Mainframe Computing: Internet-Based Survey Says Mainframes Ain't Dead Yet!

Edge: Work-Group Computing Report, August 10, 1998

According to a just-released study from Palo Alto Management Group (PAMG), mainframe-based platforms held about a quarter of the market for Decision Support systems representing $3.5 billion in user expenditures in 1997.

Although the mainframe will continue to slowly lose market share, the study reports that it will still account for 20% of the market five years from now, representing more than $22 billion in user expenditures worldwide.

One reason is that for many users its less of a hassle to add a few processors and more DASD on an existing system than to start from scratch. In addition, some believe that backend chores like extraction and transformation are simpler if done on a single platform.

As most pundits expect, Windows NT will claim an increasing share of the data warehousing market, but won't have the impact that many people believe. Michael P. Burwen, the study's Director and PAMG's President says, "The evidence is that data warehouse based solutions are fast becoming mission-critical and tend to grow very rapidly to hundreds of GigaBytes or even TeraBytes.

"Windows NT simply does not yet have the scalability, the fault resilience or the system management/administration capability to play in the big leagues where the money is in this business. That is not to say that NT won't be important at the client level or as the operating system for subsidiary servers."

The study finds that the majority of the market will be UNIX-based. "Support for UNIX in the decision support market continues unabated," says Burwen. Every major systems company has a UNIX-based product line, and while most systems companies also support NT, major investments continue to be made in both UNIX and mainframe technologies.

Entitled "Data Solutions II," the study is based on 375 interviews conducted in North America, Europe and Japan, most of which were conducted using one of the most in-depth questionnaires (nearly 100 questions) yet devised for Internet-based research.

The study is available from Palo Alto Management Group, Inc., a leading market research and consulting firm specializing in data warehousing and decision support markets. Documentation describing the study and a white paper may be found at www.pamg.com.