Datapro Information Service Group conducted a survey in June among senior data processing managers and man-agement information system directors at a number of mainframe sites throughout the US. The company says that over 800 respondents provided information on the manufacturers and models of the mainframe computers installed at their locations, and they were asked to rate their mainframe on a variety of features. 90% of the managers say that they do not plan to change their mainframe vendors within the next 12 months, but they do intend to enhance their systems within the same time frame. Over 41% say that hardware expansion is on the agenda, while 40% highlight expansion of their communications facilities. Only 28% are planning to upgrade to a larger system, and less than one in four intend to implement some form of optical storage. Even less, 17%, plan to implement Unix systems, and the same proportion emphasises document imaging. Other results to emerge from Datapro’s Mainframe User Ratings Survey are that 98% of the operating systems in use are proprietary, and 1% are Unix-based. The most important selection and purchase criteria are price performance, hardware architecture, service and support and upgrade capability. The managers say that 62% of applications are developed internally, 20% are packaged programs from an independent vendor, 12% are packaged programs from the manufacturer and 6% are developed by contract programmers. While 12% of respondents have a distributed computing environment, and 2% claim a client-server architecture, DataPro estimates that these figures will grow to 18% and 10% respectively. 43% are using IBM mainframes with a third using Unisys equipment and Bull claiming 12%. NCR is the next favourite with 11%, but only 8% and 5% respectively use Amdahl and Hitachi Data Systems equipment. Two per cent use Digital Equipment Corp systems while Tandem and Control Data are even-stevens – both companies have one per cent of users.
