The mainframe business may be slowly dying off, but it’s nowhere near dead yet.
Even as the enterprise market’s affinity for less-expensive servers grows stronger, some portions of it continue to use mainframes for mission-critical tasks. And as long as there’s still a decent market for mainframes, IBM will continue to cater to it.
To wit, the company’s announcement Tuesday of the latest member of the more than half-century-old mainframe line: The zEnterprise EC12. The product of some $1 billion in research and development spending over three years, the zEnterprise EC12 25 is said to offer 25 percent more performance and 50 percent more capacity, with the same energy footprint as its predecessor. And it has been designed to support data analytics and hybrid cloud computing. In short, it’s significantly more economically efficient and buzzword compatible.
That’s something that should appeal to IBM’s longtime mainframe customers, and hopefully some new ones, as well. The company’s mainframe revenue was down 11 percent the second quarter, and could certainly use a boost.
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