That Brazilian mainframe shop was the poster child for the zBX and the Cell blade. I don’t think it’s very active at this point – at least IBM hasn’t talked about it for years.
FWIW, the one comment I’d contribute is the decline of NLS language messages and documentation. In most cases, English and Japanese Kanji are the only supported languages any more – all the hooks and libraries to display it are still there, but the translated text isn’t. Even the uppercase English only variant for messages has been dropped. This can be a serious barrier to adoption – if you have to read docs in a foreign language to explain a complex technical topic, that can be a pretty steep hurdle, and the Japanese market can be very sensitive to that for various past cultural reasons. When I worked with Fuji Xerox, they had a lot of people supporting that to stay competitive in that market. There’s also been some discussion of the EU dropping English as one of the formally accepted EU languages with Brexit, so that may be an issue if/when it actually happens. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
