IBM to Acquire SPSS
This morning IBM announced its intention to acquire SPSS Inc., a major provider of predictive business analytics software. IBM continues to push, hard, into the business intelligence solutions market, including major improvements in System z's business intelligence capabilities. In fact, one of the just announced new IBM System z Solution Edition Series is an aggressively priced data warehousing package for z/OS.
| by Timothy Sipples | July 28, 2009 in Future Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) |
Turmoil in the Financial Sector
The financial services industry is experiencing profound disruption, especially in the U.S. JP Morgan buys Bear Sterns then swallows Washington Mutual. Bank of America takes Countrywide then Merrill Lynch. Lehman Brothers collapses, with Barclays picking up some of the pieces (including Lehman's main data center). Lloyds grabs HBOS, while Fortis and B&B collapse. Citigroup buys out Wachovia. The U.S. Government now owns most of AIG. Investors as diverse as Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway and Japan's MUFJ pump cash into Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, respectively. The Big Three U.S. automakers are bleeding cash, with $5,000 and even $10,000 SUV discounts now routine. And central banks around the world, particularly the U.S. Federal Reserve, inject massive amounts of cash into the world's financial system. These are historic weeks in the financial industry, and there is more news to come.
All of this turmoil is causing (and will cause) big changes in these companies' IT plans and operations. Most directly, IT staff now must rapidly reorganize infrastructure assets to match the new corporate organizations. They must do so quickly, and with little or zero service interruption lest they cause further panic.
Fortunately, most if not all the companies mentioned above rely on mainframes for the bulk of their core business processes. It's no exaggeration to say that mainframes have facilitated the incredible pace of consolidation in the global financial industry which occurred even prior to this turmoil on Wall Street. So in an IT sense these historic events are nothing new. IT staff will be busy splitting more LPARs, relocating more LPARs, and/or consolidating more LPARs as they help their companies adjust to their new circumstances. In fact, the extent to which these companies have mainframe-based applications and information will heavily influence the ease and speed of their IT restructuring. These events resemble "disasters," and the mainframe IT staff at these companies certainly understand disaster recovery (DR). Also, we already know mainframes can scale instantly and easily to handle more demand, from customers and/or simply because a merged organization is much bigger. These are good times to have mainframes. These are the "change machines." In contrast, reorganizing the non-mainframe IT infrastructure elements will be much more painful. A lot of smart people will appreciate the contrasts.
These times undoubtedly will result in job losses, including IT job losses. However, the good news is that the IT employment market has been relatively stable or even growing robustly in certain parts of the world, with continuing demand for skilled IT professionals. Although there are never any guarantees, I expect that individuals with mainframe-related skills will do comparatively well in the months and years ahead. But there's an important caveat: if you expect to continue working for the same employer in the same city, you may be in for a shock. Workloads will be moving, a lot. Turnover is likely to increase even while the number of jobs remains relatively stable. Fundamentally, however, business managers do appreciate how important their IT staff will be to help them reorganize their companies, especially IT staff skilled at rapid, well-executed shifts of workload.
There are other IT challenges facing financial companies. In particular, it is now abundantly clear that company managers do not have real-time visibility over their own corporate balance sheets. IT practices in the investment banking community have been largely "siloed," with little or no respect for central management oversight and business controls. I expect high demand for recentralized financial information with real-time executive "dashboards," to give managers much better information to make informed decisions about their financial assets at any moment in time. I think there will be serious questions asked and much different architectural patterns for implementing decision support systems. My view is that mainframes and mainframe-based solutions will play increasing roles in financial decision support, reversing recent trends. One notable and extraordinarily timely example is IBM's Scalable Architecture for Financial Reporting (SAFR).
What trends do you see amidst the chaos?
| by Timothy Sipples | September 30, 2008 in Future Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0) |
More Potpourri
1. The Chicago Tribune reports on the excellent career prospects for new mainframe professionals in Illinois. Illinois State University Assistant Professor Chu Jong, associated with that university's mainframe curriculum, says it's not uncommon for his graduates to receive six or seven job offers.
