I no longer believe that IBM is acting in the long term interest of
the z/OS industry. Or more accurately, I believe that IBM's focus on
z/OS has changed from growth to consolidation, and that they see
themselves less as a hardware/software company and more as services
company. Their actions with respect to the z/OS world are utterly
anti-competitive and in total disregard of what is needed to nurture
the long term health of this portion of their business.
I view this a little differently......
Your statement vis-a-vis growth to consolidation is probably dead on,
but the reason IBM does not want PSI in this ball game has to do with
commodity pricing vs. specialty pricing. Exodus from MVS started almost 20
years ago. Those shops that felt another platform was justified and could
successfully make the transition off have done so. What we have left are
the shops that are probably not going to move. In addition to those
installations that have moved to another platform, there has been a lot of
data center consolidations that reduced the overall number of installed MVS
sites even more. IBM has a potential customer base for it's mainframe
offering that is limited, and defined. I have no idea what the true size of
the mainframe market is in dollars. The latest number I've run across
stated 28 billion. I've read it's in the 50 billion range as well. In my
opinion what is so wrong with their business strategy is that there is no
clearly defined path for any small business to start on IBM hardware and
software, and as the business grows, easily transition to larger and more
sophisticated IBM offerings, until the business eventually winds up running
on z/OS on some mainframe.
If IBM were transitioning to a services dominated company I do not
believe you would be seeing the level of new releases of both hardware and
software that we have seen over the last few years.
Yes, there actions are anti-competitive. But, isn't that part of being
in business. You do what you can to help yourself, you don't help your
competition, and when you feel your competitors are doing something that
will harm your business, you take them to court and try to win a judgment.
Dave Day
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