Key Features of zEnterprise EC12

• World’s fastest chip 5.5 GHz
• Improved availability and security
• Around 120 processors running at 5.5 GHz
• Capacity to scale up to 78,000 MIPS
• Crypto Express 4S Tamper resistant cryptographic co-processor providing data privacy
• Provide support for high quality digital signatures
• First IBM Mainframe to accommodate solid state technology with Flash Express
• First high end Mainframe which can run without a raised data center floor
• Ability to run integrated and dynamic workloads with zEnterprise BladeCenter Extension (zBX)

The new Mainframe possesses several additional features and capabilities. IBM has introduced new technologies IBM zAware and Flash Express in zEC12, bringing in greater manageability and improved availability for enterprise computing environments. zEnterprise EC12 is designed for EAL5+ certification capable of providing greater protection for confidential data even when it is kept in disparate applications. In zEC12, IBM has incorporated the transactional memory technology, which was used in making Blue Gene Supercomputer.

The zEnterprise EC12, has strengthened the traditional Mainframe capabilities of reliability and security in handling large volumes of transactions in enterprise data centres. Moreover, with the new Mainframe, IBM aims to improve customer service, enabling continuous availability for critical transaction processing and ensuring security with cross platform or cross industry cryptography capabilities. With its total performance improvement, enterprises can use the zEC12 to consolidate more workload and free up resources for new services. A single zEC12 can encompass the capacity of an entire multi-platform data center. Customers can consolidate thousands of distributed systems into Linux on zEC12 which helps in lowering the IT expenses especially those with software licensing, energy and floor space in data centres.

Every new release of Mainframe proclaims the significance of these mammoth systems in the enterprise computing industry. The unmatched reliability, availability, serviceability and security of Big Iron systems make them relevant in enterprises and enable CIO’s to think of new ways to consolidate workloads into this platform. The market release of new Mainframe zEC12 is the result of IBM’s strong determination to improve the Mainframe capabilities with an investment of $1 billion in IBM R&D.

Currently the second phase results of the survey say that the skills shortage will have a wider business impact in enterprises. Especially, at a time when 78% of the enterprise CIO’s believe that Mainframe will remain as a key business asset in global enterprises, over the next decade. The study also reveals that Mainframe remains a critical component of the wider IT infrastructure despite the prevalence of distributed computing. Vanson Bourne an independent research firm conducted the survey, on 520 CIO’s belonging to international Mainframe enterprises with over 1000 workforce. Enterprise CIO’s from UK, Germany, France, US, Italy, Australia, Japan and Benelux participated in the survey.

The Compuware Survey key findings

• About 56 % of CIOs’ are concerned over Mainframe developer shortage.
• More than half of the survey respondents expects increased application risk and reduced productivity due to Mainframe developer shortage.
• Seventy-eight percent of CIOs say the mainframe will remain a key business asset over the next decade.
• Forty-six percent of CIOs do not have plans in place to address mainframe developer shortages.
• Around 69 % of survey respondents believe that a lack of change in Mainframe environment is turning off fresh IT graduates from Mainframe development career.
• Seventy percent of CIOs agree that mainframe cost cutting will expose more risks in business than rewards.
• High acquisition costs (60 %), complex integration (54 %) and high training and implementation costs (45 %) are preventing businesses from modernizing their mainframe environment.

The survey reflects the current scenario of the Mainframe market. In a continuously evolving IT scenario, there is a serious challenge to do more with fewer resources in a critical field like Mainframe industry. Shortage of new Mainframe developers is yet another major concern surrounding the Mainframe industry now. Mainframe remains a less appealing platform for fresh IT graduates, based on a wrong consumption that this platform lacks changes and new developments with the current trends.

IT industry’s new technology upswings like cloud computing, mobile computing etc are putting their mark stronger in the recent years. The reflections of modernization with new trends are seen in the Mainframe industry too. This current situation demands more number of Mainframe programmers and other associated resources to satisfy the demand supply ratio. However, with the retirement of experienced Mainframe resources in enterprises, there is a skills shortage looming around the Mainframe industry. This will seriously affect and slow down the immense possibilities of modern Mainframe platform integrated with current IT trends. There is a critical need of addressing this issue in no time.

