It may be the 40th anniversary of the mainframe today, but the chances of Sun Microsystems Inc. (Nasdaq: SUNW)
sending IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM)
a birthday card appear pretty slim.
Wednesday, April 7, is a landmark date in computing, marking as it does the 40th birthday of the IBM System/360, which has been described as the worlds first general-purpose mainframe. To celebrate the event, IBM is holding a reception at the Computer History Museum in San Jose, Calif., later today.
But Don Whitehead, director of mainframe migration at Sun Microsystems is unimpressed by all the brouhaha. Speaking at the Afcom Data Center World Conference in Las Vegas last night, he says, Its happy birthday mainframe, but, boy, you might want to think about a retirement strategy because it has been around a long time.
With all the changes in the computer industry, the mainframe is one of the things that has changed the least - its amazing that you can have a computer that can be in the market for that many years.
Whitehead acknowledged that the mainframe is a great product but said that the users he has spoken to are now looking for alternatives or exit strategies. These include software products that allow users to run mainframe workloads on Sun systems, he added.
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