> Could IBM turn itself into a generic tech consultancy?
Not that anyone necessarily cares, per se, but if they do this, what happens to the companies invested in platforms like System z that only IBM can really support? Does "generic tech consultancy" include developing and supporting proprietary hardware and software?
Enter the multitude of companies whose entire business model is selling products that emulate IBM platforms on top of commodity UNIX hardware and RDBMS.
> Enter the multitude of companies whose entire business model is selling products that emulate IBM platforms on top of commodity UNIX hardware and RDBMS.
As I understand it, the big selling point of Big Iron has always been the idea that it's more stable at the hardware level than other kinds of computer. Is that actually true? If it is, can a company get similar uptime with non-Big Iron hardware? Because it seems like that would be a hard prerequisite for replacing those systems.
If that were still true I don't think virtualization would have caught on to the extent that it has. I work in a pretty conservative business that used to run everything on IBM and then HP mainframes but has since migrated to commodity x86 hardware running VMWare. Downtimes do happen but modern monitoring and deployment processes can address them quickly and cheaply.
Not that anyone necessarily cares, per se, but if they do this, what happens to the companies invested in platforms like System z that only IBM can really support? Does "generic tech consultancy" include developing and supporting proprietary hardware and software?