Modern Mainframe Development

Chapter 2. World of the Mainframe

In 1985, Stewart Alsop started the P.C. Letter, which quickly became a must-read for the rapidly growing tech industry. He would go on to create several conferences and to become an editor of InfoWorld.

For the most part, Alsop had a knack for anticipating the next big trends. But he was not perfect. In 1991, he wrote the following: “I predict that the last mainframe will be unplugged on 15 March 1996.”

At the time, this prediction was not necessarily controversial. The king of the mainframe—​IBM—​was struggling against the onslaught of fast-growing companies like Dell, Compaq, and Sun Microsystems. There was even buzz that the company could go bust.

But to paraphrase Mark Twain, the death of the mainframe was greatly exaggerated. This technology proved quite durable. In 2002 Alsop admitted his mistake and wrote, “It’s clear that corporate customers still like to have centrally controlled, very predictable, reliable computing systems—​exactly the kind of systems that IBM specializes in.”

And this is the case today. Keep in mind that the mainframe is a growth business for IBM and is likely to be important for key trends like the hybrid cloud, ecommerce, and even fintech. Since 2010, more than 250 companies have migrated their workloads to IBM Z systems.

The mainframe is also pervasive across the world. Consider that this technology is used by the following:

• 92 of the world’s top 100 banks

• All 10 of the world’s top insurers

• 18 of the top 25 ...