IBM 2001 Annual Report Download - page 33

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no. 11
We didn’t give up on the mainframe
A RETURN TO ENTERPRISE COMPUTING
“i predict that the last mainframe will be unplugged
on march 15,1996.
”
Stewart Alsop, InfoWorld, March 1991
In 1991, Stewart Alsop was far from alone. Most respected
industry pundits were declaring the end of the “mainframe era.”
So we don’t hold it against him. We’re just glad he has the grace
and good humor to see things differently today.
To be fair, the “mainframe,” circa 1991, was a dead end. But
we believed (along with a lot of our customers) that this way of
computing
—
serious, secure, industrial-strength
—
would always
be in demand.
So we stuck with “big iron,,” but reinvented it from the
inside
—
infusing it with an entirely new technology core,
reducing its price, and building support for open standards
and operating environments like Linux.
Since 1992, shipments of mainframe computing capacity
have increased more than 30 percent annually. And in the years
since the last one was to have been unplugged, our mainframe
business has generated revenues in excess of $19 billion.
“it’s clear that corporate customers still
like to have centrally controlled,very predictable,
reliable computing systems—exactly the kind
of systems that ibm specializes in.
”
Stewart Alsop, February 2002