2. You can now download the open beta release of IBM's WebSphere MQ Version 7 for z/OS (and for Linux on System z) at no charge. Click on "Trials and demos" on the left menu to get there. MQ V7 will be generally available in late June, 2008, so don't wait too long to take the beta for a spin. Please let IBM know what you think.
WebSphere MQ is the most popular reliable messaging transport for connecting basically anything to anything. Many enterprise architects argue that WebSphere MQ is foundational to successful service-oriented architectures, especially on System z. I agree.
3. IBM reports 1Q2008 earnings after the U.S. markets close on Wednesday, April 16.
4. The Blocks and Files blog asks, "Seriously, why does IBM bother?" This skepticism arises after IBM researchers announced a breakthrough in spintronics memory technology which could lead to a new class of storage devices within 10 years.
It's a fair question, but there are some simple answers. The basic answer is that IBM has had tremendous success commercializing (and profiting from) storage technologies, so this research is hardly unusual and is in IBM's self-interest. Examples include hard disks, floppy disks, and most tape-related technologies (such as vacuum column loading). For example, Alan Shugart at IBM invented the floppy disk to load microcode onto System/370 mainframes and peripherals. The fact that other companies might also benefit from IBM's research — as "free loaders" — is interesting but not directly relevant to whether IBM spends money on R&D. IBM has done quite well collecting both direct sales and royalties from these inventions. And yes, R&D is inherently risky. IBM has spent a lot of money researching so-called millipede storage, and it's extremely unclear whether IBM will ever see any profit from that effort. But the only criterion that matters to IBM is whether the company itself is better off for investing billions in basic research. Given IBM's track record I side with the researchers: yes, it is, without a doubt.
It's also worth noting that there are some government subsidies that encourage certain types of research. The U.S. space program is one famous example. IBM does receive some government support, although the pharmaceutical and pure defense industries tend to receive a lot more.
I do think Blocks and Files raises an interesting point indirectly. If Wall Street is so focused on short-term quarterly results, putting pressure on research investments, how can society encourage more research? (Society is the ultimate "free loader." :-)) The traditional answer has been patents, but there are a lot of companies, including IBM, that think the patent system needs fixing.
| by Timothy Sipples | April 13, 2008 in Future, Innovation, People Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0) |
Solaris is coming, Solaris is coming.....to System z
Wow....I felt the earth
shake just now....IBM and Sun have announced a live demo of Solaris on System z. Experts at Sine Nomine
– the same folks who were at the epicenter of the Linux on the mainframe
movement – have brought the two companies together and showcased the
possibilities at this week’s Gartner conference in Las Vegas.
Click here to see David
Boyes from Sine Nomine discuss the project from the Gartner event floor.
Amazing. But why are they
doing this? To make customers’ lives easier. One question I hear all the time
is: Is IBM trying to take over all computers? Does IBM believe that a mainframe
or a collection of mainframes can replace all the servers in a business? The
answer to that is simple: NO.
How do I know that? Because an IBM mainframe can never be
the sole computer in any business and the reason is, it doesn't have it's own
front end interface....well, maybe it does....the punch card
and the 3270 terminal.
But they really didn't take off the way IBM anticipated, so now you have ATM's,
Kiosks, Web browsers, cell phones, pda’s, PC's with 3270 emulators....a
cornucopia of front end devices as the human computer interface. In that
regard, IBM's mainframe has to work as a master collaborator to make sure that
it can interoperate with that wide range of front end processors and as such,
has had to augment the 3270 data stream with slick new XML and web services
built into it's systems.....but I digress....we are talking about Solaris on
the mainframe....is this to be a demonstration system, a proof of concept, or
an actual supported system?
