Wow, what a great question Alan. I think I start from several likely safe assumptions:
1. The world's transaction volumes will never stop growing. 2. The world's data access needs will never stop growing. 3. Nobody will figure out how to work around the speed of light as a physical constraint. 4. Labor costs will keep rising. (That's a good thing for the human race's standard of living.) 5. Energy costs will continue to rise. 6. Security will keep growing in importance. 7. In a world with instant, competitive market access (e.g. the Internet) with global news, service qualities matter. 8. There will always be business value in code written yesterday. 9. The number of business functions within the average organization that are fulfilled by computers will keep growing. 10. Scale economies will grow in importance. 11. No civilization-ending calamities. If even half those assumptions are true, I don't see any way around having a healthy degree of centralized computing infrastructure. And as long as that's true, you're going to have the IBM mainframe. What runs on the mainframe will shift, as it always has. There will still be 50 year old code that chugs along, delivering wonderful business value (see #8), with varying degrees of modification and maintenance over time as business needs evolve -- truly "living code." There will also be lots of new stuff running that hasn't been created yet, maybe even yet another new programming language that will solve all the world's problems. :-) The geographic ratios of mainframe installations will change. What has been a primarily North American and European phenomenon will become more Asian, as the developing world recognizes the same IT issues and goes through its own growing pains. Mainframe hardware will be quite different, certainly. Weren't there lots of bipolar technology mainframes running in early 1997, 10 years ago? There was no 64-bit z/Architecture, which was a radical improvement. The trend toward integrated function will continue. Look around the data center: what moves onboard next? I'm not sure, but I'm sure it'll be interesting. IBM will continue to lessen the learning curve. (See #4.) This has already happened in quite dramatic fashion, and more is coming. IBM-MAIN will finally graduate from a relatively simple e-mail distribution list to something else, although this will occur no earlier than 9 years from now. :-) Half the messages will relate to concerns about outsourcing to Greenland's booming IT industry. :-) It'll be fun to watch it all unfold. Let's check back in 10 years. - - - - - Timothy Sipples IBM Consulting Enterprise Software Architect Specializing in Software Architectures Related to System z Based in Tokyo, Serving IBM Japan and IBM 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
