In his recent article titled “Why you can't move a mainframe with a cloud”, Timothy Pricket-Morgan writes about the recent mainframe surveys from BMC users. Surveys are a funny thing. You often get the results you are looking at proving. Psychologists call this Confirmation Bias - a tendency for people to favor information that confirms their preconceptions.
For example:
If you ask corn farmers about the viability of their bumper crop to be used as a fuel alternative, you would get an overwhelmingly positive response. However, users see corn ethanol as an expensive and inefficient option. It is an interesting juxtaposition to be discussing alternatives to fossil fuels (corn ethanol) with mainframes – a system that even IBM named after a dinosaur.
If you ask the federal government about jobs creation, they will point to 3 million jobs created with the stimulus package…but independent research shows four out of five jobs created were created in the public sector - jobs that are paid by our increased taxes.
What the point? When viewing any survey, you must ask if the survey taker has any vested interest in their response. No doubt that mainframe users will have a vested interest in showing the mainframe as a viable long term platform. So with the surveys mentioned in Timothy’s well written article, the absolute numbers are less important than the year over year trends with the same audience.
So – what are the TRENDS from BMC Software 2010 survey looking back over the last 3 years?
- Mainframe will NOT attract new workloads
- Fewer will be leveraging legacy apps to create new business
- Mainframe Specialty Engines have not been rapidly adopted
- Only 12% have more than 4 Specialty Engines
- 47% have NO Specialty Engines
- Fewer companies are expecting MIPS Growth/Remain Steady
- More companies seeing flat or declining growth
Finally - The #1 priority for 2010 is to “Reduce cost of IT”. The irony here is that mainframe costs are so much higher than alternative platform options. Consider one of the components of an HP Converged Infrastructure – the Superdome- it has similar availability as a mainframe, yet is 1/8th the Total Cost of Ownership…even including hardware, software, and staffing costs.
To do your own mainframe TCO comparison, go to HP’s Mainframe TCO Challenge.
