Weigh In

Mainframes Under Fire

Demonstrating big business value from the big box.

By Ralph Crosby, CTO at BMC Software

June 04, 2007 — CIO — As an IT professional responsible for your organization's mainframe computers, you've built an extremely reliable, high-performing, and secure computing environment. While your staff or your colleagues are wrestling with deploying ITIL processes on the distributed side of the IT infrastructure, you've already got mature, stable management processes in place on your mainframe.

Congratulations. Unfortunately, this is no longer enough.

Ultimately, business users and application owners don't care how good mainframe performance is or if you are meeting your component-level SLAs. They just want to receive the IT service levels they are paying for, which power the applications their work depends upon.

Ultimately, senior management doesn't care how efficient mainframe IT operations are. The mainframe—in fact, all of IT—is still largely perceived as a cost center where every dollar spent erodes profitability. Mainframes are perceived as expensive to buy, expensive to operate and not viable as a development platform for new applications. Although these perceptions are largely inaccurate, the result is that the biggest challenge to your mainframe in many organizations won't be automation, but attitude.

It really shouldn't be this way. The mainframe remains the workhorse for business around the globe. Mainframes are instrumental in processing most of the transactions, housing much of the data and running many of the applications that power today's companies. Mainframes are also unequaled in terms of availability, reliability and security, particularly when compared with distributed systems. And, they typically have mature management processes.

Taken together, these attributes make mainframes a formidable weapon for businesses whose IT infrastructures are a point of competitive differentiation.

To defend and retain these valuable mainframe resources, IT professionals need to continually improve—and prove—the business contribution of their mainframes. The good news is, with the right management processes and technologies, you can not only achieve this, but you can bring the mainframe back into the mainstream in almost any organization.

Agility, Continuity and Business Relevance
What you really want to accomplish boils down to three simple goals. With these, you can help ensure that your mainframe is recognized as a cost-effective, efficient platform capable of handling the demands of an increasingly complex IT environment:

Improve the business agility of your mainframe, by making those who support it more productive and interchangeable.
Improve continuity, by providing higher business and application service levels from all IT infrastructure components.
Improve the perceived business relevance of the mainframe, by managing it as part of a global IT infrastructure.

By doing these things, you can extend your mainframe's assets across the enterprise, to the direct benefit of customers and senior management. That's a competitive advantage. Without such a strategy, senior management and business users will likely continue to view your mainframe as a very expensive commodity.