Paperclips and Mainframes ... Still Meeting Requirements.

I attended a customer briefing last week, and was once again impressed by the due diligence being performed by IT. One company was about to revamp their business application suite. That is not unique unto itself, but they were investigating the tools available for the mainframe, specifically DB2 on z/OS. The application which they were about to standardize on was available on UNIX as well as the mainframe. The robustness and scalability of the mainframe platform was encouraging a serious look as it appeared to be a better match for their business.

This customer is not alone, but there is a tendency in this industry to look at, and publicize the new and shiny toys being deployed in IT. In all honesty, like many of its experts, the mainframe is not old ... it is just experienced.

If you think this is unique, then you might want to take a look at an article which appeared a year ago describing Ford Motor Company's flirtation with distributed systems application development. Ford I've been told looks at application deployment based on the attributes of the business service requiring the application. If the service can tolerate downtime then mainframe is probably not the best platform. If scalability, security and availability are important then the mainframe still cannot be beat.

Has a standard paperclip lost its ability to meet the requirements of temporarily binding papers? Its over one hundred years old.. and like the mainframe, it is still meeting requirements.