Changing the Industry’s Mindset About the Mainframe: Viewpoints From IBM’s System z General Manager Anne Altman

by Joe Clabby
January 22, 2009

It’s a common practice at IBM to regularly shuffle the job responsibilities of product line general managers to ensure that new thinking, approaches, and skills are constantly infused into IBM’s hardware, software, services, and research organizations. As an industry analyst for the past 13 years, I’ve had the pleasure of meeting, listening to, and working with three IBM System z General Managers (GMs): Erich Clemente, Jim Stallings, and now Anne Altman.

Each of these GMs carried total responsibility for profit and loss (P&L) for IBM’s high-profile, hallmark, iconic System z mainframe environment. But that’s where the similarity ends. Each GM also carried a separate charter— one driven by both market factors and each individual’s unique skillset.

Erich Clemente was GM during the years that the mainframe, according to many industry pundits and IBM competitors, was supposed to die. Applications and databases were to have been migrated to less expensive UNIX servers, and the mainframe was to have faded away. Clemente ensured this didn’t happen by finding ways to greatly improve mainframe performance and by ensuring the mainframe installed base remained loyal. At the end of his tenure, mainframes had weathered the UNIX attack, and customers committed even more strongly to mainframes by increasing overall mainframe capacity (by installing thousands upon thousands of additional mainframe MIPS [Millions of Instructions Per Second]). Clemente also set the stage for the mainframe’s aggressive adoption of industry standards. His successor, Jim Stallings, put tremendous emphasis on understanding the mainframe customer base. In fact, he visited almost 100 customers in his first 100 days in office. As a result of these visits, Stallings revamped and reoriented the mainframe, modernizing the architecture by ensuring that System z supported all the most important industry standards—especially Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) standards, Linux, and Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE). By adopting these standards and introducing new, lower-cost specialty processors to the System z, Stallings was able to re-introduce the mainframe as the industry’s most powerful and secure scale-up server— a server capable of running traditional batch and transaction workloads as well as the most modern J2EE workloads. He also introduced the concept of IBM’s System z as the industry’s most energy-efficient scale-up server— and raised the ante by showing how System z significantly lowers data center operating costs.

As Stallings exited his System z GM position to become the master of all IBM server platforms—the GM of IBM’s Enterprise Systems Division—he set up his successor to release the most advanced modern mainframe ever introduced, the IBM System z10.

Introducing Anne Altman

Like those before her, Anne Altman is responsible for all System z P&L (a role she is well-equipped to handle after managing IBM’s Federal Government Integrated Account). But Ms. Altman’s charter is completely different from those of her predecessors. Her biggest challenge will be to change the industry’s mindset about the “mainframe,” and prove that the mainframe is the industry’s pinnacle scale-up virtualization/secure/green architecture for running traditional batch and transaction workloads and the industry’s most advanced application workloads.