Latest Articles

Multi-Factor Authentication

Multi-Factor Authentication

There was a time when mainframes were in a world of their own, separated from other computing platforms. A world where even the mainframe staff seldom mixed with the distributed people, and managers had no idea what the mainframe did or how it did it. People who...

Mainframe News Out There

Mainframe News Out There

Once a month we like to pick blog articles from other sources that we feel are interesting enough to talk about on the Planet Mainframe blog. Here are this month’s picks: Customers Don’t Care About Open Banking An interesting thought in an article on Compare the Cloud...

A view from the C-level

A view from the C-level

New mainframe technologies that will make a difference to your business Be honest: what do you really think of IT?  Most C-level execs think of it, at best, as a cost center to be minimized. Others go even further, thinking it arrogant, pushy, dictatorial, and...

Controlling Costs, or Leaving Money on the Table?

Controlling Costs, or Leaving Money on the Table?

I am the CFO of one of the most long-lived mainframe software companies on the planet. The company has been around for 40+ years, it has been profitable for almost all of that time, and its products are running in the mainframe datacenters of many of the world’s...

Db2 12 In-Memory Feature: Fast Index Traversal

Db2 12 In-Memory Feature: Fast Index Traversal

Db2 12 is classified as an in-memory data base by Gartner.  It is not just a simple in-memory data base but a very smart one. In this paper, we explain one of the most innovative in memory optimizations in Db2 12. Why In-Memory Optimization in Index?  The...

Is the Mainframe Dead?

Is the Mainframe Dead?

No. But it has been a victim of friendly-fire. I’m not sure that there is a headline relating to IT and enterprise software more cliché than the one at the top of this article. Cringeworthy? Perhaps, particularly If you’re in your 4th decade in the mainframe and...

Creating the Future by Slashing Complexity

Creating the Future by Slashing Complexity

Mainframe users have a problem: finding people with the right skills to service their mission-critical systems. It isn’t language: learning COBOL and PL/I is relatively easy.  The difficult part is understanding the logic of systems built by programmers who...

DevOps in the multi-platform Data Center

DevOps in the multi-platform Data Center

Positioned by some as the panacea of new-age IT management, promising shorter development times, improved business processes, reduced time to market, more engaged teams, greater business agility, and more, DevOps is all the rage. If you're not doing it, you're doing...