IBM of course runs their business as they see fit. No amount of logic on IBM-MAIN is likely to change their minds. The people at IBM who make these decisions probably do not read IBM-MAIN. <g>
If we take Phil's point about some Wall Street analyst being able to say "look, the mainframe is dying" [or even "not growing very much"] it is one thing if he is working from best guesses from employment agencies, etc. It would be quite another thing if he had IBM's official numbers to cite. Phil gave you numbers (that no one here has yet disagreed with) that should be good enough for you to make decisions about your business. What would you do differently if you knew there were exactly 4763 z/OS sites as opposed to Phil's "low thousands"? I'd like to know too. But there's a lot of things I would like that I'm not going to get. Charles -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] On Behalf Of ITschak Mugzach Sent: Tuesday, March 20, 2018 12:47 PM To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU Subject: Re: mainframe distribution Phil, It is funny they are trying to hide it. The information can be collected from free resources like job seeking portals, linkedin searches, etc. it's just a question of time one has to invest collecting this info. IBM or any other vendor can't block clients from posting jobs. As IBM claims they achieved new clients (and they publish names from time to time, like the south african bank). They should be proud they drive the world, don't they? ITschak On Tue, Mar 20, 2018 at 9:29 PM, Phil Smith <p...@voltage.com> wrote: > ITschak Mugzach wrote: > >I wonder if anyone (vendors, maybe) has an insight into the mainframe > market ... > > (And then after various discussion): > >Strange it is so hard to collect this information. > > Why? It's proprietary information for IBM about their market. As a > vendor for the last 35 years, I've wished for this information, but > was never surprised that it wasn't available. Why would they want to release > it? > Sure, in boom times - at one point they said there were 20,000 VM > installations. But that was a long time ago, and many of those were > probably 9370s in a closet that were never really used. Now? All it > would do is provide fodder for folks saying "See, the mainframe > business is shrinking". (Whether that's true or not is irrelevant: the > number of licenses is surely shrinking, as companies consolidate and > few if any new z shops are created.) > > Best guesses I've seen in recent years: low thousands for z/OS; fewer > for z/VM (still > 1K; I think); fewer still for z/VSE; and 150 max for > z/TPF (perhaps half that). ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
