On Thu, 30 Oct 2025 18:15:41 -0500, Enzo Damato <[email protected]> wrote:
Hi Enzo. You made some great observations of what the current situation is. >I've said it in SHARE talks, I've said it in person, and I've probably >said it on this mailing list, but the only way that IBM is ever going to >grow the mainframe platform, solve the skills gap, or even just stop the >slow gradual erosion of customers and installed sites is if they create >a machine cheap enough, and with license costs low enough, that /new >startups can afford it./ IBM must bring in customers who don't yet have >legacy, and that means startups and new customers. The most effective >way to sell mainframes right now would be for IBM to create a box that >costs 10K, takes up 4RU, and can run the equivalent of a few dozen >decent sized EC2 instances. This would be useless for every existing >customer base, but it would be affordable to startups, who are don't >want to get annihilated by AWS/GCP/Azure costs, and haven't yet built >out their infrastructure. I was thinking about what the barrier would be to IBM doing that (ie it is self-evident that they haven't). It's presumably because they believe it wouldn't be profitable. And then I was thinking from the customer side - why would a new customer (startup) be willing to tie themselves down to a single hardware supplier? BFN. Paul. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
