The Future of Mainframes

The future of mainframes is a never-ending debate, which has grown tremendously in recent years, especially after 9/11, people are looking for technologies that are fault tolerant. Due to the advancement of computers, especially microcomputers in 1970s and desktop computers in the 80s was projected to hit the death knell for mainframes, as they were considered to be too large, expensive, inflexible and very difficult to use. Desktops computers are expensive and of course, they can be inter connected to a network into a central server which will help organizations to store large amounts of data. However, those doomsayers were very wrong and there was a stiff competition, mainframes continue to keep up a stable growth rate. If you look at the present scenario, organizations have tremendously increased they expenditures when it comes to storage solutions, this is a development, which shows that mainframes would gain a better share in the Information Technology budgets.

Apart from traditional mainframe users like the manufacturing behemoths and financial/banking services sector, uses like the travel industry and universities seems to be choosing mainframes. According to a report, more than seventy percent of world's data continues to make use of mainframes. The market for mainframes and mainframe course are growing tremendously pushing off the traditional mainframes, adding software, and new features to the list of oldies! Today’s innovative mainframes are much cheaper, smaller, more powerful and they are e-business friendly, hence the market is growing gradually. This trend is quite encouraging.

Sometime back mainframes were used just because of policy issues rather than technological choices. In the late 70s until the early 1990s, developing countries missed an era of legacy systems and mainframe due to lack of global IT majors these countries. Except for public sector companies and large government organizations mainframes were not seen anywhere in developing counties. Only in late 90s, the mainframe market grew slowly during the Y2K scare, and lot of companies seized the opportunities. Awareness about mainframes is picking up now in countries like India, more and more mainframes are been purchased and installed. The industries are realizing the significance of converting large volume and mission critical applications from distributed processing back to a centralized processing for superior management, control, security, disaster recovery and business stability.
Majority of companies have managed to make a perfect combination of old and new technologies to meet their vital computing requirements. On the other hand, smaller organizations once felt that maintaining mainframes are expensive, but now they are choosing mainframes instead of server/client systems. The cost of owning mainframes do influence corporate to opt for server/client technology but thanks to today’s brilliant mainframe course that is making this technology easier to use, hence smaller companies doesn’t mind investing on expensive mainframes that will promise superb results. Another problem that companies face when it comes to using server/client systems is that these systems generally come from diverse suppliers, and has a wide range of components which may not be adapted and integrated to the user’s needs; this problem can be overcome by installing mainframes.