As the IT industry goes through another cycle of convergence of vendors back to largely to where it was 30+ years ago, namely 4 or 5 key vendors, these vendors are increasingly offering integrated vertical 'stacks' to their clients to address largely similar cloud like deployment requirements.
IBM has made great waves recently with Pure Systems as a solution with 'expertise' built in in the form of solution patterns for various common COTS (Commercial Off The Shelf) software from IBM and others such as SAP. This approach is starting to resonate with clients as it addresses some fundamental concerns around time to value and the cost of deployment for new IT solutions. IBM is not alone in this space with Oracle/SUN also making great claims for their range of pre-integrated and tuned offerings.
So given the rest of the industry is looking at pre-packaging and pre-integrating what then of the the mainframe? Well the mainframe is largely still a bespoke suit amongst racks of off the shelf offerings. Now I am not going to argue that we should be pre-packaging a core banking solution based on in-house written COBOL/PL1 applications as the requirements for each client in the banking sector would be soooo different it would make this whole exercise a waste of time. However if we are looking at Linux consolidation onto an ELS then the story might be somewhat different.
So perhaps we should be looking at S/M/L large configuration options with storage sized accordingly with pre-integrated cloud tooling and patterns for common zLinux deployments such as WAS and DB2. This would mean we could massively decrease the 'solutioning' required whilst making the proposition easier to consume for business partners...
Without going further keen to get feedback and comments...