Effective Steps to address this skills shortage in a timely manner can lessen the impact of this issue in critical business environments where Mainframe plays a key role for several years. It is high time to introduce Mainframe training programmes, awareness programmes, contests etc globally along with addition of Mainframe syllabus in University curriculums. IBM’s academic initiatives and other major vendor initiatives to address this skills gap issue offer a ray of hope for Mainframe industry.

Let this small spark light up more and more number of lamps in the near future. Future appears to be bright and confident for Mainframe platform apart from this issue of skills shortage. Enterprise CIOs have to take key steps to find and nurture competent future Mainframe professionals to keep alive this critical platform for the next several decades.

Cloud Computing is expected to create 14 million jobs worldwide from 2011 to 2015, says a study conducted by analyst firm IDC (International Data Corporation). The study also adds up that half of these jobs will be in India and China.

In the study commissioned by Microsoft, IDC predicts that new jobs will be split equally between small and large business enterprises. More than one-third of jobs will be in three specific sectors:

• Communications/media (2.4 million jobs)
• Banking (1.4 million jobs)
• discrete manufacturing (1.3 million jobs).

According to IDC, India and China are emerging markets and early adopters of cloud computing making them crucial places for future cloud computing growth. In addition, the immense workforce to the tune of 1.2 billion professionals alone in India and China is also a crucial factor in future cloud growth of these two countries. IDC also estimates that Cloud services in global IT enterprises have created revenue of $400 billion and have created 1.5 million jobs last year alone.

IDC Predictions in a nutshell

• IT innovation created by cloud computing could produce $1.1 trillion a year in new business revenues.
• Cloud computing will produce more than 14 million jobs worldwide from 2012 to 2015.
• India and China will be the places where around 6.75 million cloud generated jobs are estimated to occur between 2012  and 2015.
• In North America 1.17 million jobs are expected to be created during this period and in EMEA 2.07 million and in Asia Pacific region (excluding India and China) it is 2.87 million.
• Communications and Media, Banking and discrete manufacturing are the sectors where one third of the job creation is expected.
• Around 54 to 55 % of the newly created cloud jobs will be in small and midsized business sectors.
• U.S. accounted for 62 percent of worldwide spending for public IT cloud services last year.

IDC prediction on the number of cloud-generated jobs was done by considering several factors, including available country workforce, unemployment rates, GDP, IT expense by industry and company size, industry mix by country and city, technology infrastructure by country and city, regulatory environment etc.

Prediction about growth of Cloud computing in India in the coming years is an optimistic message to the numerous cloud service providers as well as cloud adopters in Indian IT environment. This will enable more number of enterprises- small to large, to step into the cloud computing market in the coming years. Let us expect cloud computing being an economical as well as efficient business model, will reshape the Indian IT in the next few years.

Introduced in 1960’s, Supercomputers are the computers with fastest processing power.  They are the most advanced, sophisticated and expensive computers capable of processing trillions of instructions in a second. CDC6600 is considered as the first Supercomputer designed by Seymour Cray in 1964. Mainframes are large computers with great processing speed and storage capabilities.   Introduced in 1950’2s, Mainframes are serving the critical back end data processing, banking, ERP, airline industry etc for the last 50 + years.

 Mainframe features

• Mainframe uses its processing power to execute multiple programs concurrently.
• For Mainframe, performance is measured in terms of MIPS (Millions of Instructions per Second).
• Mainframes undertake simple computational task that involves huge amount of external data.
• Mainframes execute broader tasks like critical back end data processing, data warehousing etc.

Supercomputer features

• A Supercomputer utilizes all its processing speed and power in executing a few programs as fast as possible.
• The performance of Supercomputer is measured in terms of Flop/s (Floating Point Operations per Second)
• Supercomputer executes complicated computations and utilizes large memory.
• Supercomputers are purpose built for tasks like simulation, modelling, research etc.

Where are supercomputers used?

Supercomputers are used for highly complex computing purposes like weather forecasting, calculations in fluid dynamics, nuclear research, animated graphics etc. Scientific research organizations use super computers for their highly calculation intensive tasks and bulk data processing, which would take years when processed in a normal computing platform.

