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Curt Schumacher has a three-year plan to migrate off the mainframes at the Chicago Board of Exchange.

He’s had this three-year plan since 1993.

Schumacher is vice president of systems operations for the Chicago Board of Exchange (CBOE), an options trading exchange. As such, he is in charge of all of the infrastructure that keeps the Exchange’s systems running around the clock. The CBOE has made all sorts of upgrades and changes in its computing architecture since 1993, but still those three big Amdahl processors keep plugging away at the heart of the company’s core trading system. "I still state that in three

years we want to be off of these systems," Schumacher says, "but it always comes back to the old disciplines of the data center and its reliability."

Reliability, uptime, data integrity—those are the key strengths of that least cool of all computing platforms, the mainframe. And that’s the principal reason why many CIOs are standing in Schumacher’s shoes, keeping their big iron dinosaurs alive no matter how many Unix and Windows NT mammals are scurrying about underfoot. Even so, various wags and pundits have continued to shovel dirt on the mainframe’s grave for years. To pick one recent example, The Robert Frances Group, a Westport, Conn.-based research house, issued a "Duel for Data Center Dominance" report last May that trumpeted IBM’s loss of market share to big Unix vendors Sun and Hewlett-Packard.

IBM has renamed and rearchitected the mainframe and its operating system several times in an attempt to stem the tide—most recently announcing its next generation as z/OS running on the z900 platform. All well and good, but if the declining sales of IBM’s mainframes (and Amdahl’s and Hitachi’s withdrawal from the market) are any indicator, the tide hasn’t turned—yet.

After all, the Chicago Board of Exchange fits the profile of the classic mainframe holdouts: financial companies, airlines, telecoms. And even in these industries, mainframe users have yet to overcome two key obstacles—outrageous software licensing costs and staffing difficulties. But despite these challenges, other businesses might do well to reexamine the potential benefits of having a highly reliable, mature computing platform anchoring their e-commerce systems in the age of Internet availability demands. After all, if you’re in a new-economy gunfight, you should carry a big gun.