NEWS & ANALYSIS

EU Commission initiates formal investigations against IBM in two cases of suspected abuse of dominant market position

by Directorate General for Competition of the European Commission

(26 July, 2010)

The European Commission has decided to initiate formal antitrust investigations against IBM Corporation in two separate cases of alleged infringements of EU antitrust rules related to the abuse of a dominant market position (Article 102 TFEU). Both cases are related to IBM's conduct on the market for mainframe computers. The first case follows complaints by emulator software vendors T3 and Turbo Hercules, and focuses on IBM's alleged tying of mainframe hardware to its mainframe operating system. The second is an investigation begun on the Commission's own initiative of IBM's alleged discriminatory behaviour towards competing suppliers of mainframe maintenance services.

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BowlerRoger Bowler Responds to IBM Patent Attack on Open Source

by Roger Bowler Creator of Hercules and Co-founder of TurboHercules

(Posted in News & Blogs section of turbohercules.com on 6 April, 2010)

As many of you know, the company I founded to promote the Hercules open source mainframe emulator, TurboHercules SAS, has filed an antitrust complaint against IBM with the European Commission in Brussels. We are not asking that IBM be subjected to punishing fines or anything like that. We simply want IBM to agree to allow legitimate paying customers of its z/OS mainframe operating system to deploy that software on the hardware platforms of their choice – including, should they so choose, on low-cost servers using Intel or AMD microprocessors and Hercules.

I want to make clear that we undertook this action reluctantly, and only after a long period of reflection during which we reached out to IBM to see if there was some way to resolve our differences amicably. I regret to report that IBM rebuffed our efforts at conciliation, and even added fuel to the fire by launching accusations against Hercules. I would like to take this opportunity to respond to some of those charges.

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The Issues of Competition in Mainframe and Associated Services in India

by Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations and Indicus Analytics

Very little is known about the extent and nature of competition in the mainframe and associated services market in India. This is the first study to analyze competition and related issues in the Indian server market, with an extensive focus on mainframe computing.

Download the report PDF (4MB)

Steven FriedmanThe T3 Technologies story

by Steven Friedman, T3 Technologies

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.

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MAINFRAME AND THE CLOUD

“Cloud Computing” is getting a lot of coverage in the press and from industry analysts these days. Cloud Computing has the potential to offer customers the ability to rapidly scale computing resources based on demand and to save IT organizations money by offloading the cost of capital purchases and IT administration to service providers. Virtualization and automated provisioning will play key roles in helping vendors deliver the exact resources their customers need in a streamlined way.

Some experts say Cloud Computing will be the next new paradigm for enterprise computing – some say it is just a re-birth of ASP (Application Service Provider) or timesharing computing. Numerous models have emerged from the biggest players in the IT world to provide software, infrastructure, platform, and storage as a service. Some vendor models define Cloud Computing as IT services provided by off-premises datacenters, some define Cloud Computing as a remote extension of traditional on-premises datacenter computing and some define it as Software plus Services.

Regardless of how you define Cloud Computing, IBM has made it clear that the mainframe will play an important role in its Cloud Computing offerings. This section of OpenMainframe.org is dedicated to covering the issues and news related to how the proprietary IBM mainframe platform impacts the open computing world of Cloud Computing. We welcome your feedback and hope that the material here will help customers understand the impact of extending mainframe workloads into the Cloud.

For a list of all posts related to the mainframe and cloud computing, click here.

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Thursday
Sep022010

How IBM hopes to make the cloud proprietary

DateSeptember 2, 2010

(ZDNet) By Dana Blankenhorn

Asia Dent (right) must be the most famous face in Poughkeepsie today.

She was photographed by IBM PR recently putting a probe to a new 5.2 GHz chip that is at the heart of the company’s new zEnterprise mainframe, shipping next week.

Florian Mueller calls this the most dangerous product announcement of the century. That’s because zEnterprise could let IBM create a cloud monopoly among large enterprises, assimilating Linux under its mainframe patents.

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Tuesday
May252010

Cloud Computing and.. mainframes!

DateMay 25, 2010

(NetworkWorld) By Dustin Puryear

In “Cloud Computing Comes to a Desktop Near You”, I thought aloud about the direction that Microsoft, Google, and others are trying to take us. Do we really want or need to cloud-itize (cloudify? to make clowdsy?) every software process? Well, probably, yes. If we can securely and cost-effectively distribute IT to more efficient handlers of that IT (e.g., Microsoft or Google handling email and collaboration, Amazon handling storage), then there are some very powerful financial motivators at play.

But how do we get from here to there?

The move to the cloud is going to take a long time, and there will be many steps along the way. And, for some business processes and functions, we have to realize that we’ll keep some things in-house, even while we take advantage of what web services and cloud computing is bringing us. (A more full-featured, available-to-all middleware infrastructure.)

Let’s take GT Software’s Ivory Service Architect as an example. GT has developed software that is supposed to make it easier to take an existing business function that is available to your application and turn it into a web service. Your software can run on Windows, Linux, or even IBM’s System z mainframe family, all while being able to access existing business services on your mainframe system, which you’ve probably spent a lot of time and money on in terms of application development and tuning.

Mainframes? Web services? But why?

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Monday
May102010

Cloud to drive a quarter of server sales

DateMay 10, 2010

(The Register) By Timothy Prickett Morgan

...According to Katherine Broderick, a research analyst at IDC who follows enterprise platform and data center trends, IDC has a very formal definition of when a server is being used in a cloudy way. The server has to make use of converged networking for servers and storage, it has to be virtualized, and it has to be highly automated.

Cloudy infrastructure also has to have the means of keeping track of who is using what server resources and of hooking into chargeback systems so users can be billed, utility style, for the resources they consume running their applications. A cloudy server can be used in a public cloud, like Amazon's EC2, or in a private cloud, like a mainframe-based parallel sysplex cluster.

Yup. That's right. The $7.3bn that IDC estimates was spent on cloudy servers in 2009 had a very large mainframe component to it.

Broderick says that mainframes meet the IDC definition of a cloud, just like a stack of x64 servers running VMware's vSphere 4.0 with some other tools and using converged storage and network fabric would. Even VMware calls what it has created with vSphere a 21st century software mainframe, after all.

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Monday
Nov232009

IBM: Back To The Future

DateNovember 23, 2009

(Forbes) CIO Chat by Ed Sperling

When IBM invented virtualization back in the late 1960s, the goal was to make mainframes more efficient. Fast-forward four decades and the company is returning to its roots--mainframes and virtualization.

Why is this happening and how does IBM see the data center changing? Forbes caught up with Pat Toole, IBM's CIO, to talk about what's different and why--and how the CIO's job ultimately will be affected by these changes.

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Monday
Nov162009

IBM launches private analytics cloud

DateNovember 16, 2009

(SearchDataManagement) By Jeff Kelly

IBM, with more than 400,000 employees, knows as well as any large enterprise that supporting multiple business intelligence (BI) deployments can put a drag on IT resources and create data silos.

So Big Blue has come up with an alternative, today launching what it says is the world's largest internal cloud for BI and advanced analytics. This will make it easier for IT to manage and provision the hardware – servers and storage devices – that supports them and will give workers access to more data, IBM said.

IBM is also offering the internal analytic cloud service to its large enterprise customers under the moniker Smart Analytics Cloud.

The private cloud, which is anchored by IBM's System z10 mainframe and Storage DS8000, will bring together more than 100 of IBM's relational and transactional data sources, which between them house more than a petabyte of data. Sales and support staff can tap into and analyze the wealth of data with Cognos 8 front-end BI tools, according to the company.

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