Yes, this post touched a lot of buttons. Thanks for the good insight Phil. My 2 cents' worth comes from product marketing and mainframe market perspective. I spend a good deal of my year researching and writing about trends in enterprise IT. As you all know, the mainframe remains relevant and an integral part of large enterprise and gov business/IT service delivery. What's trending in software initiatives right now -- e.g. what biz/gov are willing spending money on -- is app modernization, data governance/SIEM, document management/digitization, analytics/BI. If you want to see what research is being consumed by orgs big enough to have a mainframe, Andrew White (Gartner) posts top 20 research reads here - https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/7193311183750246403/.
I see the ColeSoft acquisition as the beginning of several by the holding company to address some of the trends I mention above (if they're smart). Regarding their investment/growth, as many companies do, this could be a play just to get in the game by the holding company in acquiring a company simply for its paying customers. As far as acquisitions followed by sacking workforce, I've been through 3 of these and it's the general MO of "tech" holding companies who are run by CFO-types (sorry for soapboxing). ColeSoft in its capability to debug assembler and C/C++, is essentially contributing to the glut of app modernization initiatives going on now and the help is definitely needed (raise your hand if you can even work in assembler and you're younger than 30 years old). I too see this as good news for we who make a living in the mainframe space. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
