Earlier this month, in a report entitled Ensuring You Have Mainframe Skills Through 2020, analyst Gartner warned of an impending mainframe skills gap. A generation of experienced IT staff are approaching retirement just as the mainframe is experiencing a renaissance.
The world’s top 25 banks run on mainframes and there are more Cobol transactions in a day than Google hits, according to some estimates. IBM, a mainframe market leader, profits handsomely from its computing behemoths: last year’s revenue from System z was up 19 per cent on 2008.
Mainframes are highly efficient. For example, a System Z can replace 1,500 x86 servers but consumes 15 per cent of the power. Bank of New Zealand, for example, is replacing 200 Sun servers with a five-CPU System z.
However, not everyone agrees that the industry faces a mainframe skills issue. After all, some so-called skills crises are often over-egged by head-hunters and trainers, and mainframe staff have been laid off owing to recession and offshoring.
Read rest of article at computing.co.uk here.