HP’s latest Supercomputer with 172.60 TeraFlops is one of the current top supercomputers in India. Param Cluster supercomputer by CDAC comes next and IBM’s Blue Gene Solution comes third. In India, ISRO and IISC are working together now to develop world’s fastest supercomputer by 2017.

Apart from Mainframe computers and Supercomputers, IBM is doing research in a new stream called quantum computing which is faster than supercomputing. This computing uses computer whose the transistors are so small and the computer is working with atoms and molecules. A quantum computer would be capable of solving millions of calculations at once – and able to crack any computer code on Earth.

The recent advancements in high performance computing systems are expected to find feasible solutions for challenges related to energy management, fraud detection, antiterrorism, medical research etc. The big data problem, ie, where the large quantity of unstructured data that does not fit to the current formats of RDBMS is also expected to find a solution with future developments in the computing technology.

History of COBOL
COBOL the acronym for Common Business Oriented Language is one of the oldest programming languages created by a committee named CODASYL in 1959. Grace Hopper, an American Computer Scientist working in US Navy, headed this committee. The committee comprised of major Universities, computer manufacturers and the US Government agencies. COBOL was the first programming language that could be run on more than one manufacturer’s computer. Before that, each computer manufacturer had to design and develop their versions of language to tell the computer what to do. The COBOL is designed and developed as a business problem solving machine independent language, which can be subjected to frequent changes and revisions. Initially, COBOL was used for developing file-oriented business applications, and was not intended for writing systems programs. Over these years, this language has been subjected to continuous improvements and adaptations to the needs of modern IT environment.

COBOL remains as the most popular programming language on z system. This is important especially when more than 60 percent of organizational business data accessible through the Internet, is stored on Mainframes. In addition, 83 percent of all business transactions and 95 percent of all financial and insurance data are being processed by COBOL language on z/OS.

According to IBM, there are currently about 2 million strong COBOL programmers in the world. IBM’s introduction of Enterprise COBOL for z/OS enabled integration of business critical COBOL applications with modern web technology.

COBOL Advantages
Even if critics project reasons like wordiness, rigidity of COBOL as disadvantages there are numerous advantages for this language. The primary advantage of COBOL is that the coding style is simple and straight forward without using pointers or other user defining capabilities. Other noted COBOL features include:
• Portability
• Platform Independence
• High readability
• Maintainable
• Easy to upgrade and revise codes
• Support large volumes of transaction data
• Quick application capabilities
• Easy to integrate with web
• Self documenting
• Scalability
• Robust and time tested

Disadvantages
• Language structure(Wordy)
• Programming inflexibility
• Rigid format
• Not suitable for scientific applications

The simplicity and ease of use have made COBOL programming more business friendly and accessible. No wonder, the first English resembling programming language COBOL remains as the cornerstone for billions of critical business transactions in global enterprises. In this era of Mainframe resurgence with added capabilities and improved features being embedded into Mainframes, COBOL language is not going to get obsolete, even in the far distant future.

In short, the relevance and the capabilities of COBOL are increasing day by day.

As usual this year also we have multiple predictions backed via the research done by organisations, research bodies, magazines, etc.

CRN on cloud computing-2012

CRN a popular online IT Magazine predicts that ‘’ 2012 is the real cloud-computing year’’. In addition, ,the magazine also says that that usage of cloud computing drives innovation and innovation drive usage in 2012.

Key points on CRN Cloud predictions

• Year 2012, will be of hybrid clouds that brings in the best of the private as well as public clouds.
• Open source applications will be used more in 2012 for cloud computing.
• Industry can expect a combination of various cloud models in 2012. Multi cloud management will be the new trend.
• With big data threats, cloud storage solutions are expected to gain more momentum in 2012.
• No slow down is expected but cloud acquisitions will be on rise in 2012.
• Need for agility and cost reduction will drive the rise of PaaS than IaaS in 2011
• Security breaches in the cloud is expected to strike in 2012
• The demand for cloud computing skill sets and professionals is expected to be high in 2012
• The cloud mobile relation that started in 2011 is expected to deepen in 2012.
• Companies will add more  social elements on their cloud ecosystem

ZD Net predictions on cloud computing

The five ZD Net predictions also bring in a realistic view of cloud computing for the year 2012.

