End-of-Year Scorecard for Europe's Mainframe Players

(Gartner) By Rakesh Kumar and Errol Rasit

The mainframe market in Europe, the Middle East and Africa has four key players: IBM, Fujitsu Siemens Computers, Group Bull and Unisys. Gartner assesses their strategies and offers guidance to users.

The mainframe market in EMEA is worth more than $2 billion a year and is showing a remarkable resistance to change. Although IBM is the largest player by far — accounting for 77% of revenue in 2006 — Bull, FSC and Unisys are strong in key geographies and in vertical industries such as financial services and transportation. During the past six years, significant growth and penetration of x86-based servers have occurred, along with a declining reduced instruction set computing (RISC) Unix installed base. However, each mainframe player has generally held its ground in sustaining investment and, in some cases, growing, which is remarkable given the changes in infrastructure topology trends. Figure 1 shows a comparison of the server market segmented by CPU technology in 2001, 2006 and the 2012 forecast, mainframes are represented in this figure by "others." Although these vendors have seen a small, but steady, flow of customers leaving the platforms during the past 10 years, there has not been the mass exodus that the industry has repeatedly predicted would occur. Through a variety of strategies, the four players have attempted to revitalize their business. Figure 2 shows the relative size of the mainframe market by operating system. Here, IBM is represented by z/OS/OS390, FSC by BS2000/OSD, Bull by GCOS and Unisys by MCP/OS2200.

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