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Many retail (brick and mortar chains) use them extensively. Way back in the day, that was what you did when you wanted to process "big data" in the 80's and 90'
by coleca 11y ago
Many retail (brick and mortar chains) use them extensively. Way back in the day, that was what you did when you wanted to process "big data" in the 80's and 90's. Those systems became so ingrained into the business processes of the retailers that they are hard to remove.
I've seen some retailers in the North East try and "get off the mainframe" by moving to a modern ERP from Oracle or SAP only to have the projects fail after spending $250m-$500m and to this day they are still running 20-40 year old backend software for things like financials, pricing, payroll and merchandising. I've seen production COBOL code running that was authored in the late 70's.
- Spooky23 11y agoI was on the outskirts of a conversation where someone wanted to get away from the "inflexibility of the mainframe", so they were moving to SAP. I missed the rest of the conversation, because I was choking on my beer.
- nickpsecurity 11y agoLmao. I would've been to. Like with person you replied to, retail companies in my area still use mainframes, AS/400, and even IBM's DOS variant. Few people even understand fully how it works and they're not young people wanting a ton of change to happen. Improvements are incremental and stay within the terminal. However, they do use newer technologies on GUI's etc that integrate with their mainframe solutions. People often have to keep working with two, inconsistent systems at once, though.