• Mobile technology and cloud computing will go hand in hand in year 2012.
• Organizations will realise the need for more flexibility and interpretability in cloud
• Mix and match of cloud models (hybrid ) will be the trend in 2012
• As cloud management gets more complex, managed cloud services will be on more demand in 2012.
• Cloud adoption is expected to rise even more in large companies

Forrester Predictions

Forrester Research also predicts that 2012 is the year cloud-computing model gets more matured. Forrester predictions say that 2012 will be the year of multi cloud solutions. Cloud markets will continue to grow, and the total cloud market (including private, virtual private, and public cloud markets) will reach about $61 billion by the end of 2012. The other major points include

• In 2012, SaaS solutions will be increasingly adopted for software segments like product life-cycle management (PLM), business intelligence (BI), and supply chain management (SCM) etc
• With increasing acceptability of cloud computing, organizations will shift their focus from technical virtualization projects to focus on the change management aspects for business flexibility
• New business models like cloud brokers (a new business model managing the flexible sourcing of internal and external cloud resources on behalf of a company) will emerge in 2012
• Large enterprises are expected to be  joining the cloud bandwagon in 2012

Predictions from CA Community Blog

Major Mainframe vendor CA Technologies also bound to find a place on cloud predictions 2012. According to CA Community blog cloud predictions, year 2012 will see the increasing demand of Mainframe as cloud platform. Owing to the Mainframe features like scalability, capability of running complex workloads, reliability etc Government bodies and enterprises will start adopting Mainframe cloud coalition platform for critical business processes.

Other key predictions from CA

• Hybrid IT will be the next big thing in 2012
• Public cloud adoption will be replaced by hybrid cloud
• Organizations will go for more Cloud oriented security solutions in 2012
• Modern Mainframes with cross platform integration capabilities will be used for diverse high volume workloads like cloud bursting, pop up data centres, desktop virtualization etc.

Google pages with cloud predictions still continue as a long list. This clearly indicates the wide acceptability of the cloud business model among the IT industry. All the predictions convey a positive outlook for cloud computing in 2012. We can expect much exciting days coming ahead for this vibrant business model.  Let us watch for the real outcome of these predictions.

Download Here: Arcati Mainframe 2012 Year Book -PDF

Introduced first in 2005, the Arcati Mainframe yearbook is a great resource for experienced Mainframe professionals as well as new faces in the Mainframe industry. The highlight of the yearbook is the user survey, which indicates the upcoming Mainframe market trends. The survey also gives a snapshot of the Mainframe user community’s existing hardware and software configuration, and also their strategies and concerns for 2012. The survey also conveys a mixed view of positives and negatives.

Year 2012 Survey key points
• Larger businesses with MIPS rate more than 10, 000 are expected to show growth rates of 0 – 10 % this year.

• Smaller businesses with MIPS range below 1000 are expecting limited or no growth as per the survey.

• Competitive pressures are very high with the lower end Mainframe markets.

• Around 44 % of the respondents were running Linux on System z (up from last year’s 40%).

• About 78% of the respondents were web enabling their CICS subsystems (up from 58 percent last year).

• Only 12 % of the respondents were using their Mainframe for Cloud Computing.

• Around 18 % were planning to cloud enable their Mainframe environment in the near future.

• About 6 % have installed z114 Mainframes and 19% have installed z196.

• About 44% of the enterprise data of surveyed sites reside on Mainframes and 56 % on other platforms.

• Survey also identified management ignorance of the power and benefits of using a mainframe.

• Majority of respondents believe that their Unix and Windows user support costs were increasing faster than the Mainframe.

The next section of the Arcati yearbook comes out with the vendor directory in which the detailed information about the vendors, consultants, and service providers working in the z/OS environment are given.

Mainframe relevance is increasing day by day and they are now very much in the air of the industrial arena. Yearly release of Arcati Mainframe yearbook along with its wide acceptance among the industry is a testimonial for this.

The Mainframe platform has undergone several turnkey changes in architecture and technology over these years. The Mainframe Reliability, Availability and Serviceability features enable organizations to heavily depend on Mainframes for critical data center operations. More than 70 % of the organizational business data is now stored in Mainframes. A 2011 annual Mainframe survey by BMC software proves the increasing relevance of Mainframe in modern data centers. At a time when a number of business enterprises are thinking about the modern data center requirements, let us also have a look at what makes Mainframes an unavoidable entity in modern data centers.

