Big iron shrinks and grows

Beverley Head
Monday, 25 October 2010 07:04

Business IT - Technology

The number of mainframe sites in Australia continues to dwindle - down from a peak of almost 120 in 1997 to 40 today, with expectations that it will eventually settle at around 35 sites by 2014. But there will be a role for mainframes in the largest enterprises for years to come, with at least three local mainframe sites running machines capable of processing 15,000-20,000 million instructions per second (MIPS).

BMC Software has today released the findings of its fifth annual survey of global mainframe users, which found that although the number of mainframe sites is gradually dropping as organisations consolidate, outsource, merge or move to other platforms, the scale of the remaining mainframe sites continues to grow.

As indeed does the scale of the companies using them. Of the 1700 organisations surveyed for the report, over half of them have annual revenues above $1billion.

James Russell, director of sales and software consulting for BMC in Southern Asia, said that; 'Five years ago there was the perception that this was a diminishing market.' But he said for banks telecommunications companies, large Government departments and insurance companies, the mainframe remained the platform of choice for high level transaction processing.

And that meant an IBM machine according to Mr Russell. 'You might find the odd Facom legacy system, but I'm not aware of an HDS or Amdahl machines left (in Australia),' he said.

Internationally IBM dominated the mainframe market, and was also strengthening its position in Japan against local suppliers Fujitsu and NEC he said.

According to the survey, 62 per cent of Australian mainframe users expect to see growing or steady MIPS on the mainframe (slightly lower than the 84 per cent figure globally). Mr Russell said that what tended to happen was that sites with more than 2,000 MIPS running on a mainframe were considered unlikely to replace the mainframe platform with different technology.