I agree with the parent post in that it's mostly marketing. There was nothing preventing you from calling back and forth from cloud services on your mainframe b

I agree with the parent post in that it's mostly marketing. There was nothing preventing you from calling back and forth from cloud services on your mainframe before the recent marketing shift to "hybrid cloud". Hybrid cloud is a meaningless term on a technical level, but I guess for buisness people it means you can buy a new mainframe and that won't stop you from delivering "cloud" or whatever other initiative the suits have budgeted for. So yes, its laughable to hear that kind of marketing if you are technical. But for the kinds of large organizations that would potentially be buying a new mainframe, its what you need to get this sort of thing budgeted. Certainly the IBM systems group didn't come up it. They know just as well as the people trying to upgrade their mainframes that it's an on-premises strategy primarily intended for line of business applications with reasonably well understood resource utilization.