6 Sep
2007
6 Sep
'07
7:31 p.m.
On Thursday 06 September 2007, Liam Proven wrote:
Well, we could compare installs, or we could compare
users. It's up
to you. Either way, I'll warrant that its market share now is
infinitisemal compared to what it once what.
Even if they're shifting a million seats a year, which I really very
much doubt, they're doing so in a market of hundreds of millions of
users a year of other platforms. It's marginal. It may be
high-margin, but it's a tiny drop in a big ocean.
How do you count "number of users" on a payroll system? There's
probably only a couple of users, but it's the number of people who get
paid which matters...
Number of users isn't always a useful benchmark.
All right, up to a point, yes. I've been watching
the progress of
Linux on S/390 and zSeries with some interest. I still don't reckon
it's a very significant market share, and furthermore, every site
running primarily or totally on Linux/390 is a site that's running
less on actual IBM OSs.
Unless they're running the typical Linux/390 environment under zVM.
From what I'm told, this is the most common
arrangement, and lets IBM
still sell large amounts of VM while customers are
running Linux on the
end layer.
Indeed, tho' I don't know a lot about
mainframes, I have a feeling
that most Linux/390 is deployed on z/VM - which is to say, in an LPAR
under VM - rather than under z/OS, which is to say, MVS. Linux is
probably actually displacing MVS - z/OS - rather than helping it.
Yeah, but zVM isn't free any more than zOS is. In effect, "zLinux" is
helping IBM sell zVM. (And, more importantly to IBM, helping to sell
maintenance contracts, and consulting work).
Pat
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