Mainframes continue to be favored for mission critical computing Date:   Sunday , December 04, 2011 Almost as old as four decades old, Mainframes continue to be a ubiquitous choice of technology platform for companies that work on mission critical business process. Today, at a global level, IBM and Unisys are the only two major players holding a strong grip on the mainframes market. Jim Thompson, VP- Engineering & CTO for TCIS, Unisys’ Technology Division in an exclusive interview talks about evolution of Mainframes, its adoption in today’s market and efforts with in Unisys’s to take it across different user segments. How has mainframes evolved in the last few decades? ‘Mainframes’ comes from a terminology that was used to describe how computers were built in earlier days but later in the 60s and 70s it became synonymous to the complexity of technology involved in the types of computers used for business process. Mainframes today is very much alive, and is the core of every business process that people use today, be it smartphones, emails, travel transportation and more. Why is Mainframes preferred for mission critical business process? We refer to Mainframes as a class of computing rather than a type of system. They are known for their ability to rapidly scale for large complex computing needs. Also, security is synonymous to mainframes and hence it is the reason that financial institutions, government organizations, airports and may others depend on mainframes as a choice of computing. Mainframes remain dedicated to providing a secure, scalable, reliable processing environment. CIOs realize the potential of mainframes, especially those who are in the financial industry and many more are migrating to it. What is Unisys doing in this segment? We have a strong hold on the mainframes business and doing a lot to leverage it. We continue to bring in new technologies such as cloud computing, mobility, virtualization and leverage mainframes with it. Clearpath Dorado and Libra are our offerings for our customers using mainframes. The Clearpath mainframe sales growth has been excellent for the past two years. Clearpath Dorado mainframes have long been a favorite of the airline, defence and aerospace industries. Around a third of all airline reservations and cargo are processed on Dorado mainframes. Telecommunications and banking industries have preferred the ClearPath Libra. We have expanded Clearpath functionality using specialty processors for niche workloads. Clearpath operating systems transparently offload eligible processing to these external appliances. Speciality processors available include cryptographic processing, and Java and Web enablement. At Unisys, we have attempted to reduce the TCO of our Clearpath mainframes. Hardware costs continue to decrease as processing power increases. Electrical, cooling and space requirements also continue to decrease. In fact we estimate that the power and footprint of our large-scale systems has halved every two years for the past six. Unisys has also followed IBMs Sub-Capacity Pricing idea. Metering functionality allows customers to pay for what they use, not the size of the machine. These technological advances seem to be paying off. Sales are strong, and there have been no migrations away from Clearpath in the Asia-Pacific region over the last few years. At the end of the day, the key is to stay agile and be up to date to market needs but at the same time staying true to the fundamentals that mainframe is built on.