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They have ironclad contracts with the DoD and other government organizations, and with the way those processes work if every person from the president to the pe
by gustavus 3y ago
They have ironclad contracts with the DoD and other government organizations, and with the way those processes work if every person from the president to the peon decided they wanted to move everything off of IBM and were going to move heaven and earth to do it. They wouldn't even be able to start entertaining bids from other competitors until 2035.
Beyond this IBM's core competency is winning government contracts, a niche very few other people have the desire or the resources, or the proper understanding of the necronomicon to enter.
- xyst 3y agoNow that you mention it. Isn’t the brand new FedNow program built using mainframe tech? Shit man, IBM will live on for centuries (assuming we get that far)
- throwawayForMe2 3y agoThe FRB moved the last of its major services off of the mainframe around 2017 I believe. It does use MQ as an interface.
- mhh__ 3y agoMainframes are technologically pretty interesting just wrapped in IBM poison
- rbanffy 3y agoYou are not forced to use the "poison" - you can get them as LinuxONE machines and run everything on top of a very thin hypervisor (which is necessary, since nothing runs on bare metal on the newer machines).
- mhh__ 3y agoAm I not then throwing away all the cool stuff that makes them unique? The poison I'm referring to is the IBM bean counters and lock-in not the software
- rbanffy 3y agoAFAIK, the LinuxONE boxes come without lock-in - what you pay for is what you get and there aren't any monthly subscriptions as there are with z/OS and the various pay-as-you-go features (besides, of course, the maintenance contract you WILL want to have for a multi-million dollar machine that uses mostly bespoke hardware). Am I wrong?
- bluedevil2k 3y agoDon’t dismiss the possibility of IBM getting bought out for those easy cash flow government contracts. Someone like Amazon or Oracle could potentially goggle them up in 5-7 years when their stock price grows and IBM’s stagnates or drops.
- cj 3y agoI have a feeling US regulators wouldn't look too favorably on any IaaS mergers. Not to say it couldn't be done, but there would most likely be pretty high regulatory hurdles if any 2 major public cloud providers propose a merger or buy out