A single mainframe can provide the computing capacity of over 2000 distributed servers. Making use of effective virtualisation, energy efficiency a mainframe brings into the modern data center becomes enormous. With lower power to run and reduced heat emission, mainframes directly lower the HVAC cost largely. As an efficient tool for server consolidation and virtualisation, Mainframes brings in drastic space savings in the modern data centers.

Key factors making Mainframes apt for data center management

Energy Efficiency
Efficient Energy management is a key concern for global enterprises. Mainframes are more energy efficient than the distributed systems. A distributed system environment requires power supply for each individual systems, consuming a large amount of energy. Compared to an equivalently configured x86 distributed computing environment, Mainframes use about 12 % of energy only. Power and cooling requirements for modern Mainframes are more efficient than distributed systems. Mainframe brings in more work with less energy for data centers.

Reduced server sprawl
In many organizational data centers, there were a great number of underutilized servers creating a server sprawl. The underutilized servers increase the cost, complexity and maintenance efforts of companies. Effective virtualization and consolidation of servers with Mainframes help reduce the number of underutilized servers in data centers thereby reducing the server sprawl.

Less Floor space
Mainframe consumes less floor space in data centers compared to large number of x 86 servers in a distributed system environment. Additional capacity demands in distributed system environment require addition of new systems. Meanwhile, in Mainframe based data centers the scalability of Mainframes help to meet the additional capacity demands without purchasing new infrastructure. This helps reduce the floor space largely. In addition, new Mainframe systems like z196 and z114 are capable to house 250 Linux servers in a box having the size of a closet. Mainframe brings in more processing power in relatively smaller footprints compared to distributed system environment.

Security
Distributed system environments have more number of access points and storage systems mostly with no specific centralized point of control thereby increasing chance of security flaws. Organizations’ IT departments spend more money and time to safe guard the security access points in these systems. In addition, the purchase cost for security licenses in these systems are creating overheads for IT departments. Compared to distributed systems, Mainframes possess efficient security architecture with centralised control. These security features makes Mainframes apt for critical data processing jobs in banking, credit card transactions, insurance companies etc for the last 50 +years. Integrated security features in Mainframe can significantly reduce costs related to security software licensing and security management personnel.

Manageability
Manageability is one of the core features that affect the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) in an organizational data center. Modern Mainframes are less complex and more manageable than the old Mainframe architectures. As organizations adopt new business models like SOA, the service interactions, networking and storage functions etc have to be carefully supervised and controlled. IBM has offered many products that are apt for effectively tracking mainframe operations. IBM’s Tivoli Product offerings are examples for this.

Developments and technological advancements in Mainframe world have changed the traditional thinking about Mainframes. Mainframes in modern data centers possess additional features like expanded service management capabilities, cross platform integration facilities etc. data centers are being modernised, Mainframe technology is also advancing in a fast pace. Latest technologies are being converged into this single box. Organisations cannot avoid utilising this advantage. Future seems to be brighter as mainframe’s acceptance is increasing day by day and IBM’s serious effort on mainframe improvement continues. With all these developments, no doubt, Mainframes are going to rule the business world once again.

According to a 2011 survey on social media recruiting conducted by Jobvite, a social media recruiting company:-

• Over 89 % of the organizations are planning to recruit through social media- an increase from 83 % in 2010.
• 55% of the respondents are planning to increase their spending on social media recruiting
• Referrals, direct sourcing and social networks were the top rated external sources for quality candidates.
• LinkedIn was the most used social media for recruiting with 87% of the survey respondents using it.
• Facebook comes next with 55% and Twitter with 47%.

The survey underlines the changing social media trends in the recruiting industry. Social media connects people in a better way compared to the different media. Statistics reports reveal that around 2 billion people, all over the world are accessing social media, with over 135 million members on LinkedIn, 175 million users on Twitter and 500 million active users on Facebook. The large user base offers an attractive platform for employersto select the skilful candidates through transparent recruiting procedures.

