zEnterprise Should Change The Role Of The Mainframe In Application Strategy Decisions

On July 22, 2010, IBM released a series of product announcements under the banner of zEnterprise that will force firms with both mainframe and distributed systems to rethink their application strategies. The announcement heralds a vastly improved z server (z196) combined with a zBladeCenter Extension (zBX) tied together via private data networks and managed by a single point of control. Why do application professionals care? zEnterprise is a big leap forward in simplicity for applications running on multiplatform environments. Rather than using a brittle maze of connections across myriad vendors, zEnterprise provides a pre-integrated multiplatform application environment. We expect synergistic offerings from IBM Tivoli and IBM Rational as well as from BMC Software (BMC), CA Technologies, Compuware, and others to further enrich this offering — the first zEnterprise announcement is only the beginning of the story.