On Wed, 25 Jan 2012 13:32:12 -0500, Knutson, Sam <[email protected]> wrote: > Most shops have at least one or two vendor products that are being maintained > and > paid for purely due to inertia which could be replaced without any impact to > their > business by functions included at no additional charge with z/OS base and > DFSMSdfp. > Still using an OEM tape sharing product? Still using an OEM product to > provide VTAM > consoles? Still using an OEM product to improve VSAM performance or reduce > space > ABENDs? Opportunities abound to recoup that 6% increase in many shops.
Sam, While this might appear to be a good thing, what's happening here is that IBM are using their monopoly position to squeeze independent software vendors out of the mainframe space. In effect, customers are now paying for the IBM product whether they want it or not. The reality is that ISVs are too often confronted with customers saying "we prefer your product, but we just signed a deal with IBM which includes a more or less equivalent product bundled in, so we will use that instead". Since the consent decree[1] was lifted more than 10 years ago , IBM has been working hard to eliminate competition in the mainframe space (example [2]). My belief is that if IBM were obliged to tolerate competition, we would still be seeing a healthy growth in the mainframe ecosystem. And when I talk of growth in the mainframe market, I am talking about increasing the number of mainframe sites and encouraging new application workloads on z/OS, not the IBM definition of mainframe growth, which is about extracting increased IBM revenues from a diminishing number of mainframe customers[3]. Roger Bowler Hercules "the people's mainframe" [1] http://www.justice.gov/atr/public/press_releases/1996/0715.htm [2] http://www.tech-news.com/another/ap200807b.html [3] http://www.ibm.com/investor/2q11/press.phtml ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
