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Microsoft’s Mainframe Obsession
Why is Microsoft so interested in mainframes?
Microsoft’s name popped up on a few occasions in my article published Monday about I.B.M.’s moves over the last couple of years to keep tight control over the mainframe computer market. As it turns out, Microsoft paid for a study about servers that can emulate mainframes, financed two mainframe emulation companies suing I.B.M on antitrust grounds and sponsored a trade group critical of I.B.M.’s decision to buy its most significant competitor in the mainframe market.
In the past, Microsoft has also enjoyed a cozy relationship with the SCO Group, which has sued I.B.M.
Meanwhile, I.B.M. has maneuvered in the background, supporting organizations critical of Microsoft’s practices during antitrust proceedings in Europe.
At the rawest level, Microsoft and I.B.M. seem intent on stoking the antitrust fires against each other, perhaps viewing long-term legal cases as a nice way to distract a rival.
They, however, also seem to be battling over who owns the most prized customer data.
Often ridiculed as the dinosaurs of computing, mainframes continue to maintain a prominent spot in data centers around the globe. I.B.M. has a direct link to the most important data of the world’s biggest companies and can get their attention as a result.
It’s taken years for Microsoft to work its way up from the desktop to the data center, but the company seems to think it’s ready for a crack at that precious data now. The systems once sold by start-up Platform Solutions, for example, would run mainframe software and Windows Server on the same computer.
The Platform engineers had also built technology that would offload some mainframe jobs like encryption and data analysis onto separate machines such as x86-based servers or even machines using I.B.M.’s Cell chip. The idea was to speed up these jobs with more modern hardware and to create a path between industry-standard servers and mainframes.
Such technology could well appear in new mainframe systems due to arrive in late 2010 or early 2011, according to numerous people interviewed for my story.
So, it looks like I.B.M. is working on technology that brings even more data toward the mainframe rather than letting it escape off to industry-standard systems. And with no mainframe emulation companies left, Microsoft and others don’t have an answer to that.
Should I.B.M.’s acquisition of Sun Microsystems go through, it would seem I.B.M. could whip out its mainframe playbook and use that to solidify control of the Unix server market as well.
The Unix server business is often ridiculed as a slowly dying part of the market, and one that requires a devastating amount of investment to maintain. That’s pretty much how people described the mainframe market in the late 1990s when I.B.M.’s rivals gave up on the technology. Today, I.B.M.’s mainframe business is a profit machine.
Ten years from now, I.B.M. may well be laughing all the way to the bank as it sells high-profit software and servers around its dinosaur Unix systems.
source: NYTimes
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