After 23 years of operation, IBM’s Transaction Processing Facility, TPF, suddenly flagged back in 1984 as a strategic product for others than airlines that couldn’t manage without it, is now losing favour with its users. The former Airline Control Program, Computerwoche reports, can process up to 2,000 transactions per second. But, who wants to use the fastest transaction rates when the price is too high and only a few programmers are able to work with the system? According to an estimate by the Framingham, Massachusetts-based market research company International Data Corp, there are around 250 to 300 Transaction Processing Facility licences held worldwide, but that doesn’t say anything about the large number of end users worldwide that work with the system. Transaction Processing Facility’s distribution is well documented – the system is installed wherever the processing of many simple transactions per second is required. Customers include Visa International, American Airlines and the United Airlines Covia system. But now major users – such as Bank of America – are breaking away from their long tradition of using the IBM facility, partly because they are sick of the high costs, and partly also because of the lack of competent personnel. Only 8,000 developers worldwide can program the Transaction Processing Facility – 10% to 15% too few to meet today’s demand. New technology being developed by competitors such as Tandem Computers Inc is now beginning to threaten IBM’s hegemony: Tandem is putting up its topo-end NonStop Cyclone as competition. Even IBM itself is contributing to the decline of its Transaction Processing Facility with its new Summit computers, which are claimed to enable the DB2 relational database to run 25% to 50% faster. The CICS transaction monitor and the IMS database system also run considerably faster under MVS/ESA. With these changes, most companies will soon no longer require Transaction Processing Facility, although this may not be so immediately true for the biggest airline reservation systems, which have an enormous software investment tied up in TPF.
