IBM and Unisys Mainframe Roundup

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Mainframes, despite being card-walloping big iron from IBM, Unisys, and a few other companies in the world, do not have big announcements every week. The mainframe market is a slow, methodical, and steadily one, and the news flow is a reflection of that. So in this week's edition of Big Iron, we present a wrap-up of some of the small--but important--mainframe stories of the past two weeks.

Just before we went on Thanksgiving holiday two weeks ago, IBM announced it has extended mainframe data encryption so it can encrypt information being passed from mainframes to print servers running on Linux, AIX, and Windows platforms and down the wire farther to the printers themselves. In an increasingly security-conscious world that has lots of excess processing capacity laying around, it only makes sense to encrypt just about any data being moved from point to point. Better safe than sorry. As I have previously reported in September, Big Blue has already added sophisticated encryption to the z/OS platform for disk and tape storage, with the security keys administered by z/OS in the rock-solid manner that mainframes are legendary for.

In addition to encryption features, the new Print Services Facility for z/OS Version 4 software has a new AFP Download Plus feature that automates the prepping of print jobs generated by mainframe applications but physically printed at another remote site. PSF for z/OS V4 generates a printer-ready file that can be encrypted at the mainframe, sent down the wire, decrypted at the other end, and thrown right at the printer to be printed. IBM has more than 2,000 licenses to PSF for z/OS. PSF for z/OS V4 runs on z/OS V1R4 or higher and z/OS.e V1R4 or higher.

And for budget-conscious mainframe shops that do not want to spend a lot of dough on their page generation for massive print jobs, IBM also launched Infoprint Transform Manager for Linux Version 1, Release 2, which works in conjunction with Infoprint Server for z/OS and the integrated Advanced Function Printing (AFP) printing protocol developed by IBM many years ago to allow the offload data-heavy and image-intensive transforms to other, cheaper iron, such as IBM's BladeCenter HS20 blade servers running SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9. The Infoprint Transform Manager V1R2 for Linux will be available December 16, and Infoprint servers running on z/OS, Windows, and AIX can all call this solution to handle images. This software can handle transformations of PDF, PostScript, PCL, TIFF, JPEG, and GIF files to AFP formats.

IBM also announced before the holiday that it has both 31-bit and 64-bit Java 2 software development kits available for the z/OS platform. These SDKs are designed to be compatible and feature equivalent to the Java 2 SDK 5 from Sun Microsystems. The 32-bit Java 2 SDK runs on z/OS V1.6 or z/OS.e V1.6 or higher, and requires a zSeries 800, 890, 900, 990, or System z9 machine. The JDKs, both 31-bit and 64-bit versions, can hook into the zSeries Application Assist Processors (zAAPs), which support Java workloads on heavily discounted mainframe engines. The new Java software is available for download at on IBM's zSeries software site beginning November 30.

Over on the Unisys side, which just a few weeks ago forged a server alliance with Japanese server maker NEC, the word from the analysts at Morgan Stanley is uplifting for the mainframe base. After doing a survey of ClearPath mainframe customers, Morgan Stanley analysts Julie Santoriello and Matthew Spiegelman said in a report that they are more confident that Unisys can meet their expectations during the fourth quarter of 2005, because "a significant share of customers" plan not only to upgrade to new ClearPath machines, but to do so in the fourth quarter.

Morgan Stanley did the survey of the Unisys mainframe base in conjunction with UNITE, the North American Unisys User Association--yes, that acronym doesn't work, give yourself a gold star--and asked 400 ClearPath customers what their plans were for 2005 and 2006. Morgan Stanley believes Unisys has a ClearPath server pipeline of about $600 million over the next six to seven quarters, and that large and profitable mainframe shops "seem to be committed to the Unisys mainframe platform." The survey results indicated about 6 percent of customers plan to leave the Unisys mainframe.

Unisys has been telling Wall Street it should expect a relatively steep revenue ramp for mainframes this year. Half of the customers surveyed by Morgan Stanley said they intended to upgrade to a new ClearPath Libra model. Morgan Stanley believes Unisys has about 1,300 mainframe customers, and about 1,000 of them have Libra-class machines. The ClearPath Libra line of servers, which run the MCP operating system, hail from the former Burroughs side of the Unisys house. The Libra machines were upgraded this summer (see Unisys Tweaks Its ClearPath Mainframes, Too), and apparently dominate the Unisys installed base. The Sperry side of Unisys, where the ClearPath Dorado mainframes run OS2200, also has some very large customers, but if Morgan Stanley is right, there are only 300 customers running these boxes. The Wall Street analysts reckon Unisys is looking at around 400 upgrades in the next year and a half or so--with about a third coming in the fourth quarter of this year--and at $1.5 million per upgrade on average, that works out to about $600 million over the long haul and just under $200 million in the fourth quarter.

To that end, Morgan Stanley is estimating Unisys will have about $205 million in enterprise server sales in the fourth quarter of 2005 and $703 million for all of 2006--including sales of Libra and Dorado mainframes as well as ES7000 servers running Windows and Linux.