The old and new worlds of information technology collided at the SHARE mainframe conference in Atlanta this week. Founded in 1955, SHARE bills itself as the oldest enterprise IT-centric user group on the planet – and from the buzz at the conference, many of the vendors as well as attendees have been in attendance for nearly that long.
Overall, however, the conference revealed a fault line of contradiction, as digital transformation-driven change breathed new life into many stories, while at the same time other vendors as well as attendees themselves languished in increasing irrelevance, as they remained content to focus on old ways of doing things.
Even well-known vendors like Oracle were content to pitch their tape storage technology – a remnant of Sun Microsystems’ acquisition of StorageTek in 2005, followed by Oracle’s acquisition of Sun in 2010. And Oracle wasn’t alone. Tape – yes, tape – was the talk at several vendors’ booths.
Various attempts to bring the mainframe into the 21st century were also on display, starting with Linux. The three primary flavors of Linux on the mainframe – Red Hat, SUSE, and Ubuntu – were all touting their wares, and IBM was hyping its all-Linux LinuxONE mainframe.
Yet, while some enterprises have achieved notable successes with Linux on mainframes, at SHARE the reaction to the open source operating system was mostly yawns, punctuated by occasional curiosity about whether this platform would be suitable for Blockchain deployments.
Read the entire article at http://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonbloomberg/2016/08/05/mainframes-at-the-crossroads-mainstream-or-irrelevant/.
Intellyx publishes the Agile Digital Transformation Roadmap poster, advises companies on their digital transformation initiatives, and helps vendors communicate their agility stories. As of the time of writing, CA Technologies and Compuware are an Intellyx customers. None of the other organizations mentioned in this article are Intellyx customers. Image credit: Jason Bloomberg.
