Pursuing the Power of Parallel
If John Grisham had worked at IBM before taking up writing novels, he might have titled a new mystery The Mainframe Paradox.
On one hand, many opinion-shapers - the press, consultants, analysts and even some IBMers - don't grasp the reality that the System/390® brand represents the most fundamental leap in computing capability since the PC.
Despite that, customers have been catching on and the System/390 Division is dedicated to pursuing and promulgating the power and potential of Parallel Sysplex(TM).
Enterprise customers have always wanted what the traditional mainframe delivered - reliability, availability, security and virtually unlimited computing capacity. But the bipolar-based system had become too expensive to fit easily into IS budgets; it required the increasingly sophisticated skills of high-priced professionals to install, maintain and program.
So the System/390 Division, with the powerful support of IBM Research, made a leap of technology in hardware and software.
In just over two years, the System/390 brand has been transformed from water-cooled to air-cooled, from bipolar to CMOS, from product-focused to application-driven, from proprietary to open, from single-system to parallel, and from host-centered to network-centric.
It is a fraction of the cost, boasts a mean time to failure of 20 years and retains the classic security and data-management features of the traditional mainframe.
And with Parallel Sysplex, customers can achieve the ultimate: continuous computing that they can't outgrow - at the lowest incremental cost.
Customers have bought into our vision. Shipments of MIPS, or computing capacity, have doubled in the past two years, with a huge increase in the ratio of CMOS- to bipolar-based engines.
Our software advances, again buttressed by IBM Research, have been as impressive as our hardware successes. OS/390(TM) is our new operating system integrating the latest versions of MVS®, OpenEdition® and more than 30 key software products, along with features that customers bet their businesses on. OpenEdition, in which IBM Research played a key role, has been a major driver of new applications. And applications, in turn, have been responsible for about half our shipments of MIPS.
We are completing feasibility studies to port Lotus Notes®, SAP's R3 and other "hot" applications to the platform. In little more than a year, we have attracted nearly 700 independent solutions developers to our System/390 Partners in Development program - and already they have produced 700-plus new or modernized applications for System/390, including a number of UNIX programs. Full UNIX branding of System/390 will come later this year.
All of this has put us on the cusp of network computing, a development that Lou Gerstner believes has implications for society as profound as the printing press and the light bulb. Internet and intranet applications - information searches and data mining on the Web, managing digital libraries and performing online commercial transactions - will devour MIPS, and that, in turn, will drive growth for System/390 and IBM.
But we must maintain our lead over the competition. Realizing belatedly that CMOS and parallel are the keys to the future, competitors are rushing to catch us.
But we don't intend to let up. Hundreds of customers are implementing Parallel Sysplex today, with dozens in full data-sharing production. And to encourage customers to move to Parallel Sysplex now, we must execute. We must deliver, on schedule, key parallel software, such as IMS(TM) Shared Message Queuing and CICS(TM)/VSAM; we must seek and receive help from the field to identify opportunities and to close sales; we must deploy the skills necessary to speed customer installation of Parallel Sysplex and accelerating their migration.
To these ends, we're hiring more people and launching media and marketing blitzes. We're adding Parallel Centers where customers can learn the advantages of Parallel Sysplex and receive migration support. Our executive team is on call to fly anywhere, anytime to help our colleagues in the field.
If we work as a team - development, manufacturing, sales, service and the irreplaceable skills of IBM Research - we can expect to continue to win in the marketplace.
Linda Sanford is the general manager of IBM's System/390 Division.
