Speaking for myself.... Computerworld's comment was incredibly overwrought and not especially insightful. As a general pattern, server hardware vendors have gotten hammered for several quarters, most especially in the Intel/AMD marketplace. (I wonder if Computerworld has reported "the death of the Intel/AMD server market." :-)) System z hardware was perhaps the lone server product to buck that trend for several quarters and has been gaining share. It finally had a down revenue quarter after bucking that sustained global economic headwind for so long, although interestingly IBM reported that mainframe hardware revenues were still up 17% in its growth and emerging markets. (That's an atypical result for hardware vendors and portends well for the future.) There was also some evidence in IBM's announcement that hardware profitability was holding up well, even with declining unit prices.
Also, everybody knew that 2Q2009 was going to be what's called a "tough compare." If you recall, IBM said that it had all its mainframe factories running flat out in 2Q2008 to manufacture System z10 machines. IBM couldn't keep up with demand. That year ago quarter was the first full quarter of System z10 EC availability. It's also worth noting that IBM does not break out System z-related software and services revenue separately. While hardware is important, it is certainly not the only part of IBM's revenues -- even System z-related revenues. All that said, I assume IBM would prefer never-ending quarters of increasing revenue and profit in every one of its businesses. With respect to the new System z Solution Edition offerings, they're unambiguously good news for customers. Price is no longer an excuse to avoid hosting a wide variety of new applications on System z and z/OS -- IBM just plain got rid of that excuse in this announcement. The announcement has been very well received and adopted many times already, from what I am hearing. I'm not surprised: if you can get mainframe qualities of service and mainframe-related significant cost savings (such as lower administrative costs, lower networking costs, lower facilities costs, etc.) for an industry-competitive multi-year predictable acquisition price, why on earth wouldn't you choose System z? Any rational business would: it's far lower risk and cost-efficient. - - - - - Timothy Sipples IBM Consulting Enterprise Software Architect Based in Tokyo, Serving IBM Japan / Asia-Pacific E-Mail: [email protected] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
