OzHub, the Macquarie Telecom-led cloud computing alliance, has come down firmly on the side of Optus over the copyright controversy surrounding Optus TV Now, warning that any moves to change the law "risk branding Australia a global luddite state."
Get set for a shortage of staff with mainframe expertise as baby
boomers who cut their teeth on big iron cash in their pension cheques
and head off for a life under a palm tree in the sun. The problem is
that mainframe use is still growing, according to a new report.
CA today announced the results of a global study
indicating that enterprise IT organisations are losing their
experienced mainframe personnel to retirement just as their use of the
mainframe is projected to grow significantly.
The study, conducted by TheInfoPro in September and early October,
surveyed 270 senior IT executives from Fortune 2000 companies around
the world. All respondents had applications running on the mainframe
platform.
The study revealed that 80% of respondents have mainframe staff
eligible for retirement either now or within two years. It also
revealed that mainframe spending—which had been in decline over the
past two years—is now projected to rise.
According to CA, this is occurring as utilisation of applications
currently running on the mainframe increases, new applications are
developed for the mainframe, and application workloads are shifted to
the mainframe from distributed systems.
Results from the survey showed 50% of respondents said that their
mainframe spending was higher two years ago than it is today, while 63%
said it would be higher two years from now. 12% predicted that their
mainframe spending would decrease over the next two years.
Respondents shared a variety of planned approaches to coping with the
“greying” of their mainframe workforces. Top responses included the
hiring and training of new talent, consolidation of mainframe vendors,
and deploying solutions that make the mainframe easier to use.
Respondents were asked to rate these various approaches in terms of
both how “practical” and how “helpful” they considered them to be.
New hiring ranked the highest as the most potentially helpful (83%), and also ranked highly as being practical (78%).
Asked to name the management tasks they believed would suffer most from
shortfalls in mainframe staffing, respondents cited security (55%),
storage (47%), workload management (46%), and database management (26%).
“It is clear that enterprise IT organisations need to start taking
steps now to ensure their ability to continue leveraging mainframe
technology—which delivers the scalability, reliability, security,
cost-efficiency, and energy-efficiency so essential to the fulfillment
of the IT mission—despite the loss of their most experienced mainframe
professionals,” said Chris O’Malley, executive vice president and
general manager of CA’s Mainframe Business Unit.
Based on the results of the study, there may well be a boom in mainframe training courses over the coming years.
Complete survey results are available online here.
David Frost
| SYDNEY– February 9, 2012. Gigamon®, the world leader in Traffic Visibility Fabric solutions, announced that it has expanded the breadth and s…
How to Make Business Discovery Work for Your Business
Business Discovery takes its cues from consumer apps. Like Google, it encourages us- ers to hunt for and explore data without worrying about or even noticing the underly- ing technology. Their entire experience is working within an intuitive interface to get real-time, self-service results with only minimal training. ...more
Try an easy-to-use set of web-enabled
tools for business-class productivity services. Office 365 provides
anywhere-access to email, important documents, contacts, and calendars
on almost any device.
Latest Headlines from IT PEOPLE
