Australian companies still investing in mainframes: Survey
- 22 October, 2015 15:37
Good security and centralised data server capabilities have been cited as reasons why Australian businesses are continuing to use mainframes according to a new survey.
BMC’s 10th mainframe research report, which asked 1200 respondents around the world about their IBM zSeries mainframe servers, gathered responses from 18 enterprises in Australia.
According to the vendor, there are 35 zSeries mainframes in use in Australia and New Zealand. In September, ANZ bank signed a five year, $450 million agreement with IBM which includes deployment of a z13 mainframe and POWER8 infrastructure as part of ANZ’s private cloud environment.
Ninety seven per cent of the Australian organisations said they would continue to use their mainframe because of its security strengths as a platform.
Eighty six per cent of Australian enterprises indicated that growing mainframe investment was driven by security while 79 per cent said their investment was due to centralised data server capability and availability advantages.
Meanwhile, 62 per cent said the mainframe will continue to grow and attract new workloads and 50 per cent said mainframe growth will come through legacy apps and new apps
Eight per cent expect general purpose mainframe usage growth of more than 10 per cent over the next two years.
Turning to the global results, 56 per cent out of the 1182 respondents said the security strengths of the platform were an advantage.
Forty eight per cent of customers are continuing their investment because of the mainframe’s centralised data server capability, and 45 per cent said their transaction throughput requirements are best suited to the mainframe.
Looking at the top priorities for 2016, 65 per cent said they would focus on mainframe cost optimisation and 59 per cent on application availability.