Doing More With the Mainframe

CA's Dayton Semerjian explains the role of the mainframe and reveals how to make the platform the most innovative in the organization.

Leaders have a lot on their plates. There are always new technologies and strategies proposed to deliver innovative solutions to complex IT problems. The challenges of newer regulatory regimes have further compounded the technological and budget conundrums. However, the fundamental challenge of trying to balance existing commitments with the need to deliver innovation to the business is particularly vexing. In fact, after discussing this topic with many technology executives, we found that many organizations spend about 80 percent of their resources on basic core operations. The 20 percent balance is spent on delivering innovation. The challenge then becomes one of bending the operations-innovation curve to actually do more with less.

Fundamentally, we can apply a few simple rules to help us bend the cost-investment.  We believe that a focus on delivering incremental efficiency improvements on the operations side can free up significant amounts of investment for innovation. For example, a five percent decrease of operational expenditures yields a 20 percent increase on the innovation side of that same ledger. Said more succinctly, small improvements in operational efficiency can free up significant amounts of monies for the innovation. The first thing to examine is the fundamentals - do we have the right pieces in place? The answer, of course, is 'it depends'.  However, there are some core attributes that are necessary in terms of making sure that the portfolio of technologies does indeed deliver business critical functions and services well.  

Today there is only one platform that has these attributes and delivers on the key needs, the mainframe. This explains why over 70 percent of the world's business data still resides on mainframes and why, contrary to the decades of predictions by pundits, the platform continues as the main workhorse for a very large proportion of the world's largest and most successful organizations. For many business leaders, the idea of doing more with the mainframe is not surprising, but they have been looking for solutions to three issues, and recently the market has responded with exciting new ways to address them.

The first issue has been one of cost  - or at least perceived cost. While on a cost per transaction level it outperforms all other choices, the feeling has always been that there must be a continual flow of new ways to make it even more cost effective. The second issue has been the need to rejuvenate the workforce. Despite huge growth in transaction workloads many organizations essentially have had the same very experienced, relatively unchanged mainframe staff managing it all, due to mainframe's incredible performance over multiple decades. But what happens when the staff starts to retire, who will run it next?

The third issue is one of agility. How can the mainframe be used for both new and existing work, more flexibly than ever before, but continue to deliver in terms of reliability, security and performance?

It turns out that all of these issues have a similar root cause, the level of complexity of the platform. By driving down this complexity and, at the same time, introducing the most advanced industrial design and IT management methodologies, it is possible to turn the mainframe into the most innovative platform in an organization. Further, it is also possible to make it easy and exciting to use, by all levels of IT staff working across an organization, to flexibly deliver more services for less cost. We call this strategy Mainframe 2.0 and it is changing the way the mainframe is managed.

Mainframe 2.0 has been delivering real value for the last year, and in May 2010 a whole new range of innovative additions to this strategy will be announced. To hear the details for yourself, come and join me and my team at CA World (www.caworld.com) or join us virtually at our month long mainframe event called May Mainframe Madness (www.ca.com/mmm).

Seven key attributes of highly effective IT

1. IT must be reliable. For core business functions, no unscheduled downtime is acceptable. The common goal that is discussed is uptime of 99.999 percent or 'five nines'.

2. IT systems need to be able to deal with changes in workload without failing or requiring significant additional resources.

3. The environment must be demonstrably secure.

4. IT must use as little power and cooling as possible.

5. The holistic cost of running the system must be manageable and capable of continuous improvement.

6. I must be able to manage the environment without incurring the expense of an ever-expanding hardware footprint. To accomplish this, the ability to support virtualization models that can enable fast and flexible service delivery is critical.

7. Finally, the systems must not only support continuous improvement programs, but must do so without requiring massive shifts or rip and replace models - in short, the technology must be highly leverageable.

As Corporate Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Mainframe Business Unit, Dayton Semerjian is responsible for leading strategy and driving innovation and execution across CA's market leading mainframe product portfolio.