Small to large enterprises are viewing social media as an effective tool for finding the right candidates for their job openings. This helps the recruitment industry in a greater way along with the traditional means of accessing employees like job boards, campus recruitment, referrals, job sites, and internal transfers. Small enterprises also benefit heavily from social media as frequent advertising on paid job sites and print media have become rather expensive. Social media offer employers opportunities to advertise positions free of cost in these channels. Employers can easily validate and choose their desired candidates from a specific group matching their job requirement. For example, employers can access Mainframe professionals in LinkedIn from an exclusive group for Mainframe professionals named “Mainframe experts network”.

Students and young professionals are the driving force for social media. They can stay informed about industry pulses, maintain an online professional identity and network with people having the same area of interest. A well-maintained online professional identity along with good network can help users in finding a desirable job of their interest area. Professional networking opportunities in social media offer productive referral engagements for the members.

Social media can be considered as an emerging medium of recruiting, but not the silver bullet solution. Substantial efforts should be taken to optimize social media for using it as a critical instrument in recruiting. Job seekers should keep an eye on better utilizing the positive outcomes of social media for their professional as well as personal networking. Communication revolution and internet revolution have drastically changed the way people communicate with each other and do business. Changing roles of social media are examples example for this. The revolution in recruitment industry has just begun only. We have to wait for the future to analyse the huge potential or the perils with social media.

Let us analyse in our next blog, how the various social media channels like LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook etc influence in job recruitment.

Indian IT industry contributes immensely to the national economy. IT industry is one of the biggest job creators in India. For the last 20 years, the growth of Indian IT industry is quite astonishing, as we can see evidently that the Indian market has entrenched strongly in the global IT market. No other Indian industry was more successful as to stand against its global competitors. Let us have a look on the rise of Indian IT industry and the factors that led to its success.

History of Information Technology revolution in India

TATA group laid the foundation of Indian IT revolution. In 1970, TCS aligned with Burroughs Corporation (the Mainframe manufacturers), to carry out outsourced application services in Mumbai. This was the very beginning of software revolution in India. Indian IT engineers in large numbers were moved to various onsite projects (body shopping) abroad. The birth and growth of India’s IT industry also add to the 1984 government policy, which provided the provision for software exports through satellite links. Though Indira Gandhi’s Cabinet approved this, the Rajiv Gandhi Government that announced the policy on November 19, 1984. It was in this era that various other policy initiatives including liberalisation of policies for computer and electronics sector, Software Technology Parks (STP’s), computerisation of railways, rural digital telephone exchange etc took place. NASSCOM, a regulatory body on Indian IT services was set up in 1988 at Mumbai to assist trade and business in IT and ITES and to motivate advancement of research in software technology. Offshore outsourcing of IT services started to prevail during this period. NASSCOM’s initiatives strengthened India’s position as a globally recognisable brand in IT outsourcing industry. Apart from IT, other IT enabled services like hardware, peripherals, networking, training, domestic and export market for IT services, software’s, and ITES-BPO started flourishing in India.

During this time, counterparts of US, UK IT firms mushroomed in key Indian locations like Mumbai, Bangalore, etc utilising the emerging opportunities. Indian IT firms slowly moved up the value chain to provide comprehensive software development for overseas customers. Large English speaking low-cost workforce and comparatively lower real estate prices were the key attractions for global organizations to outsource their software development services to Bangalore, later developed to be the IT hub of India. IT-BPO sector was emerging as one of the most significant growth catalysts for the Indian economy.

Later in 1990’s, the Indian Government’s introduction of telecommunication policy, infrastructure facilities and other policies had an immense contribution to the rapid growth of offshore outsourcing. The Y2K boom demanded IT professionals in large numbers all over the world, benefitting India in creating more job opportunities. Meanwhile, , Government policy reforms, strong base in technical education and emerging market requirements led to an unprecedented growth in IT industry.

From IT destinations like Mumbai, Bangalore and Chennai etc, Indian IT industry extended its presence to other locations like Pune, Hyderabad, Kerala, Delhi, Ahmadabad, Gujarat etc.  Increasing client confidence in Indian capabilities along with quality standards were attracting many global enterprises to offshore their work to India. The global perceptions of India as an under-developed country with uncontrolled population, poverty and corruption were being changed. In short, 21st century India began to represent a fast growing economic power, a globally recognisable business brand for IT and other IT enabled services.