IBM’s Integrated Delivery Centers are well positioned to benefit from growing demand for mainframes.
According to reports, currently, 70% of organizations and governments are running critical applications on mainframes, but what this figure does not tell the reader are the reasons behind these numbers.
Organizations could be maintaining these applications on the mainframe because it is too expensive to migrate them to another platform, or they could be delivering an excellent service to the organization cost-effectively. It is for these reasons that the re-birth of the mainframe, or the concept of a single computing engine, has long been debated.
IBM Integrated Delivery Centers (IDCs) offer a mainframe operation support service that organizations require where the mainframe is not a strategic fit with the current or future IT infrastructure. IDCs offer a remote operations service for the mainframe from three of IBM’s global service centers; Johannesburg in South Africa, Szekesfehervar in Hungary, and Shenzhen in China, with Bangalore in India and Brno in the Czech Republic only able to offer a limited mainframe capability.
For western European customers, IBM chose both of its locations as a base for this service for several reasons. Firstly, they are in a similar time zone to most of Europe; secondly, they have a wealth of available labor with extensive knowledge of mainframe technology; thirdly, English is widely spoken and the infrastructure is well developed; and finally, the cost base is significantly lower than western Europe.
The choice of locations demonstrates that IBM is keen to enable mainframe customers in western Europe, Russia, and Asia to have a cost-effective choice to retain mainframes in-house. Mainframe adoption is expected to see steady growth in certain key vertical markets such as financial services and government. It appears that IBM has recognized this by its positioning of these IDCs with mainframe capability.
For organizations where the mainframe represents a significant but reducing part of the IT infrastructure, this remote operations solution offers a half-way approach between complete in-house operational support and outsourcing. The benefits of this approach allow organizations to retain full control over the mainframe, without the associated overhead costs of having a separate department just to provide operation support.
Source: OpinionWire by Butler Group (www.butlergroup.com)
