Q&A: IBM’s Jim Stallings sees mainframe growth

Computerworld - Jim Stallings, the new general manager of IBM’s mainframe System z division, is settling into his job by promising 100 customer visits in his first 100 days. He’s been on the job for two months, and in an interview this week mapped out some of his plans, including increased automation of security, the training of 20,000 workers in mainframe skills before 2010 and the prospect of new specialty processors.

Excerpts from the interview follow:

Jim Stallings of IBM

Didn’t you have customers holding back on buying? In other words, wasn’t some of that pent-up demand? No, I think a lot of it had to do with our customers growing. If you look at where we are serving customers in the enterprise, a lot of the big banks, a lot of the big public-sector customers, a lot of the people that run transactions online are growing. This gave them vertical room to grow. These customers can’t hold back. The demand is there for this scale of a platform.

Where is your new-customer growth coming from? A lot of the new-customer growth is happening in Brazil, Russia, India and China. I just left China. There is a tremendous amount of growth there.

Most of your new mainframe growth is happening overseas? No, a lot is happening here. The small and medium business is growing. What was a medium-size company five years ago is now a big company today. Those companies are all mainframe customers in the United States.

The z9 was your first mainframe to get Advanced Encryption Standard capability. Is AES prompting customers to use the mainframe in different ways? The No. 1 concern/question that I get from customers is about security. What they want to talk about is how do they exploit the full capability of the mainframe. Everything from key management, centralized management of encryption across the enterprise, AES, intrusion detection –- they want us to help them manage and exploit the capability for security on a mainframe. Most of our customers tell me it’s one of the principal reasons they buy a mainframe -- because it’s secure.

Is AES prompting customers to use the mainframe in different ways? The answer is yes. Customers are saying they want to run a variety of workloads on the mainframe. They have been gradually moving edge-of-network applications and workloads [running on Linux] onto the mainframe, and they are now bringing a lot of the Web server apps onto the mainframe. They feel that the edge-of-network [applications] are the first point of defense. So, yes, they are exploiting AES -- and are concerned about intrusions inside and outside, by the way.