In the current global economy, the levels of competition are higher than ever.
In order to thrive; businesses should be innovating on a continual basis and IT systems need to be flexible enough to accommodate these rapid changes.
This is the word from Andy Hoiles, new workload leader for the Middle East and Africa at IBM Middle East. "With sprawling and complex IT infrastructure, many organisations struggle to implement new solutions to support new business opportunities in a timely and efficient manner," notes Hoiles, adding that this can affect their ability to achieve an accurate view of their customers and can be prevent them from delivering high quality service. This kind of infrastructure can also be expensive to maintain and the level of complexity increases security risks, he points out.
"Today, organisations are able to afford and purchase processing power that would have been unimaginable only 10 or 20 years ago," he says. But, says Hoiles, as IT infrastructures grow in size and complexity, these new solutions are often implemented on disparate platforms, each with its own silo of data, he continues.
While the mainframe has been around for half a century, new capabilities have been brought to the platform, to enhance its capability to centralise workloads and the associated data, he says, citing the move to run Linux on mainframe as an example of this adaptability.
In line with this, Hoiles argues that cloud technology actually began on the mainframe. "With industry leading virtualisation available from the early 1970s, it was possible to create 'cloud-like' environments, and many customers took advantage of this to deliver efficient services to their businesses and customers," states Hoiles. And by consolidating many workloads, the mainframe provides cloud capability within a single system. This is true for both private cloud environments and public cloud environments where many customers can be hosted securely on a single system, he points out.
As data expands at an alarming rate, Hoiles notes how conducting real-time analytics creates the highest levels of performance and fosters an environment that enables businesses to provide customer insight and improved support for decision making, he adds. "Mainframe technology has a heritage of processing very large datasets in a highly efficient manner."
Speaking to the differences between developing and developed economies, Hoiles believes that the requirements for effective IT in both types of economy are similar, but the starting point can be different. The level of investment in a countrywide infrastructure and the availability of fast and efficient wide area network connectivity can vary dramatically.
"In many African countries, mobile devices may provide the only access to services that in other economies would be provided by other means. So in an environment where mobile networks are predominant, and IT infrastructures less developed and more basic, the implementation of new solutions will differ," he notes.
And while some may understand that mainframe technology is only a viable business case for larger corporates, Hoiles asserts that the platform has been developed with both enterprise class and business class infrastructures in mind.
According to Hoiles, small to medium sized enterprises with limited IT operations and a lack of skilled resources can still take advantage of the cost-effective, secure and reliable cloud services running on mainframe technologies. "When all costs are taken into account, mainframe technologies can prove to be remarkably cost effective," he concludes.
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