by Brenda J. Christie
Read some interesting articles recently depicting how the mainframe, and its supporting tools, continues to proliferate, indeed, to far corners of the world. All articles referenced appeared in Enterprise Systems Media.
One article, IBM CICS Tools , blew my mind with discussion of a CICS Cloud, and capturing data (presumably to sell to marketing companies) all while lowering TCO, total cost of ownership thru reduction of batch cycles, cross-site workload balancing and support for dynamic mobile workload configuration.
These all may just be staid and true concepts marketed under current terminology, but I was impressed. Although I did not see much of what went on behind the CICS Systems Programmer's curtain while in the mainframe world, my recollections of discussions I did have do not include tools as those discussed in this article.
Another article which brought back memories, is the one on Attachmate's extension of its terminal emulation product to work on smartphones and tablets. It was a huge jump to move away from the Wylbur environment to terminal emulation. This move to be able to access the mainframe from a smartphone or tablet is equally monumental, although I do have concerns about security and introducing vulnerabilities inherent in smartphones/tablets due to their relative youth, into the mainframe. Quite naturally, Attachmate wants to reassure prospective customers that its security is up to par. Being hard to kill, the IBM mainframe will most likely be proactive and defend itself, nonetheless.
Finally, there was also a piece, China Needs a Mainframe, which discusses China's love affair with the IBM mainframe, and how it let IBM into China to conduct business. Predictably, the recent Snowden and other revelations have dampened that honeymoon with the Chinese now advocating to buy local mainframes
All great articles, and definitely worth the read.
Brenda J. Christie
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