Mon, 18 January 2010
Technical and Economic Incentives Mount for Seeking Alternatives to Costly Mainframe Applications
A growing number of technical and economic incentives are mounting that make a strong case for modernizing and transforming enterprise mainframe applications -- and the aging infrastructure that support them. IT budget planners are using the strident economic environment to force a harder look at alternatives to inflexible and hard-to-manage legacy systems, especially as enterprises seek to cut their total and long-term IT operations spending. The rationale around reducing total costs is also forcing a recognition of the intrinsic difference between core applications and so-called context -- context being applications that are there for commodity productivity reasons, not for core innovation, customization or differentiation. With a commodity productivity application, the most effective delivery is on the lowest-cost platform or from a provider. The problem is that 20 or 30 years ago, people put everything on mainframes. They wrote it all in code. The challenge now is how to free up the applications that are not offering any differentiation -- and do not need to be on a mainframe -- and which could be running on a much more lower cost infrastructure, or come from a completely different means of delivery, such as software as a service (SaaS). There are demonstrably much less expensive ways of delivering such plain vanilla applications and services, and significant financial rewards for separating the core from the context in legacy enterprise implementations. This discussion is the third and final in a sponsored series that examines "Application Transformation: Getting to the Bottom Line." The series coincides with a trio of Hewlett-Packard (HP) virtual conferences on the same subject.
Access the regional Asia Pacific conference, the EMEA conference, or the Americas event.
Helping to examine how alternatives to mainframe computing can work, we're joined by John Pickett, worldwide mainframe modernization program manager at HP; Les Wilson, America's mainframe modernization director at HP, and Paul Evans, worldwide marketing lead on applications transformation at HP. The discussion is moderated by BriefingsDirect's Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions. Read a full transcript of the discussion or download a copy. Sponsor: HP.
Direct download: BriefingsDirect-Mainframe_Alternatives_v2.mp3
Category:podcasts -- posted at: 2:58pm EDT