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...
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...
I was reading the news on CNN recently about a power outage in California, which reminded me of some serious black outs in Costa Rica a while back. A friend was there on business, and it ruined an important business meeting that he had spent months setting up. It also...
Being in the mainframe business for about 10 years now, I hear interesting anecdotes from time to time, often from the most unlikely sources. I may have taken some liberty with the title, but it’s a true story, and it relates well to what I see in the mainframe...
Do you think the mainframe is dead? A dinosaur, an ancient piece of technology that has outlived its usefulness like cathode ray tubes, rotary dial telephones, and dial-up modems? I have some news for you. The mainframe has adapted: it is alive and well with major...
When compared to an x86/distributed server environment, the operational costs of the power consumption versus IBM’s Mainframe z Systems are half, while the performance is 30 percent greater (using z Systems as an example.) So let’s think about that for a minute!...
The days of waterfall software development on a mainframe are coming to an end. It’s no longer tolerable for end users to have to wait two years for a new application to be written and delivered to a spec that, by then, is two years out of date. The inflexibility of...
The Third Platform is defined as the interdependencies between mobile computing, social media, cloud computing, and information/analytics (big data), and possibly the Internet of Things (IoT). Here is a nice rendering of the Third Platform model from Forbes.com. It...
Today’s mainframe systems run the world’s top industries’ mission-critical workloads. This includes large financial institutions like banks, insurance companies, healthcare organizations, utilities, government, military, and a multitude of other public and private...
We read a lot about in-memory technology these days, especially as it applies to Big Data and analytics. In fact, it’s one of the fastest growing areas in all of computing, and has been since before Gartner identified it as such back in 2012. That should be no...
