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“The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated” - The Mainframe

by Hilary Palmer

OK, it’s questionable that Mark Twain ever uttered those exact words either. But for years, hundreds of articles have been sounding the death knell over the mainframe. I once truly saw a dead mainframe. It was the ENIAC—the Electrical Numerical Integrator and Computer—and it was in pieces behind a curtain at the Smithsonian. That was in 1989, a year before the Smithsonian’s exhibit “The Information Age” debuted.

In 1989, mainframes were a growing business. The market was estimated at $40 billion. DEC had just introduced its famous Vax 9000 with the astonishing low pricing between $1.24 million and $4.4 million, half the cost of new IBM big iron. Amdahl, Fujitsu and Hitachi were players to be reckoned with. And even then, now 20 years ago, pundits were elaborating on the death of the mainframe.

Here it is, 2009, and guess what? They’re still here…. There is good reason. 62% of IT managers still run Cobol. It’s still ahead of Java and is only eclipsed by Visual Basic in the lines of code running. In fact, it’s estimated there are nearly 200 billion lines of Cobol code running out there, processing 75% of commercial business, not to mention the plethora of Cobol in government and the military. You guessed it. Most of that code is still running on mainframes.

“We see mainframes at the core of clients’ businesses all the time,” says Scott Trimble, Senior Consultant and Certified Information System Auditor for Clearview. “Mainframes are critical to so many companies’ infrastructures. We had one client who actually bought a mainframe on eBay for a few hundred dollars. Of course, he had to spend several thousands on software and maintenance, but he got the machine he needed with the right size and horsepower at a fraction of the cost he would have paid to try to accomplish his heavy sort business with servers.”

Financial institutions are literally trapped in the hairball of legacy Cobol systems running on mainframes. It’s estimated that as much as 80% of our current financial information is derived from those systems. And at $20+ something per line to recode, it’s probably not going to change anytime soon.

So there’s a lot out there running on mainframes. That nice, user friendly interface you see on your laptop, your iPhone and your ATM may just be pulling its data from a mainframe out there running a 40-year-old Cobol program.

Big Enough to Share

Mainframes still provide the biggest bang for the buck when it comes to applications requiring a lot of data crunching and sort work. But they are also finding new life beyond traditional bulk and transactional processing.

Sharing mainframes by creating multiple virtual machines out of the one box allows for service bureaus to run multiple operating systems capable of supporting just about any major software packages. With better security, manageability and reliability, shared mainframes can be a sound operational strategy.

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Mainframes also have decades of sound business logic and fault tolerance built right in. When you think of the complexity of managing hundreds of servers with all the connections required in a virtual environment, consolidating work in a mainframe environment might just be the most reliable and safe way to manage certain specific scenarios.

What’s Old is New Again

Cloud computing with Software as a Service has been lauded as the future, where buying applications by the drink is seen as something new. Cloud has also been derided as a step back to mainframe computing. Not necessarily the 3270 green screen dumb terminals you might remember if you are over 50, but with network PCs that have very little

of their own intelligence and are therefore quite cheap.

With mainframes in the background, you might not be able to work on your company’s customer information at home, but you might also not have your laptop stolen with thousands of consumers credit card numbers stored in memory. Whether they knew it or not, our grandfathers and mothers who worked on mainframes and supported those systems were pretty sure that wouldn’t happen in their day.

And Speaking of Old...

With half of all business still running on mainframes, what happens when everyone who knew anything about them retires? Thanks to a questionable economy, our mainframe-astute workforce might hang around a few years longer to keep things going. But it’s inevitable. By 2012, mainframers will be getting social security and putting pictures of their trip to Branson on Facebook.

Never underestimate IBM. When it launched a new line of mainframes last year, it also set about influencing colleges and universities to bring mainframe classes back into the curriculum. Since then, the company estimates that at least 50,000 students have taken classes around the mainframe.

Soy lattes and startups aside, some astute students are realizing that being a young mainframe programmer has a real upside: a job.

Hilary Palmer is a marketing and business consultant who helps corporate and agency clients build new businesses and new brands. With more than 20 years experience she has been responsible for the launch of many new products and organizations, taking an integrated approach to strategy, marketing, communications and creativity. Hilary spent seven years at The Richards

Group after a 16-year tenure in marketing at EDS and A.T. Kearney. Her marketing programs have received numerous awards of excellence for strategy, copy writing, video/film production, advertising and internal programs. Hilary has a degree in English from the University of Texas, where she was included in Who's Who of American Colleges & Universities. For more information see http://www.hilarypalmer.com

5 Technical Support | June 2009 www.NaSPA.com