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They are mostly selling to the captive audience who is 40 years deep into COBOL and can't pull out until it falls on top of them.
by Muromec 2y ago
They are mostly selling to the captive audience who is 40 years deep into COBOL and can't pull out until it falls on top of them.
- feurio 2y agoWell, you know what to do - just sell a system that runs COBOL on an x86 cluster or Kubernetes or whatever, and you'll make billions! Be sure to allocate me a bunch of shares for giving you the idea.
- pjmlp 2y agoMany of those machines are running Java workloads, also COBOL isn't the only mainframe language, and the best thing in terms of security is that they don't use C as systems language, rather saner stuff with proper arrays, strings and bounds checking. That is why Unisys ClearPath MCP is still a thing, tracing back to its Burroughs 1961 heritage, security above all.
- rbanffy 2y agoJava workloads might be easier to port away from but aren’t MCP machines x86-based nowadays? Unisys did a ton of work for Microsoft making itself obsolete by adding a lot to their secret multiprocessor stuff to Windows. It’s amazing how Microsoft convinced so many companies to shoot their feet.
- rbanffy 2y agoNot just COBOL, but also CICS, IMS, Java, and DB2 (although the last two are easier to migrate away from).
- SideQuark 2y agoThat's demonstrably untrue. The "mostly" audience you made up is a shrinking set, and the sales of huge mainframes has CAGR more than PCs. If your claim were true the sales numbers for these mainframes would not be what they are. This is an expanding market, due to the needs for more and larger and faster data processing uses for new tech, new markets, new transactions, new capabilities.