Where is the move off mainframes?
It’s not unusual to find mainframes that have been in place for 20 years. One thing that motivates people to move applications off the mainframe is the large step costs. If your business is growing and you need to add another mainframe, it is a huge investment. That’s a common catalyst for re-platforming. With the new Microsoft operating systems, databases and development tools, you can re-platform applications with a total cost-of-ownership case that makes sense to the business guy. But for firms that have a core transaction processing engine just sitting down there in the basement grinding away on gear that is totally depreciated, the cost of continuing to operate it is low, and they probably have other priorities for the IT budget. How do you work with Microsoft? We are very close partners. We are an early adopter of Microsoft’s new technologies and we use them to run our own business – we eat the dog food, as they say in Redmond. So we get an early view into Microsoft’s product roa
