My Great Uncle Was a Farmer so I am a Mainframer

My Great Uncle Was a Farmer so I am a Mainframer

Why am I a Mainframer? It all started when my great uncle bought a Combine…. When I was growing up, my family and I made frequent trips to a farm on Manitoulin Island in Canada—about 250 miles north of Detroit—a remote place where farming was difficult and few made it...

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Internet of Things Managed by….Mainframe?

Internet of Things Managed by….Mainframe?

Michael Porter at the Harvard Business Review recently said that the Internet of Things (IoT) will deliver an economic boom as big as those delivered by computer automation and the internet. That may well happen, but we're going to have to figure out how we're going...

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Mainframe – the dinosaur on the cutting edge

Mainframe – the dinosaur on the cutting edge

There was a time, quite a while ago now, when there were serious IT executives announcing that the mainframe was obsolete, overpriced technology and that its days were numbered. It was a dinosaur. But these folks weren’t well informed, and perhaps had certain biases...

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My mind is getting cloudy…

My mind is getting cloudy…

I'm sitting in a big Dallas hotel with hundreds of other attendees at a "Microsoft Cloud Roadshow" event. This is not a "C-Suite" event; I've been the only CIO at the table each time. No, these are programming managers, security officers, infrastructure geeks. I've...

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Getting off that mainframe – or maybe not!

Getting off that mainframe – or maybe not!

Historically, IT organizations have abandoned the mainframe platform for cost reasons. It's a fact, and there's no getting around that; it's true. Now whether that makes sense or not is another matter. Howard Rubin has mentioned that 68% of production workloads is...

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