IBM: Long Live the Mainframe

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IBM
says the mainframe is back–if it ever left at all.

IBM
announced 3Q 2010 net income of $3.6 billion, compared with $3.2
billion for 3Q 2009, an increase of 12 percent driven by
significant increases in systems and technology sales and IBM services as well
as a boost in growth markets.

Mark
Loughridge, IBM’s senior vice president and chief financial officer for finance
and transformation, said IBM’s Systems and Technology Group (STG) had its best
quarter in six years. Revenues from IBM’s Systems and Technology segment
totaled $4.3 billion for the quarter, up 10 percent from the third quarter of
2009. Systems and Technology pretax income was $327 million, an increase of 46
percent. Systems revenues increased 8 percent. Revenues from System x increased
30 percent. Revenues from System z mainframe server products increased 15
percent compared with the year-ago period. Total delivery of System z computing
power, as measured in MIPS (millions of instructions per second), increased 54
percent.

Tom Rosamilia, general manager for Power and z System
technologies in IBM’s Systems and Technology Group says the key factor leading to this
growth was the launch of the new IBM
zEnterprise System
, which shipped in the third quarter. "This growth makes it
one of the most successful mainframe introductions in recent years," says Rosamilla. "We also saw
strong growth of mainframes in emerging markets."

He adds, "The new zEnterprise System represents more than $1.5 billion in IBM research
and development and more than three years of collaboration with some of IBM’s
top clients. It’s the most powerful IBM system ever and represents a radical
redesign in its ability to allow workloads on mainframe, Power 7 and System x
servers to share resources and be managed as a single, virtualized system. That
is critical as customers struggle with integrating their data centers."

For more, read the eWeek article IBM: The Mainframe is Back, Baby.

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