Mainframes rock on in 2011

Stephen Withers
Monday, 03 January 2011 15:55

IT Industry - Market

The Australian mainframe environment is "healthy," according to a senior BMC executive.

Mainframe computing in Australia is a "healthy environment" according to Jonathan Adams, vice president of mainframe service management R&D at BMC Software.

He says 62% of mainframe users expect their general purpose workloads to grow. These organisations are looking for ways to constrain the hardware footprint while getting more performance from a stable, reliable platform that can deliver the necessary level of transactions per second.

While the banking and finance sector is the largest mainframe user in the country, retail, manufacturing, telecommunications, defence, and shipping/logistics are all significant users: "any organisation with a large volume of transactions," said Adams.

And his observations suggest local organisations are finding younger people to work on mainframes, although the mix of younger and older workers seems to vary among organisations. "Australian mainframe skills seem vibrant," he said.

BMC aims to help with this process by providing cross-platform tools that are simpler and more intuitive "so you don't need a 25 year veteran," said Adams.

Taking a global perspective, "cost is the big [issue]," he said, explaining that one way BMC is addressing it is by a "concerted effort" to move its code onto zIIP processors (specialised, lower-cost processors within the IBM mainframe architecture), freeing up the general-purpose processors for 'real' work.