Smaller chips, smaller servers, smaller datacenters, smaller world…
IBM wants you to forget about all that. If you’ve had your ear to
IBM’s train tracks, you’ve heard the message too… Big is the New Small.
So, when the world is all about blade servers and you want to shift a
little love to your system z9 and zSeries mainframe servers, what do
you do?
- Make Big = Easy. Mainframes have always been
considered cumbersome, complex and difficult to use. IBM is investing
$100 million over five years to make the systems and the z/OS easier to
work with. Implementation and administration is expected to become much
less complex.
- Understand that students shall inherit the Datacenter.Today’s
IT students will be tomorrow’s IT decision makers. IBM realizes this
and has taken some smart measures in involving them in zSeries mainframe
learning.
Evidence of IBM’s Youth Movement
- zNextGen Initiative
- Photos of IBM’s new faces in zSeries technology…
- Master the Mainframe Contest
- Big Iron Poetry Collection (Mainframe Haikus)
- Personal Ads in Student Newspapers
A couple of highlights here are the zNextGen Initiative and the Master the Mainframe contest.
In their quest to add 20,000 new IBM Mainframe Experts, they’ve launched a program called zNextGen in cooperation with the SHARE user
community. Many of the old grey-bearded mainframe wizards are nearing
retirement and IBM hopes this user community will pass on some wisdom to
the new generation.
The Master the Mainframe Contest has been a big success for IBM with
over 700 participants in their first attempt. The contest is offered to
technology students who (preferably) haven’t programmed on a mainframe
before. There are nice prizes, including the obligatory iPod and a very
sweet t-shirt (with the slogan “Mainframes do IT 24/7?).
I think that Seth Godin, author of Small is the New Big, would agree
that IBM has been acting like a small, innovative business here in order
to make big the new small.
- PR that Big Iron. IBM’s PR machine is a sight to behold. Do a search for “IBM mainframe” at Google News
and you’ll see the topic in numerous publications, always with the
story framed on around IBM’s attempts to develop the mainframe and its
future admins.
———————————————————————————————-
I thought they were gone
Today, I learned they were not
Mainframes are quite cool
–Matthew Scouten, Marist College
So, will the mainframe survive?
IBM is doing its darndest to capture mindshare and young minds in
order to make it so, but time will tell. Small is a pretty cool concept,
too.