OpenMainframe.org - Analysis & Opinion

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IBM Turns the Screws on zPrime

Maureen O'Gara By Maureen O’Gara

IBM System z CTO and resident spook Mark Anzani recently sent an IBM mainframe customer a letter meant to scare it into seeing the boogeyman under its bed and make sure it doesn’t use Neon Enterprise Software’s zPrime technology to reduce its mainframe costs.

The customer wants to buy IBM’s Specialty Engines for its mainframes, the so-called zIIP and zAAP processors that IBM created to accelerate and run DB2 and Java on. IBM doesn’t want to fill the order unless the customer promises in writing not to use the chips to run the workloads that the zPrime software can offload to the things. It will save the customer millions of dollars in CP cycles and IBM doesn’t like that.

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NEON

Wednesday

04Mar2009

March 4, 2009

The case for opening up the mainframe market

Roger Bowler By Roger Bowler, mainframe professional and creator of “Hercules”

I have been following the legal battles between IBM and Platform Solutions Inc. (PSI) and T3 Technologies (T3) over the last couple of years with great interest. As the founder of the Hercules open source mainframe emulator project I feel that we are impacted by many of the same issues that put both PSI and T3 out of business. As a mainframe IT professional, it bothers me that there is no longer any competition in the mainframe platform space. While all the press coverage related to these cases has helped to raise awareness of how important this is, the fundamental issues sometimes get lost. In reality, these are very clear cases and once people understand the seriousness of the situation I hope action will be taken to open up this important market. In my mind there are three major issues here:

The IBM mainframe is a unique platform that is incredibly important for enterprise computing.
Through its actions, IBM has prevented alternative mainframe solutions from being viable and as a result it now controls 100% of the mainframe market.
With no competition in the mainframe platform market, prices have remained high and customers have fewer choices than if there were more vendors creating and selling alternative solutions.

Let me provide some more detail on each of these areas...

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Tuesday

20Jan2009

January 20, 2009

The T3 Technologies story

By Steven Friedman, President
T3 Technologies, Inc.

For over 15 years, my company was a successful IBM Business Partner. I used to have a thriving company with over 50 employees, nearly 1,000 customers in 28 countries (including 200 customers in 15 European Community states) and a profitable revenue stream earned through selling mainframe solutions to IBM customers. However, now our company is effectively out of business due to the direct actions of the company I used to be closely aligned with: IBM.

While my company is seeking legal remedies in both the US and Europe for the actions taken by IBM, most people will never hear our story. I think that needs to change and the IT world – both customers and vendors – need to understand just how easily IBM controls the fate of our company, many companies like us and as a result, harms customers who rely on IBM mainframe technology.

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Tuesday

20Jan2009

January 20, 2009

z/OS competition could save Europe $48 billion over 20 years

By Jeff Gould, CEO & Director of Research,
Peerstone Research

The goal of this paper is to quantify the costs imposed on the European economy by the absence of competition in the market for computers capable of running IBM’s z/OS mainframe operating system. We focus specifically on evaluating the economic impact of eliminating the excess costs to European buyers that result from IBM’s exclusive tying of its z/OS mainframe operating system to its brand of z Series mainframe servers.

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Government

Intellectual Property

Friday

21Nov2008

November 21, 2008

Technology review of mainframe computer systems and their alternatives

By Walter F. Tichy, Professor
Faculty of Computer Science
University of Karlsruhe
Karlsruhe, Germany

Mainframe computers are used by many of the largest companies and government institutions. This paper reviews the technology of mainframe computer systems and describes potential, lower-priced alternatives. The forces that maintain and expand the dominance of IBM in the mainframe market are explained. The paper also presents evidence that market dominance has led to a slowdown in innovation in mainframe technology.

Download the research report PDF (752K)

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