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Mid-August 2008 Potpourri
1. August is no vacation month for IBM, with lots of announcements: z/OS 1.10, z/VSE 4.2, z/VM 5.4, extended support for z/OS 1.7, a Tivoli preview, a CICS Explorer ("New Face of CICS") preview and beta program, InfoSphere Change Data Capture V6.2 for z/OS, and the new Scalable Architecture for Financial Reporting (SAFR).
SAFR is particularly intriguing as a unique business intelligence solution for System z. ComputerWeekly has some favorable words (mostly) about BI on z.
2. Winn-Dixie Stores, one of the largest food retailers in the U.S., has consolidated its IT infrastructure to System z. Computerworld has more, and Infoworld reports on some other virtualization projects.
3. BMC's annual survey is out, and it finds optimism about the future of mainframe computing jumped 13 percent. (That could be 13 percentage points, which would be even more impressive.)
4. The System z10 wins two awards from Network Products Guide: "Best in Cryptography," and "Best in Server Solutions."
5. The Ledger-Enquirer, a newspaper in Columbus, Ohio, reports on the thriving mainframe educational partnership between Columbus State University, major employer and mainframe customer TSYS, and IBM. Over the past 20 years, CSU has educated nearly 2,500 IT students. CSU prepared over 1,000 of those students for careers with TSYS, and over 800 of those CSU alumni are still working for the company.
6. "If cats have nine lives, the mainframe beats them out handily."
7. Mainframes help businesses merge more quickly and easily, achieving bigger cost savings that much faster. Delta and Northwest Airlines are merging, but Delta's CEO says that, while IT integration is the biggest challenge, their mainframe is the least of their worries. Even as competitors, their mainframe-based reservation and ticketing systems were already securely co-located on the same machine.
8. Mismanagement of the State of North Dakota's mainframe assets continues, although I think Forbes misdiagnoses the problems in their story about the ongoing debacle. I have so many questions about this situation. One of them is, if mainframe alternatives are so scary-affordable, why does the state have no IT budget left for the next project phase? (Shouldn't there be plenty of money for that? Aren't "servers" free? :-)) Citizens of North Dakota, I would encourage you to take a hard look at your state government's total IT spending patterns. KBMR adds a little more detail: "The company developing it [the new application] had assured lawmakers it would be finished, but it's complicated."
"Complicated" is a bureaucratic code word for "expensive and poor quality."
And then there's the widely reported saga of the State of California. The Governor ordered pay cuts for most state employees, reducing their salaries down to minimum wage with the prospect that they'll receive back pay once California extricates itself from the budget mess. But I have to criticize Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW) which also misdiagnoses the problem.
Look, if you have bad application development methodologies and poor tools on any platform you'll get inflexible applications. If you underinvest in application maintenance for years (decades?) you'll end up with inflexible applications. But if you spend money rewriting all the code (including the code that's still valuable and useful), analyst Software Productivity Research estimates you'll typically spend five times more than if you just modernized through reuse, particularly using Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) methodologies. And if you (or your management) don't understand these basic facts, you're doomed to overspending and suffering poor quality outcomes. Which would be...wasteful.
California is not necessarily a good example, though. The State Controller has every political reason to ignore the Governor's order, and there are plenty of excuses available.
9. In Nashua, New Hampshire, a mainframe got wet but survived. I wonder if water damage voids the warranty.
10. Like listening to Hip Hop? You may want to check out Audible Mainframe, a group which hails from Boston. The band's logo is terrific, although those cables look more Bus & Tag than FICON.
| by Timothy Sipples | August 13, 2008 Permalink |
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Comments
With regards to the comments on the California payroll system. Forget the flexability of the development platform, and let's discuss the busniness logic of a payroll system that would easily implement "reduce all employees wages to minimum wage" ... OTOH, maybe we'd be in better shape these days if we could have done that to certain Wall Street investment bankers :-)
Posted by: Kevin Corkery | Sep 17, 2008 8:53:23 AM
