Let's face it, IBM is the mainframe market. The big question is to what extent the company can exploit its dominant market position to squeeze maximum revenue out of its customers for as long as possible.
To mitigate the inevitable effects of vendor lock-in and overcharging though, analysts are urging existing IBM mainframe customers to pay closer attention to the licensing fees they pay to maintain their legacy applications, arguing that the company is artificially prolonging the mainframe's life by making it easier and cheaper to develop new software for aging platforms.
A recent survey from research firm Gartner estimates that the cost of maintaining mainframe hardware and developer expertise has actually remained fairly stable over the past seven years, whereas software ownership costs have fluctuated wildly.
"Mainframe software negotiation is a bit of a black art. The devil is in the detail," Gartner analyst Rakesh Kumar told Computing. "Vendors are past masters at playing the game and are getting away with charging more than they should, but then end users are not doing asset management and contract negotiation in the way they used to, and should be putting more attention into it."
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