Latest Articles
Blockchain – The Good, The Bad and the…Better.
People keep asking me why I am so excited about the Blockchain, and why I see it as an enabler for the mainframe. I am obviously a fan of the mainframe, and I see a lot of activity in a number of verticals that are creating a really neat rebirth where the mainframe is...
Money for Nothing
My wife loves shopping – even for food; I don’t, but we need to get it done. Because we’re both busy with our jobs, we tend to do one big shop at the start of the month, to get much of what we need for the month. For the most part, that means the dry foods like pasta...
Optimize Your System z ROI with z Operational Insights (zOI)
Hopefully all System z users are aware of the Monthly Licence Charge (MLC) pricing mechanisms, where a recurring charge applies each month. This charge includes product usage rights and IBM product support. If only it was that simple! We then encounter the...
Why Can’t You Buy IBMz Mainframe Services from AWS?
The IBMz mainframe is the most powerful, scalable and secure platform on the planet. It’s also the most TCO-efficient. If you have any doubts about that, just take a look at these blogs: "Turn Out The Lights...The Party's Over! Mainframes Rout Commodity Servers!"...
After the Expo – Are we seeing a major shift in tech?
So another year passes and with a myriad of interviews under our belts later, we broadcast live at the Cloud Expo Europe 2017. We had a great line up of guests including ITV, Google, LinkedIn, IBM, Fujitsu, as well as many others. However, this article is not about...
Should you call time on your existing mainframe development environment?
The traditional 3270 mainframe development environment deserves respect. It has enabled developers to create and support some of the world’s most enduring business-critical software applications running on ‘Big Iron’ boxes around the word. Many of these core systems...
2020 vision
I was working recently with a mixed bag of people from a company, who were trying to predict the future and see how that company needed to change in order to get where they thought they ought to be going. One issue came up fairly quickly, and that was that 2020 isn’t...
The Mainframe: Three Dimensional Thinking In IT
This is not an article on multidimensional databases, 3D rendering, or spatial databases, but rather how CIOs in IT think, based on their education, experience and professional motivations. A good friend of mine, Pete, recently asked me how many servers does it take...
Mainframes on Autopilot!
Yes, mainframes are now on autopilot, not unlike Tesla automobiles! While everyone is chasing the next big, disruptive unicorn like Uber or Airbnb, bright mainframe engineers are quietly disrupting the industry with new customer-driven innovations. If you are into...
The Need for Speed: Four Reasons Why Data Virtualization is Replacing ETL
One of the challenges of working in the modern world is adjusting to a faster and faster speed of computing. Globalization and mobile technology mean instant communications and near-instantaneous reactions are the minimum benchmark a firm must meet to keep up....
