Big Data: IBM’s Mainframe Customers Base Grows

IBM announced its fourth quarter 2012 earnings and they discussed them last week at IBM Software kickoff that I attended with a few other Gold Consultants last week.  The numbers speak for themselves and show that IBM’s Big Data solutions are being embraced by companies worldwide and probably your competitors.  The discussion showed that Information Management portion of IBM continues to grow faster than the rest of the company and exceeded its growth expectations.

First IBM continues to grow the mainframe business. The growth of the Information Management mainframe portion of the IBM business was with a lot of new customers that did not have a mainframe before.  These new mainframe customers needed their new mainframe platform for several reasons.  Three themes of the new mainframe growth that IBM saw were; 1) stem the cost of distributed servers and consolidated them to the mainframe, 2) the need for the horsepower of the mainframe for new Big Data application workloads, and 3) the availability of new mainframe zLinux implementations to power other database applications,  especially DB2 LUW.

Second the IBM Information Management Big Data solutions are improving client’s bottom line.  The IBM DB2 Analytics Accelerator is a huge success with customers because it provides quick product and customer data insights and eliminates the need for constant extract transformation and loading (ETL) of data from the mainframe environment.  The problem is that ETL and the off-mainframe applications processes can’t provide the near real time data that is needed for banking, insurance or customer scoring applications.  ETL has always been inefficient, wasteful of disk storage and a CPU resource roadblock.  IBM sold more of these IBM DB2 Analytics Accelerator solutions in the first three quarters than they expected to in the whole year.  These Big Data DB2 Analytics Accelerator solutions provide quick answers to the business in near real time and eliminate all the ETL, data timing, disk storage and wasteful CPU issues, making them the cost-saving solution for customers wanting better business answers quickly.

Third DB2 Version 10 for zOS growth is being adopted faster than any prior version.   DB2 10 saw a huge increase as every company wanted and most everyone got the 5-20% CPU savings from the new DB2 10 version.  Also DB2 10 and its collaboration with the DB2 Analytics Accelerator provided a great near real time solution for all types of applications answers.  With the expansion of the DB2 Analytics Accelerator, DB2 Version 10 design options can now provide almost instantaneous query results against petabytes of data.  Leveraging the new DB2 Version 10 partitioning, temporal and DB2 Analytics Accelerator designs, IBM provides state of the art solutions for all types of large Big Data applications. The performance improvements of DB2 Version 10 for zOS were especially beneficial for companies that adopted DB2 10 for zOS faster than other DB2 version.

Fourth IBM management is pricing its solutions more competitively through the DB2 Value Unit Edition (VUE) program.  As I talked about the value of relational database designs and solutions in last week’s blog, IBM is pricing its solutions more competitively for new workloads that might go to other platforms, the NoSQL databases or other vendors through the VUE program.  Through this hugely successful IBM VUE program, IBM’s customers were able to do their new Big Data system with substantial licensing and hardware cost savings.  This VUE program not only helped the clients with their licensing costs but also let them share their data and provide solutions faster.

All of these four items helped IBM customers and IBM have a very successful Information Management 2012 and the improvements in the mainframe hardware along with the speed improvements of the new DB2 Analytics Accelerator coming later this year can make your Big Data system work even faster and be successful.
________________________________________________________

Dave Beulke is an internationally recognized DB2 consultant, DB2 trainer and education instructor.  Dave helps his clients improve their strategic direction, dramatically improve DB2 performance and reduce their CPU demand saving millions in their systems, databases and application areas within their mainframe, UNIX and Windows environments.

Leave a Reply

You can use these HTML tags

<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>