We have hired about 20 mainframe college students in the R&D area in the last two years. I can't even guess at what IBM and CA have realized but they both have similar programs in place. We have not seen the critical mass of resources that you allude to in India ... in the mainframe area, however they are gearing up in that area.

We are also hearing of a number of cross-training activities within our install base where non-MF IT personnel are learning and applying their skills in the MF area. This is further substantiated by consolidation of IT organizations crossing the enterprise.

I have no numbers ... but we constantly talk to our customers and are hearing that they are back-filling successfully ... the same is also true of BMC.

The only data I saw was a few years ago from Forrester I believe and while not segmenting by MF and distributed showed an overall IT skill shortage.

I don't believe we'll see an increase in CICS, Cobol programmers ... nor should we. There are other technologies which can extend existing CICS apps and mainframe data and new workloads being delivered on the mainframe. Wrappers and such can be used on existing mainframe applications to extend the business logic into components of SOA initiatives.

What data have you seen or experiences have you had to indicate it is "not working"?