The term “Digital Transformation” has been and continues to be mentioned practically everywhere within the industry at the moment. Depending on whom you talk to and why, you will get many different educated answers back on the definition of the term. So from a...
IT and business management are increasingly concerned with the rising costs associated with their highly complex and ever-growing mainframe and distributed systems data centers. They are also concerned about controlling outages and mitigating the lack of transparency...
It’s no secret that the dreaded “skills gap” is affecting the mainframe market. It’s getting harder and harder to find people who know COBOL or Assembler, and organizations that rely on these systems often have open job postings because there’s no perfect match for...
Anyone who has been working on mainframes for any length of time knows that things are always changing. Many people can remember when DB2 was new (1983), the client-server period, and the need for Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). And, I’m sure, can come up with a...
Mainframe IT professionals always get excited when IBM announces a new version of its stalwart mainframe z Systems platform. And on July 17, 2017 IBM announced its latest and greatest mainframe hardware, dubbed the IBM z14. Coming more than two years after the IBM...
Having worked ‘on The Mainframe’ for almost 20 years at a variety of clients and sites I’ve come about a number of taboos within the Mainframe ‘ecosystem’ that are sometimes just doing my head in and just need to be broken. These taboos can be seen across the playing...
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...
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...
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!"...
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...
