Mainframe Survey: IT Costs A Concern

Respondents to BMC Software’s Sixth Annual Worldwide Mainframe Survey showed the mainframe’s importance in driving business applications and services and that the mainframe continues to be a critical platform for the evolving hybrid datacentre.

Top-level results from the survey include:

• 93 percent of respondents at large companies expect capacity to grow or remain steady;

• 62 percent, compared to 56 percent last year, expect to grow overall capacity;

• 47 percent of respondents said new workloads and new business applications are contributing to their capacity growth; and

• 60 percent of respondents said the top IT priority is keeping costs down.

In today’s enterprise, the need for IT flexibility is more crucial than ever as companies are using mainframes, distributed systems, cloud environments and more to run their IT operations. These survey results show that companies are still heavily committed to the mainframe and continue to look for new ways to integrate the mainframe into their future datacentres.

The Future Of The Mainframe

The BMC mainframe survey has showcased the continued need for the mainframe in today’s business, yet, as with the rest of the IT world, the mainframe is not immune to the changing nature of IT.

“The mainframe’s continuing growth demonstrates that the platform remains the first and best choice for secure, reliable, high volume computing,” said Rich Ptak, Principal Analyst- Ptak, Noel & Associates. “However, it’s the ability to smoothly integrate mainframe reliability, security, capacity and proven business value into a hybrid datacentre or company’s cloud strategy that will make it the key differentiator for IT organisations in the future.”

“We continue to see an increased demand for capacity, workload and availability in our mainframe environment as the need for data and business applications continues to grow in our business,” said Ing. Gerald Böhm, Group Leader System Engineering Competence Centre Linz at Drei Banken EDV, an Austrian bank. “As the mainframe demand continues to expand we are also seeing the platform play a more dominant role in our hybrid datacentre to help aid in delivering the business services that our customers and company expects.”

In this year’s mainframe industry survey, respondents indicated that they are starting to take notice of important IT trends, such as cloud and mobile computing.

When asked about important concepts to the future of datacentres and the mainframe, 55 percent said private cloud support was an important concept to understand for the future of the datacentre and then 60 percent of those respondents said it was important to the mainframe. As well, 31 percent of respondents noted that mobile device support (smartphone or tablet) was an important expectation for accessing the mainframe.

These results show that mainframe users understand the importance of keeping the mainframe involved in the active IT discussion about the future datacentre.

Cross-Enterprise Support And The Hybrid Datacentre

As the mainframe grows within the hybrid datacentre, respondents to the survey said that the ability to simplify the management across the enterprise with unified solutions is important.

64 percent of respondents cited unified tools for monitoring and managing events across mainframe and distributed systems as either important or critically important. And 61 percent and 55 percent say the same thing about change management and workload management, respectively.

High IT Costs Still A Concern

With IT organisations expecting growth in their capacity and mainframe processing in the coming year, the need to keep IT costs down continues to be an area of focus. IT organisations continue to look at specialty engines, to reduce the mainframe usage cost. zIIPs were used by 57 percent of the respondents in the survey with 55 percent of respondents having installed one or more zIIP engines in the last year.

Mainframe Survey Background

More than 1,300 global mainframe users participated in the BMC survey, now in its sixth consecutive year. More than half of companies (52 percent) surveyed have revenues in excess of $1 billion. The survey pool was comprehensive and definitive and included pre-qualified respondents from across the mainframe industry. Participants provided insight into questions focused on the current and future state of the mainframe. Responses were then analysed using standard statistical practices.