It’s a demo today, but it's intended to be a supported
system – and it’s only a matter of time before we see it. We've learned already
that customers may desire open source computing on z/OS, zVM and Linux for System
z. They just aren't willing to service it themselves. Sure, they can download a
myriad of tools
from the internet, but they can't download a service contract. So they look
toward distributors or vendors to provide service for those offerings before
they'll put them into production. The same will be true of Solaris on System z.
On this lovely mainframe, we also realize that code development is
generally created on the desktop...an x86 platform and as such, typically
favors native operating systems as the deployment platform as well. Those
platforms are predominantly Windows, Linux and Solaris-based. But because of
openness and portability, Solaris and Linux can be deployed on multiple
hardware platforms now. Today, deployment of servers on the x86 platform has
been considered Scale Out
computing....just keep adding more and more server images, each dedicated to a
single operating system and typically a single application or data base server.
In many respects, these servers have the appearance of an appliance, because
they are "single" function devices. Those servers might satisfy the
needs of a lot of folks (e.g. clients), but typically excel at a single
function.
In the last couple of years, it seems like the next new
thing is Virtualization
and server consolidation...the ability to host multiples of these
"appliances" in a single container and, in doing so, make the
operational environment more green - use less energy, cooling, floor space,
etc, but still meet businesses' service level agreements. Well, you'd think
that virtualization just got invented. Nope - it's been around for over 40
years, with IBM's zVM as the cream of the crop in systems virtualization. We've
already learned the power of virtualization when associated with Linux for System
z. There have been a large number of deployments and over 90% of those
deployments are on zVM. With Solaris on System z, 100% of the deployments will
be on zVM. That's because the operational environment will take advantage of
some of the native System z resource sharing and management tooling, in
addition to offering the opportunity to manage each Solaris image
independently.
The virtualization available on System z through zVM has a
number of distinct advantages over the Johnny-come-lately virtual servers on
other platforms - the ability to run at 90% and higher system utilization
without fear of failover for a very large number of operating system images;
the ability to add or remove capacity on System z by turning on or off
additional processors without suffering a service disruption and in doing so,
meet tactical business processing needs on demand; the ability to leverage
hardware and system memory to communicate between operating system images,
which in turn reduces the number of system intrusion points; the
compartmentalization of one operating system image from another one to provide
an additional layer of security; the ability to use zVM services across Solaris
system images for common auditing, disk and tape back up processing.
The net of this is, it's the same code that you might be
running on a different hardware architecture, but when executed within the zVM
hypervisor, inherits much of the operational superiority from that environment,
with no significant additional cost. And then there is the hardware benefits of
the System z architecture...it had an OnStar
like call home capability and autonomic healing capability long before the blue
prints were written by GM or other server platforms. IBM's mainframe remote support
facility provides electronic diagnosis of system failures and with
redundant hardware built in, can switch over to the backup components and in
parallel "call home" to dispatch a customer engineer to correct the
problem. In the case of CPU failure, the z architecture will swap in a
processor, transparent to any operating system running on its hardware to
continue processing unabated. It's like changing the tire while the cars in
motion and calling ahead to have a new spare put in the trunk, again without
having the car stop.
Let's continue that automotive metaphor. The mainframe is
intended to be a super highway. There are folks that believe it's just a
parkway...allows only cars and it's not heavily traveled. Today's announcement
is just another occasion to demonstrate the super highway nature of the
mainframe. It enables all kinds of vehicles to travel on its roads and the
traffic is moving along very quickly. In fact, there are sensors in this
mainframe highway to detect bottlenecks and provide re-balancing workloads to
meet service goals, another value that Solaris on System z will be
able to take advantage of as well. But let's not forget, the interstate
highways are selective, they don't accept bicycles and pedestrians. There are
other roads, running at a slower pace for those folks to travel on. Yes,
they'll reach the same destinations, but it will take them a bit longer to get
there. So in that sense, the mainframe is not going to "take over
Solaris". There will be certain application and data serving workloads
that will more naturally appeal to a consolidated effort on a mainframe and
there will be other workloads that can continue to run independently on other
server hardware or for that matter be virtualized in an x86 environment, quite
possibly because they are stateless and don't need the resilience, security and
capacity management that a mainframe brings to the operational environment.
