« Gartner: Databases Are Movin' On Up to the Mainframe | The Mainframe Blog Home | more liveblogging: Robert LeBlanc on zSeries SOA »
A little live blogging: IBM's SOA z analyst event
IBM has a room full of people here in New York, industry analysts that usually cover the software market, to learn a little bit more about why the mainframe makes a good service oriented architecture (SOA) platform.
Steve Mills, IBM Software Group supremo kicked off, before handing off the Jim Stallings, GM of the mainframe division.
Stallings says a new business context is emerging, that suits the mainframe. Security, risk management, and even power management are all traditional mainframe strengths. He even claimed to talk to Google lately - I wonder if we're going to see System z in the Googleplex anytime soon?
We have spoken on this blog before about China scale, which is a real and fundamental context. China is going to have all the biggest businesses in the world by customer... no competition. Try scaling to 500m customers in five years. You're going to need a pretty heavy engine to handle that.
So what about new workloads. Q1 MIPS grew 25%, with 35% of that growth across IBM offload processors such as zIIP, zAAP and IFL.
How about a customer example? Farmers Insurance runs 45m transactions a day, supporting 50k users. 90% of its revenues are driven by the mainframe running WebSphere. So what about dollar savings? Well, as any mainframer knows customers pay per MIP.
By using the zAAP offload engine Farmers cut its MIPs from 1200 to 700.
That's the kind of price break that should interest any mainframe shop.
Something interesting is definitely afoot in mainframe economics. Quite simply - every year IBM is finding new ways to reduce mainframe cost of ownership. IBM calls this trend The Mainframe Charter. Its also good to see IBM focusing so squarely on third party ISVs. Successful platforms needs developer communities.
Well I guess I will post this now. I hope the Farmers example was a public reference. IBM didn't say not to report any of this material, so here goes...
| by James Governor | May 4, 2006 Permalink |
TrackBack
TrackBack URL for this entry:
https://www.typepad.com/services/trackback/6a00d834521c8469e200e55069b5bb8833
Listed below are links to weblogs that reference A little live blogging: IBM's SOA z analyst event:
Comments
Hey James - Yes, the Zurich Farmers case is public. To view an animation on Farmers, Wachovia, and others, check out: http://www-306.ibm.com/software/os/zseries/testimonials/#
Posted by: Tim Washer | May 4, 2006 6:07:14 PM
Tim - I have discovered that IBM has two separate sets of Customer Videos on the www. You point to those from Software group. The link below takes you to a slightly different set of videos from hardware! Checkout http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/z/testimonials/customer.html
Note there are 3 tabs on this site - Customers, Partners, Solutions.
Posted by: Peter Norris | May 10, 2006 6:02:54 AM
The comments to this entry are closed.