Adding to the are they or aren’t they downsizing dispute, Hewlett-Packard Co’s UK marketing manager, Nick Earle, claims that users are not so much ditching their mainframes wholesale as running core applications on mainframes and installing new ones on mid-range systems. It will be at least five years, Earle estimates, before users start to be weaned from their attachment to their mainframes, though recent research done by the company shows that 10% of major mainframe users do now want to talk about downsizing their operations. Before the rise of open systems there were five factors that precluded migration to Unix, he argues. Unix was not robust enough, no-one believed it would be more economical, applications and networking were lacking, and data security was weak. Today, security is the remaining stumbling block, Earle says, though for that 10% above, data security is probably not crucial. Users are finally coming round to the idea that applications are more important than the hardware, he says, citing the UK supermarket chain, J Sainsbury & Co Plc, which took 10 months to decide that it would move to Unix, choosing its software before inviting firms to bid for the hardware contract.
