Articles

By Reg Harbeck

One of my favorite movies is “Good Morning, Vietnam” starring Robin Williams. In it, he portrays radio-show host and disc jockey Adrian Cronauer during the Vietnam Conflict.

Cronauer was not just an ordinary show-up-and-be-your-job-description kind of host like some of his colleagues. Instead, he went above and beyond the call of duty in many ways, challenging a rigid and dysfunctional system while forming connections and close friendships with many local people who were not in the military. At one point he even took on the job of teaching English as a second language.

Part of why I like this movie so much is similar to why I like working within today’s mainframe ecosystem so much as well. It’s almost as if someone dropped an Adrian Cronauer type of personality into the mainframe milieu some time in the last decade, as I’ve seen the mainframe wake up and become a living, functional, connected platform like never before—taking on new workloads, introducing new processors, improving its already substantial ROI and just generally manifesting itself as a truly exceptional platform for business computing.

So, I thought it might be fun to draw some comparisons between Robin Williams’ portrayal of Adrian Cronauer and today’s mainframe to illustrate this. Of course, you’ll get more out of this article if you see the movie as well (but I don’t see a downside there).

Talk about a wake-up. His first day on the job begins with Cronauer yelling into the broadcast mike, “Gooooooood Morning, Vietnam!”

Talk about a wake-up call. Not so long ago, Y2K, the Internet, graphical interfaces and the dot-com boom had people thinking that the mainframe was dead. Then, financial collapses occurred, followed by regulations (such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act) enacted in order to get businesses to behave more responsibly. At the same time, datacenters began to hit limitations on energy, floor space, cooling and staffing, and there began the emerging movement to get business more “green.”

Then subprime mortgages, super-inflated fuel prices and other scandals knocked the bottom out of global finances. Suddenly, everyone was waking up to the fact that the mainframe was the one platform that could be consistently relied on to help them respond to all of these challenges. It reminds me of what one of our customers said about a mainframe system they were using: “We started sunsetting this system years ago. The sun's been setting so long, now it's coming up again.”

How irreverent. Turning his back on rigid behaviors and dysfunctional management, Cronauer persisted in his poignant, relevant and gut-splittingly funny humor, waking his listeners up to what was actually going on around them, and helping them realize what was really important.

How impertinent. Refusing to be written off, the mainframe continues to offer outstanding reliability, availability, security, scalability and ROI. And while other platforms require an escalating number of techies to keep them running, the mainframe continues to grow while being managed by the same number of technologists—or even fewer.

Now, bringing it to the next level and breaking all the old mainframe taboos, there’s CA’s Mainframe 2.0 enabling a new generation of mainframe professionals to be even more effective with an even more manageable and functional environment. This is important considering that it runs the workloads that keep the world economy functional, despite the downturn—indeed, with particular effectiveness at such a time.

And how sociable. Not only does Cronauer immediately hit it off with his military audience, but he connects in with the local culture as well, even pursuing the affections of a local girl and getting to know her family.

And what an open platform. While remaining relevant to those organizations and people that have been its mainstays, the mainframe has taken on UNIX System Services (USS) and Linux, TCP/IP and Websphere. Now it can serve up tried-and-proven applications and data and act as a reliable part of the entire IT world, rather than just keeping to itself.

In addition, taking in the experiences and examples as well as connectivity offered by the mainframe, the distributed world is able to grow its capacity to play a more responsible part in this “the business is the computer” world of IT.

Finally, going beyond just friendliness, Cronauer opens up the doors of communication by teaching English to those residents of his host country who wish to exert a special effort to reach out and connect with him and other English speakers.

So, a mainframe also opens up, using Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) and Java Database Connectivity (JDBC) to serve up data, and building beyond that to become a foundational platform for true Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) enablement. As a result, the distributed machines, which may have started out as explicitly different from the mainframe, can now reach out to connect with it and produce a higher level of business processing through this shared approach.

Another way that the mainframe reaches out to those who “speak another language” is with CA’s Mainframe 2.0 initiative, which allows experienced IT people who are used to the interfaces and other paradigms of the distributed world to understand and effectively manage the mainframe.

A new day has definitely dawned. Time to have a serving of Java (zAAPs and all) and wake up to the platform that’s as strong as the day is long. GOOD MORNING, MAINFRAME.