Linux on System z has been wildly successful in its ability
to consolidate workloads. Does Solaris present a "weakness" in the
force driving Linux ubiquity? No, quite the contrary. It's about flexibility
and choice. In many cases today, Linux is evolving as a server of choice in the
x86 world and collections of those servers can be easily consolidated to IBM
mainframes running Linux. But in some cases, a UNIX workload, like Solaris,
must first be ported over to Linux before it can take advantage of the
virtualization and scaling capabilities of the mainframe. In addition, some
operational tooling is different, so there might be a skills hit or a
procedural hit to make a change. Well, just as Linux is Linux, regardless of
where it's deployed, the same objective holds true for Solaris. Common code is
a re-compile vs a port and the objective is to enable the same operations
model, but offer some new capabilities, through zVM, that further reduce the
operational complexity of running many, many Solaris images on the same
mainframe.
So back to the celebration....there's a new choice coming to town, Solaris on z. The benefits of the Solaris operating system as many businesses have grown to enjoy on other architectures, with the benefits of the operations model and virtualization capabilities of IBM's System z mainframe and zVM. Long may they both prosper to give businesses the choices and flexibility they need to build global system deployments that meet their business governance, privacy, security and resilience needs in solving problems along with the myriad of other options available for them to deploy on this modern mainframe.
| by JimPorell | November 28, 2007 in Future Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0) |
Introducing the 6th IBM Mainframe Operating System: Solaris?
The Associated Press reports on IBM and Sun's new collaboration announcement concerning the Solaris operating system. Sun's CEO Jonathan Schwartz called this announcement "a tectonic shift in the market landscape."
As most of you know, the IBM mainframe currently has five widely deployed and supported operating systems available: z/OS, z/VSE, z/TPF, z/VM, and Linux on z. A single machine can run all five, in any combination, in multiple secure instances dynamically responding to business demands, at the same time with the highest service qualities.
Next up it appears: Solaris on System z. In fact, Sine Nomine Associates already began work over one year ago to bring Solaris to the IBM mainframe, so maybe OS #6 is a lot closer to delivery than anybody knew. It took a little more than one year to bring Linux to the mainframe, for comparison.
Solaris is particularly popular among telecommunications companies who have racks and racks of smaller servers, typically running C and C++ code, to perform tasks such as call accounting. There's a lot of Web hosting on Solaris. Solaris is Fujitsu's preferred UNIXTM solution, and Fujitsu is one of the largest technology service companies in Japan. I could go on, but the introduction of Solaris on System z would help many customers around the world lower their costs of computing (including power, cooling, and data center space), scale up in addition to scaling out, improve the quality of their service delivery, and take advantage of increased choice and flexibility offered with all the applications and middleware available for the other 5 operating systems via in-memory, secure, high performance connections.
Solaris on System z would become in fact the third UNIX or UNIX-like operating system for the mainframe. Linux is "UNIX-like" of course, and z/OS is UNIX. (z/OS contains z/OS UNIX System Services, a complete, certified implementation of UNIX.) [Update: One develops z/TPF applications nowadays using Linux (e.g. gcc), and z/TPF is acquiring lots of in-built software familiar to UNIX users, so arguably z/TPF is at least trending toward acquiring UNIX-like characteristics.]
Now that Solaris on System z looks like a not-too-distant capability, do you think you'll be trying it?
| by Timothy Sipples | August 16, 2007 in Future Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBack (0) |
What's in a name? Send us your feedback.
In watching the recent Transformers movie - and seeing/hearing the word "mainframe" come up a few times - I began to wonder about just what the name stands for.
On one hand, it's not uncommon that some mainframe enthusiasts consider the name itself to be somewhat archaic - to suggest that perhaps the vitality and new innovation around the mainframe platform is cheated by the antiquity of its own name.
