Computer Weekly is going with a story in today’s issue that IBM Corp has killed development on the Repository Manager/MVS (well you do have to stop believing in Santa Claus when you reach the age of six or seven) and will replace it with a distributed product on a local network based on the Portable Common Tools Environment that has already been adopted for AIX Unix; the company really believes in outsourcing these days, as anyone that has been at the end of a pitch to give the company its data processing operations for running on a facilities management basis will attest, the argument being that companies should specialise in what they do really well and get an expert to take over the operations that are just a nuisance and a drain on management and resources: it even believes in it in its own operations, spinning off low-end printers to Lexmark International Inc – but isn’t it time that the company started thinking the unthinkable and recognising that while it is pretty good at hardware development and manufacturing, and not bad at marketing, it is rather less than world class at mainframe software development – so why not outsource the whole business, hand over the entire development staff to someone like Electronic Data Systems Corp, tie it down to stiff contracts on what functionality must be delivered when, and leave it to dump the products that aren’t liked or up to scratch and buy in replacement ones by buying the companies that own them, getting rid of a giant headache and rationalising the whole business at a stroke.
