Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
For years computing aficionados have been predicting the demise of the mainframe. However, every now and then, mainframe monarch IBM bobs up to remind us that there's no way that the world could do without them. Now IBM wants to make the mainframe more than just a back-office work horse and more like a web server that enables developers to put up online services that connect directly to clients.
The mainframe computer is the only machine with architecture to provide
the grunt, scalability and, above all, reliability to keep the back
offices running in all the world's major corporations. Large banks, for
instance, would never consider using anything else to house the
critical data that forms the backbone of their organisations. However,
when it comes to customer interfacing web services, that's normally
handled by beefed up Intel and Linux servers.
IBM, which recently released its new range of $100,000 System z9
Business Class servers, running the Z/OS mainframe operating system,
promises to make the tools available for the environment to develop and
run the necessary web services without the need to use mid-range
servers to connect to users. Specifically, IBM plans to make its
WebSphere suite of web development software available on the System z9
and other mainframes.
IBM also wants to encourage developers to build web-based applications
for the mainframe platform. So it has announced a tool, aimed at
developers used to Java, VB and other web development languages, that
will automatically generate Cobol code, the business transactions
language developed in the 1950s but is still used in much mainframe
development today.
Although Big Blue knows mainframes will probably never really go away,
the company wants to make sure that undergraduates will complete their
IT courses with an understanding that the platform is not only relevant
but is one which will continue grow. To that end, IBM knows it is never
going to get young IT students interested in development for the big
iron unless it can convince them the applications being developed
include web services.
David Bass
| For the fourth year in a row, IDC has placed content security provider Websense (NASDAQ: WBSN) at the top of the IDC Worldwide Web Security 2011 –…
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