IBM: Why the Mainframe Will Never Die, Part II - Education and System z (
Page 2 of 2 )
Q: What is IBM doing to make
sure there are enough IT pros with mainframe skills?
A: It's been said that 80 percent of the world's
mission-critical data is stored on and accessed by IBM
System z. We have a responsibility to ensure students around the world are
being educated on System z servers. The System z Academic Initiative Program
has added hundreds of schools offering System z course work. More than 50,000
students have been educated on the mainframe. Approximately 550 schools
worldwide have now joined IBM to offer
course work on the IBM System z enterprise
servers. Around the world, more than 1,000 students from Brazil,
United Kingdom,
Australia, U.S., Canada
and China won
prizes through the IBM student mainframe
contests.
We feel this is important because students with z skills
differentiate themselves with a level of versatility and depth that companies
look for these days. Universities we work with are reporting strong job
placement rates, even in this economy, for students with mainframe skills.
Q: How does System z play in IBM's
"Smarter Planet" strategy?
A: The world is becoming more instrumented -- by 2010 there
will be a billion transistors per human. The world is becoming more interconnected,
with a trillion networked things, and it's becoming more intelligent. Powerful
systems are needed for industries to analyze mountains of data and turn it into
decision and action, tailored to their specific needs. System z is an important engine behind this.
System z is one important element of a dynamic infrastructure
that clients want today. It provides flexibility and choice to users, the
agility and responsiveness that businesses need in today’s ever-changing
environment, the automation and manageability required to provide the control
that businesses require, and the ability to modernize mainframe assets. All of
these requirements align with what System z can deliver today. As customers
embrace the rapidly changing application environments of the future, they can
do so knowing that Systems z's capabilities will continue to be enhanced to
support their evolving needs.
The dynamic infrastructure vision and the cross-IBM
solutions that support it fundamentally differentiate us from commodity
hardware vendors. The competition simply does not have the leadership to help
apply technology to business problems, the middleware required to enable
infrastructure and applications or the breadth of server technologies to
deliver a solution optimized for each client's needs.
Q: Do modern programming languages/practices translate to the
mainframe?
A: The mainframe has powerful "specialty
engines" known as zAAP (System z Application Assist Processor) engines
dedicated to running Java and XML workloads. For organizations with legacy
data, IBM offers software via EGL (enterprise generation language) for developers
of any background to work on the mainframe. For example, IBM Rational software is easy to learn, hides the
technical complexity of runtimes and middleware and ensures easy interoperability
with legacy data. Basically, customers
don't need to worry about a lot of the infrastructure if they use Rational.
IT & Network Infrastructure News & Reviews 
