NEWS & ANALYSIS

Maureen O'GaraNeon Sues IBM for Antitrust

by Maureen O'Gara

No sense pussyfooting around anymore trying to sidestep the legal equivalent of nuclear war.

Texas ISV Neon Enterprise Software, accepting that it’s in a fight to the death with IBM over mainframes, ripped the kid gloves off late Wednesday, amended its pre-Christmas suit against its giant nemesis for tortious interference, business disparagement and unfair competition and charged Blue with antitrust violations.

Click to read more...

Why Choice Matters for Mainframe Customers

OpenMainframe.org Position Paper

The recent news that the US Department of Justice is investigating the IBM mainframe market has resulted in numerous stories and blog posts both for and against the investigation. However, many of the arguments have not addressed the most important question: what do mainframe customers want?
This paper addresses the key issues that impact the users of mainframe technology and why the resolution of these issues is critically important to mainframe customers.

Download the position paper PDF (147K)

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.

Click to read more...

Roger BowlerThe case for opening up the mainframe market

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.

Click to read more...
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.

  Subscribe to Mainframe and the Cloud RSS

Monday
23Nov2009

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.

Click to read more…

| Print ArticlePrint Article | | CommentPost a Comment
in ,
Monday
16Nov2009

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.

Click to read more…

| Print ArticlePrint Article | | CommentPost a Comment
in ,
Wednesday
23Sep2009

Micro Focus pitches COBOL in the cloud

DateSeptember 23, 2009

(SearchCloudComputing) By Carl Brooks

CTO of application modernization at Micro Focus, Mark Haynie sees cloud as having come full circle from the earliest days of distributed computing. Micro Focus makes "application modernization" platforms that translate application dinosaurs for mainframes, written in COBOL, onto modern server hardware. Now that cloud computing has come of age, he says, the transition of these old school applications that underpin many of the world's financial systems into the cloud more than makes sense: It's a natural fit.

Click to read more…
| Print ArticlePrint Article | | CommentPost a Comment
in
Tuesday
01Sep2009

Consolidate to the Cloud

DateSeptember 1, 2009

(IBM System magazine) By John Thomas

…A key requirement to building a private cloud service is deep virtualization. The number of workloads you can consolidate dictate what cost savings can be achieved with the cloud model. This article outlines the results of a technical study that compares different virtualization platforms for implementing a private cloud. It presents benchmarks that demonstrate consolidation ratios that can be achieved on these platforms. Additionally, results are refined to account for real-world, workload-demand variations. The numbers show utilizing z/VM on System z provides an industry-leading virtualization platform, capable of achieving very high consolidation ratios.

Click to read more…

| Print ArticlePrint Article | | CommentPost a Comment
in ,
Monday
20Apr2009

Big iron: The ultimate cloud platform?

DateApril 20, 2009

(InfoWorld - Cloud Computing Blog) By William Hurley

Get out your notepads and get ready for the mainframe resurgence. Tell your friends you heard it here. I'm not talking about a UNIVAC comeback, or Burroughs Large 2.0. I'm telling you, dear readers, that now's a good time to invest in the few remaining big iron dealers: IBM, Unisys, Hitachi, and Fujitsu, baby. Why, you ask? Because mainframes solve the cloud's impending challenges.

Click to read more...

| Print ArticlePrint Article | | CommentPost a Comment
in ,
Page 1 2 3 4 ... 4 Next 5 Entries »