Friday, December 2, 2011

IT's most wanted: Mainframe programmers

"As students study other technologies, vendors try to develop new talent and offer tools to fill the gap for these critical systems"

"Before tablets, smartphones, and PCs became prominent, "big iron" mainframes led down the path to computing, becoming a staple of enterprise business worldwide several decades ago.

"Rather than going the way of the dinosaur as PCs and the client/server model emerged, mainframes remain stalwarts in heavy-duty transactional applications. "The mainframe is alive and well and still powers the global economy," says Dayton Semerjian, general manager for mainframes at CA Technologies, which focuses on mainframe technologies. He notes that 80 percent of the Fortune 500 still use them.

"But many mainframe personnel are set to retire in coming years, and fewer students interested in learning how to work with these systems. That could lead to a skills shortage for managing and maintaining the mainframes that run so many critical applications.

"The mainframe's staying power in the age of tiny computers is all about its performance for high-volume transactions and its strengths in security and virtualization. The superiority of the platform "has remained unmatched," says Semerjian.
Mainframes are being used for core business processes within financial services, banking, and health care, says Paul Vallely, a sales director at Compuware, which offers mainframe applications. They also are becoming useful in cloud computing, he adds: "The mainframe is turning into a giant data server to be able to provide cloud applications with information they need."

"Mainframe skills are on the minds of enterprises. A Compuware survey of 520 CIOs in large enterprises found that 71 percent are concerned that this looming skills shortage will hurt their businesses, with applications and productivity at risk. After all, 78 percent said mainframe applications will remain a key business asset during the next decade. And the price for not having the right IT resources is huge: One minute of mainframe outages can cost nearly $14,000 in lost revenue for an average enterprise, Compuware said.
Compuware expects 40 percent of today's 2 million Cobol programmers -- a key segment of mainframe programmers -- to retire in the coming years. Rival CA Technologies concurs: "The pioneers of the mainframe are the Baby Boomers," says CA's Semerjian. "Starting this year, the Baby Boomers are going into retirement."

"Mainframes need programmers -- who are paid well

"Programming skills are vital to mainframes' continued use, Vallely notes, not just system skills, which are more available. "These mainframe apps have decades of modifications and complexities built into them" and need experienced programmers to keep running effectively. As a result, those willing to work on mainframes earn more than if they work with other platforms, he says..."

InfoWorld

1 comment:

  1. Currently I work for Dell and thought your article on virtualization is quite impressive. I think virtualization, in computing, is the creation of a virtual (rather than actual) version of something, such as a hardware platform, operating system, a storage device or network resources.

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