We have all been hearing about the pending shortage of mainframe specialized skills as the Baby Boomer bubble nears retirement age. There are several studies that show how this macro trend of retiring skills set may leave companies in a bind to hire and retain skilled mainframe administrators and system programmers. One recent study indicates that ¾ of large enterprises are concerned about how their mainframe applications will be handled in the future. If you are fortunate enough to find someone with these specialized skills, the rule of Supply and Demand tells us that these resources will be costing more as their ranks thin even further. Though this trend is an approaching freight train for many companies, there is another side of the same coin.
What if I am not ready to retire?
Suppose you are currently a mainframe system admin, and are not ready to retire for another 5-10 years. After all, the recent economic downturn did turn many of our 401K’s in to 201K’s. As a system admin, you have acquired over the course of you career, two important, but different, groups of skills: 1) the ability to manage, monitor, and maintain a mainframe; 2) more importantly, you have intimate knowledge of your company’s business processes. If you are looking to play out your career until retirement, you may be tempted to view the mainframe as your life preserver since you know the mainframe better than anyone else in your company, and because your group of mainframe enthusiasts inside your company may feel comfortable being isolated from the other computing platforms. Let me suggest that holding on to the mainframe is more akin to hugging an anchor than a life preserver.
Simple IT Economics
Let’s look at an overly simplified view of IT Economics. In its simplest sense, the equation for IT funding is:
IT budget = Infrastructure + People
“Infrastructure” costs include: hardware, software, power, cooling, and facilities cost.
“People” costs include: sys admin, operators, sw developers, and support staff.
During these economic times, it is not without precedent for the IT Budget to be reduced by 15% or 20%. When this occurs, the two dials to adjust are Infrastructure and People. The People part of this equation suffers when:1) Ongoing Infrastructure costs(maintenance) are a large percentage of costs; 2) Annual refresh to Infrastructure costs(incremental purchases) are too high; or 3) a multiple year Infrastructure contract locks you in. You will often see one or more of these in legacy mainframe environments.
A “What If” example: 15% Budget Cut
Let’s say the IT Budget is $100M annually, with Infrastructure being $60M and People $40M. When the total IT Budget declines by 15% to $85M, if the Infrastructure cost is fixed at $60M, the impact will be to the People side where the current $40M will need to be shaved to $25M, or 38%. This is a challenge in anybody’s book.
To justify the high mainframe costs, you may hear talk of consolidating “distributed” workloads on a mainframe, but when the justification is based on “distributed” servers running at 5%-10% utilized, you must understand that you can also consolidate on more modern HP Proliant or HP Integrity Servers at a fraction of the cost for doing so on a mainframe…while maintaining the Quality of Service for your applications.
A “What If” example – mainframe migration
We often see 50%-70% reduction in Infrastructure costs when companies move from a Mainframe to an HP Server, so let’s take another look at the same example used above. If your $100M budget is reduced by 15% to $85M, and your $60M Infrastructure cost is reduced 50% to $30 by migrating from a mainframe, not only can you maintain the $40M for People, but you have $15M left to either invest in new IT projects, hire more staff, or let the company add to their bottom-line. A win/win/win.
Hey - Where’s the “Lengthening your Career” part of this Blog?
The Business Processes knowledge acquired by mainframe legacy resources over the past years, and decades, bring value to IT and the business at large, BUT (and it’s a big “but”) that knowledge is easily leveraged outside of the mainframe environment. When other companies have migrated from an IBM mainframe to an HP server, the Business Processes are carried forward…just on a more cost effective platform. For example, you may be used to setting up goal based workload management in z/OS by using WLM/SRM (Workload Manager / Systems Resource Manager), but you may be pleasantly surprised to learn that goal based management on HP-UX has been available for over 10 years through WLM(Workload Manager). In the end, the same thing is accomplished.
Having your Cake and Eating it too
So if you are a mainframe system admin who is interested in leveraging your current skills and still have more good years in you before retirement, then applying those skills on an HP server can unlock your IT budget so you can breathe easier and apply those savings to more innovative applications in your data center.
…and you won’t be compromising your quality of services at all. Stay tuned for more detail on that topic.
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