Marketeers Have Short Memories

In a the flury of IBM mainframe announcements I came acorss this little bit of fluff: "... BMC Software, Computer Associates, Hewlett-Packard -- tend to either ignore or isolate the mainframe in their rival products, Zollar said. 'It's a major shortcoming of our competitors,' he said. 'They create an artificial wall between zSeries and distributed systems.'" This got me a little excited. Now I know these words were most probably structured by a new marketing dude or dudess at Tivoli ... but it's a little early to expect the mainframers to forget the facts.

Hello Al .... up until the Candle acquisition just a mere year and a half ago IBM had a pretty empty portfolio in support of zSeries monitoring ... they had virtually nothing. In fact, prior to the acqusition only the Tivoli executives could spell mainframe and that was only because a number had come from  VTAM software backgrounds in Ralegh, NC.

I would not include BMC nor CA in the camp with "artifical walls". I can speak directly for BMC, and we have been supporting mainframe and distributed for years .. and now that our customers' DS and MF organizations are merging we are meeting their needs for wholistic support for all computing platforms within Business Service Management. Our current products in Mainframe and Distributed go way beyong just monitoring, and including fixing things before they break, automating trouble tickets and most importantly; linkage with a customer's business services.

Oh, by the way ... we recognize Oracle as a leading DB vendor and offer support for Oracle environments as well as UDB in the distributed space. So when it comes to your end-to-end transaction management story ... don't forget the facts.