On the other hand, the most common public uses of the term recently seem to be coming from very youthful and non-intuitive sources.
I took a spin around the web and found a number of interesting uses of the word "mainframe." You might be surprised at what I found. Some are old and others new - but each of them are surprisingly cool.
So here is the question: Is the word "mainframe" lugging baggage behind it, or is it actually, well, cool?
Lady Mainframe - the avatar host of the popular internet gaming news source, Gaming News with Lady Mainframe.
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Techno DJ in Germany, known as "DJ Mainframe"
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From the mid-80's toy series G.I. Joe, here is computer specialist "Mainframe."
YO JOE!
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.
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Here's another toy named "Mainframe," complete with push-button action.
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Creative services and entertainment consulting firm.
| by Kevin Acocella | July 13, 2007 in Future Permalink | Comments (8) | TrackBack (3) |
Skills shortage?
Been following a conversation on the IMS listserver about how to keep IMS data for 15-20 years (e.g. for legal reasons or whatever). Started with good technical recommendations and moved on to what about the skills? No point in having the data if you don't have anyone who knows IMS in 20 years time. Just read this great entry on the subject:
Why blame somebody else for missing skills. Every company should have a list of critical skills. If that company takes skill seriously, they will know that they need to educate some people with IMS. It should not be that difficult to hire some students from university, tell them if they start learning IMS they will have a job for the next 20 years and off you go. Or something like they did in Germany "Small computers, small salary, big computer, big salary". Or tell them a Java/PHP/C/C++/J2EE programmer competes in a global market with 100 Mio chinese and people from india. How about somebody who knows TSO and JCL? Likely to compete with less than 10000 people in the world. Sure it takes at least 2-5 years till they can walk alone, but it's worth the effort.
Spot on.
| by pwarmstrong | February 22, 2007 in Future Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBack (0) |
eWeek on Mainframe Vitality
eWeek: Long Live the Mainframe!
eWeek is long on the mainframe, as noted in this article reported from the SHARE conferrence last week in Tampa.
Here's the story: eWeek: Long Live the Mainframe
It gives some great attention to the academic initiative as well as the $100 million mainframe simplification effort.
What's cooler is the increased attention that zNextGen is getting. It's the core of the youth movement around the mainframe with over 200 members from over 80 companies (led by a 23 year old mainframe whiz, no less).
| by Kevin Acocella | February 20, 2007 in Future Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) |
MASTERS OF THE MAINFRAME!!!!
Masters of the Mainframe!!!
The mainframe continues to attract new talent and enthusiasm from some of the brightest students in IT and business programs today.
Check out just a few of the new faces – each of whom competed in the 2006 IBM Master the Mainframe Contest.
Across the U.S. and Canada, over 1,000 students put their mainframe
skills to the test in pursuit of a number of awards, including an opportunity to visit IBM’s Poughkeepsie facility in New York – the center of the universe as far as mainframe research, development and manufacturing is concerned.
Contests like these are being planned worldwide. Last year's student mainframe contest in the U.K. drew over 700 students.
Keep an eye on this blog for more information on the contest winners. Awards will be presented formally to the top students at an event in Poughkeepsie in March. We’ll be sure to post the pictures
from the event.
*Send pictures of you and your mainframe to kma@us.ibm.com.
| by Tim Washer | February 6, 2007 in Future Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0) |
Strong Mainframe Growth Continues
IBM announced 3rd quarter earnings yesterday afternoon. TheStreet.com reported the details, along with other financial news outlets. System z hardware revenues surged 25% versus 3Q2005 (then the first quarter of System z9-109 sales). Software, particularly WebSphere and Tivoli, also did extremely well. Both those software brands have huge System z portfolios, it's worth noting.
It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that unit shipments ("MIPS") must have grown more than 25% since price per unit is declining.
Just one word: wow.
| by Timothy Sipples | October 18, 2006 in Future Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBack (0) |
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