The Growing Mainframe – ASurvey
The 2011 Annual Mainframe Survey has good news – Mainframe usage is increasing!
Conducted by BMC software among 1300 Mainframe users across the globe, the survey shows that the Mainframe market has grown at the right pace in 2011, and therefore an increased demand for capacity and workload is expected. 62% of the participants expect to grow their Mainframe capacity this year – a step upwards from last year’s expectancy of 56%. A strong 93% of respondents saw growing and stable MIPS (Million Instructions per Second) usage. The survey has also revealed concern areas of Mainframe users – 32% expressed their concern over shortage of Mainframe skill set and staffing issues.
The report, released in September 2011 indicates that Mainframes have a promising future in the IT business environment. With technological advancements like Mobile Technology, Cloud Computing etc., enterprises are searching for ways to integrate Mainframes with these technologies in order to create more value for their businesses. An example of this is the cross platform features, newly introduced in Mainframes like z196 and z114 which greatly contributed towards the growing need of Mainframes in data centres as opposed to distributed systems.
Key points highlighted by the 6th Annual Mainframe Survey are –
· 62% of respondents anticipate growth in the overall capacity of mainframe.
· 93% respondents look forward to growing or remaining steady in the coming year.
· 47% of participants credited their MIPS growth and capacity growth to new business applications and workloads.
· 60% consider cost reduction is the number one IT priority.
· 60% believe that private clouds are important for Mainframes.
· 31% see the mobile device support as an access point for Mainframes in the future.
· 32% expressed concern over issues in Mainframe staffing issues.
The survey has confirmed Mainframe’s strong market support – and place Reducing IT cost, Disaster recovery, Application modernization, MIPS utilization and reduction, reducing the impact of outages and improving availability high on their priority list. Mainframe growth projections have managed to doge the economic downturn, and has adapted to changed IT trends. The MIPS growth rates themselves are a strong testament to the increasing demand for Mainframe computing. Companies remain heavily committed to Mainframes as they provide a reliable and secure platform to run IT organizations effectively. The overall pulse of the market clearly reveals Mainframes to be a hot commodity – companies just need to effectively manage their services to meet emerging market demands.
