Programmers Quotes

IBM has an Academic Initiative Program to address the mainframe skills shortage. Many companies that use mainframes are recruiting college students and are building internship programs to add to their mainframe workforce. Companies can reach college professors who teach mainframes, using the Academic Initiative Program. The professors can identify those students who are good to become top-notch systems programmers and application developers.

Till date, more than 500 schools worldwide have leveraged the IBM Academic Initiative Program. IBM provides a list of schools teaching mainframes at http://www.ibm.com/university/systemz.

The IBM Academic Initiative Program also conducts regular Student Mainframe contests in more than 10 countries. In 2008, IBM added a System Z Mastery Test and a Student Opportunity System to connect students and employers.

Companies using mainframes can also invest to build “in-house” skills in operations staff and distributed staff on System Z. Some colleges like Marist College offer online programs for Z/OS. (http://www.idcp.org/learnzos)

Companies that have internship programs and are active on campuses where mainframes are taught can tide over the mainframe skills crunch period. Many baby-boomers with mainframe knowledge are slowly retiring from the job market. It will take some time for new interns to get up to the same skill level as that of the retiring baby boomers.

Many large banks, insurance companies, telecom companies and government organizations are currently using System Z and Z/OS. They are offering paid internship programs to build up their mainframe workforce. That is a good thing for the mainframe market.

Some mainframe customers are considering or are in the process of migration to open systems. They see a need to cut costs and be more agile by moving away from mainframes towards new trends like cloud computing and open systems. Mainframe migrations can happen in full or partial modes. Full mode refers to all the IT systems moving away from mainframes towards other computing architectures. Partial modes involve only non-critical IT functionality being offloaded to open systems and server virtualization technologies. Customers find that embracing open source can cut costs by at least 50%, at least for the non-critical functions of IT.

There is also a marked trend in enterprises that are considering migrating to cloud hosting and cloud computing for their hostable applications, and they want to evaluate SLA’s with the cloud computing vendors. But there are some issues that have been made out against the move to cloud computing. There is a case “against cloud computing” that has gained some popularity among CTO’s and CIO’s. The concerns that have been cited are legal and regulatory risks, lack of cost advantage, and that current enterprise apps cannot be conveniently migrated to the cloud and different cloud computing vendors seem to have their own preferences when it comes to cloud hosting. For example Google’s App Engine is strongly oriented towards Python-powered enterprise apps. Microsoft’s Azure is more for .NET enterprise apps.

HP has been an active player in trying to convince enterprises to move away from mainframes to Itanium powered SuperDomes. Meritz, a Korean insurer, recently moved from mainframes to SuperDomes. The estimates are that Meritz will save up to $15 million over a period of 5 years after the migration. The company has also derived savings from reduced hardware and software maintenance fees, and the lower cost for the hardware upgrades.

There are still challenges that remain in persuading existing mainframe users to move away from mainframes. These users will question any new decision that requires some IT expenses in these times of economic insecurity. They are also wary about making any decision that can potentially cause headaches and insecurity during the mainframe migration process. HP has a TCO tool that is being used to show these enterprises what are the potential savings that can arise due to the migration.