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To: Mary Cluney who wrote (70365)	12/30/1998 4:27:00 PM
From: John Koligman	Respond to of 186894

Hello Mary, Actually, I believe Tony is a hardware guy, I'm an ex-MVS internals guy... As for what the machines are used for, it really runs the gamut. Boeing designed the 777 on them. Banks run ATM networks using them. Large databases reside on these machines, using IMS and DB2 (IBM database products). RBOC's use them for billing and customer service. Airlines use them for reservation systems. And on it goes. Walmart is a large IBM shop. So is Charles Schwab, ML, and quite a few others. I've talked about it before, but most of these large shops are 'crazed' about uptime. They don't like it at all when their key systems are down. The Japanese are famous for having to apologize to their customers by placing the apology in the newspaper when their systems (such as ATMs) are down more than a preset amount of time. The other thing is, S/390 I/O is quite different than the PC world, specifically I'm talking about the channel subsystem. This architecture allows dedicated I/O processors to handle the I/O load, and allows for connection of thousands of devices through control units and ESCON directors via fiber optics. IBM is also positioning these S/390 CMOS boxes as 'super servers'. Notice they don't ship MVS anymore, it's 'OS/390'. The boxes themselves are called servers. As the net grows and becomes more critical to corporate operations, these 'RAS rich' boxes have a good shot at being around for a long time to come. I'm sure Tony can add many good comments from a hardware perspective. Regards, John

To: Mary Cluney who wrote (70365)	12/30/1998 6:04:00 PM
From: Ann Janssen	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 186894

Hi Mary, Here's an article I read last night that may shed some light on the Mainframe -vs- Micro world (ok there I go showing my age again <gg>). The bolding is mine, there are many factors but no one can deny that Reliability is a big part of the picture along with speed of course. What I mean by reliability is your system is secure and available, it's a real drag when you can't get your credit card to authorize because a system is down. Here is a great site for acronyms too. They even have my personal favorite ROFLMAO. :-)) ucc.ie Have a great evening!! Take Care Ann ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Why the Internet Is Boosting IBM's Mainframe Sales 1999--The Year of the Mainframe? David Kirkpatrick IBM is betting that the Internet will boost its once-waning technology: the mainframe. The company's CICS mainframe software (pronounced "kicks")--which manages transactions like selling and shipping products, billing customers, and trading stocks--is the most powerful and profitable in its class. As Internet standards are adopted by businesses, the number of these electronic transactions is exploding, and a variety of different computers is required to execute them. CICS, an applications server, synchronizes these processes so nothing goes wrong. "We see a trend to move applications back onto the mainframe because it is more cost-effective," says Rob Lamb, a senior manager at IBM overseeing CICS. IBM is aggressively marketing the 29-year-old CICS, trying to convince customers that it is a key technology for the Internet. The push makes sense: Sales of CICS help IBM pull in billions of dollars of revenue in hardware, additional software, and outsourcing and maintenance services. In the short term this seems like a great play. Lamb and IBM marketing manager Neil McHugh say that sales of CICS on mainframes exceed $800 million annually and are growing at a rate of 13% to 14%. Sales of applications servers that work with nonmainframe computers are less than half those of CICS alone. That includes systems that work with Microsoft's Windows NT software and Unix operating systems like Sun Microsystems' Solaris. Lamb and McHugh scoff at the competition, saying that CICS is the only program that provides the kind of reliability Fortune 500 companies insist on. McHugh calls it "amusing" that Microsoft's Windows NT operating system gets so much press, since it can't handle as many users. "[Microsoft] hopes to be able to scale to 1,400 concurrent users in 1999, while we today handle 250,000 at a time," says Lamb. The duo brag that Charles Schwab uses CICS for its stock-trading Website, which handles more transactions than any other on the Internet. But much of the rest of the industry is skeptical of the long-term viability of CICS, saying it's based on an antiquated model. While CICS shows healthy growth, sales for other applications servers are growing at a much faster pace. "We don't believe that transactional capabilities should only be the domain of horrendously expensive mainframe systems," says Vic Gundotra, a Microsoft manager who works with developers who build products to work on NT. Even Gartner analyst Yefim Natis, a fan of CICS, sees sales eventually slowing, since IBM isn't attracting new customers, just outfitting current ones with expensive upgrades. He expects customers to increasingly combine CICS with other applications servers. If this prognosis is true, CICS may not be a long-term bet. Says Bill Coleman, CEO of BEA Systems, a competitor that sells applications servers for NT and Unix: "It's like somebody in 1905 saying if we just put 20 horses in front of this wagon it will beat your car forever." CICS may be a dinosaur, but it remains a lucrative one for IBM. Vol. 139, No. 1, January 11, 1999 pathfinder.com

To: Mary Cluney who wrote (70365)	12/30/1998 7:23:00 PM
From: John Koligman	Respond to of 186894

Mary - I copied this quote out of the latest issue of Forbes - I really think it says it all in a nutshell. It is conceivable in critical corporate operations that the cost of a couple of system outages may far outweigh savings in buying cheaper hardware/software packages. I remember occasions where a brokerage firm would provide figures to us on what a half hour outage cost them at a critical time of day... "As more companies get into electronic commerce, they're going to need reliable computer systems of the kind supplied by companies like IBM and Sun. If you're Dell and you're doing $10 million a day in Internet sales, losing a half-hour means losing a half-million dollars." –Carl Howe of Forrester Re Regards, John