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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Wednesday
Jul062011

Mainframes Kicking Butt; But Whither Cloud?

DateJuly 6, 2011

(Cloud Computing Journal) By Roger Strukhoff

One of the major IT stories today involves a technology that grew almost 70% year-on-year and practically doubled its market share.

The other involves something that a major research company thinks will only command about 5% of the market in 2015.

The first sounds like a clear-cut winner. The other sounds like something that is dying on the vine.

The first of these is the IBM mainframe; the other is Cloud Computing.

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Wednesday
Mar302011

New job for mainframes: Cloud platform

DateMarch 30, 2011

(Computerworld) By Tam Harbert

Mention cloud computing to a mainframe professional, and he's likely to roll his eyes. Cloud is just a new name -- and a lot of hype -- for what mainframes have done for years, he'll say.

"A mainframe is a cloud," contends Jon Toigo, CEO and managing principal of Toigo Partners International, a data management consultancy in Dunedin, Fla.

If you, like Toigo, define a cloud as a resource that can be dynamically provisioned -- that is, allocated and de-allocated on demand -- and made available within a company with security and good management controls, "then all of that exists already in a mainframe," he says.

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Wednesday
Mar232011

Not so fast: IBM pushes mainframe toward the cloud

DateMarch 23, 2011

(SearchDataCenter.com) By Beth Pariseau

When they hear the word “mainframe,” today’s generation of IT pros may picture green-screen terminals and room-sized computers, but the traditional mainframe hasn’t stood still. With the announcement of its zEnterprise 196 last summer, IBM started to blend the mainframe and distributed systems worlds, at least for Unix and Linux operating systems, under the auspices of cloud computing.

According to Reed Mullen, leader of IBM System z Cloud Computing initiative, that cloud vision may come to include Windows and x86 server virtualization. “It is the stated intention of IBM to run Windows on System x blades within z/Enterprise -- you can run potentially everything there,” Mullen said. He declined to give a time frame for this feature, but “we know it is a missing piece from the mainframe story.”

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Friday
Dec032010

Microsoft Takes Aim at IBM's Mainframe and Cloud Business

DateDecember 3, 2010

(BNET) Wired In blog by Erik Sherman

For months, IBM has been unhappy with French company TurboHercules SAS, because the latter has tried to develop an open source emulation of IBM mainframe systems. Moreover, TurboHercules is one company accusing IBM of anti-competitive activity in Europe.

Now Big Blue has greater cause of concern, as Microsoft has invested in TurboHercules. Not only might Microsoft be using the relationship as a way to attack its rival by proxy, but it could also see mainframe emulation as a tool in its quest to become a dominant force in cloud computing.

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Friday
Nov052010

Why you can't move a mainframe with a cloud

DateNovember 5, 2010

(The Register) By Timothy Prickett Morgan

Will cloud computing finally wear the mainframe market down like thousands of years of harsh weather?

Anyone selling a server or a cloud against a mainframe will surely say "yes" to that question. Cloud computing is another style of utility computing, but it clusters cheapo servers together instead of using a large monolithic machine. But the people who actually buy and use mainframes are not so down on the big iron. And that's because they have not just studied history, but lived it.

Successive generations of new computing architectures have ground down the mainframe market from its mighty heights in the 1970s and 1980s, but the venerable big bad boxes are still humming away out there, cranking through untold billions of transactions and making IBM many billions of dollars of revenue and a large chunk of its profits each year.

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