Brief

IBM re-focusses on mainframe business

Big Blue has renewed its focus on mainframes. The company plans to spend a couple of million dollars over the next few years in training customers, tuning their software for mainframes, and assisting them in migrating from their existing computing infrastructure.

Although mainframe adoption has been written off by many analysts who complain about the expensive price tags that these boxes come with, all agree about the reliability and the computing strength that mainframes offer. IBM has taken in this feedback, and System z9, the latest range of mainframes, starts from $100,000.

The company plans to take its mainframe business in three directions. It has been releasing specialised workload-specific processors for mainframes such as IFL (Integrated Facility for Linux) for running Linux, zIIP for running its own DB2 database, and zAAP for running Java. The other step that the company plans to take is target emerging markets where mainframe adoption is on the lower side—India, China and Russia. IBM also plans to use security as a rallying point to sell mainframes. IFL is a central processor dedicated to Linux workloads.

In India the company plans to target the BFSI and government segments, and is already working with ISVs such as TCS. IBM is also considering a hosted model for delivering mainframe computing to companies that are reluctant to buying these huge machines outright.

Organisations are looking at server consolidation and other issues which can reduce maintenance cost and effort. IBM’s exit from India in the seventies led to the emergence of India as a Unix country, bypassing the mainframe stage altogether. IBM is now working hard to change that.