
Why IBM is in trouble with the antitrust police - pospischil
http://www.fakesteve.net/2009/10/why-ibm-is-in-trouble-with-antitrust.html
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pospischil
My company's clients are all big banks...and when you get into these places,
you wonder, why on earth are they still running on that system? (especially
when you are trying to interface with them).

I don't know how true this article is, but it makes sense from where I'm
sitting.

Anyone know how much truth there is to this? Curious to hear the experiences
of those who may work more closely with these mainframes...

~~~
tom_b
I know that IBM is masterful at bundling software or selling its customer base
enterprise software licenses. When I worked there, my division could trace a
huge piece of its revenues (and profit) to a mainframe monitoring app that
basically had no competitors. All the divisions other stuff got thrown in
basically for free. Thus the idea of the "IBM shop" - customers who were big
blue all the way. "No one ever got fired for buying IBM."

I don't know about the difficulty of migration - what I always understood (and
I later worked at one of the largest financial institutions in the US) was
there was tremendous investment by the companies running on mainframes in the
software developed to run on mainframes. And that these companies weren't
interested in migrating to newer hardware/software combos because it was kind
of murky if the cost effectiveness of such a move could be reasoned about.

These are also the types of companies least interested in losing control of
their data. They aren't interested in the cloud for even their non-mainframe
apps. To be fair, the financial company I was at maintained its own data
centers, so it might be too atypical to draw any meaningful conclusions from
my experience there.

