IBM has it’s roots back in the 1880s, but it was on June 16th 1911 the company Computing Tabulating Recording (CTR) Corporation, that would become International Business Machines Corporation, was founded. CTR was incorporated in Endicott, New York, USA through a merge of four different companies. These were the Tabulating Machine Company (with origins in Washington, D.C in the 1880s), the International Time Recording Company (founded in Endicott, New York in 1900), the Computing Scale Corporation (founded in Dayton, Ohio in 1901) and the Bundy Manufacturing Company (founded in 1889).

Through this merge CTR became a company with a wide range of products such as employee-time-keeping systems, weighing scales, automatic meat slicers and coffee grinders. There was one more product that would become very important for the development of the IT industry, the punched card equipment, which originally came from the Tabulating Machine Company. However, CTR ended up a company with 1300 employees and offices and plants in Endicott and Binghamton, New York; Dayton, Ohio; Detroit, Michigan; Washington, D.C; and Toronto, Ontario.

Today IBM has it’s headquarter in Armonk, Town of North Castle, New York since 1964 and the building complex is an amazing 26300 square meters. The IBM brand was in 2010 valued to $64.7 billions and the company is highly ranked on many lists such as Fortune, Forbes, Interbrand and others. IBM employs over 350 000 people around the world and around 3300 of them are located in Sweden.

Over the years until this day IBM has contributed more to the development of IT and many other areas than anyone could ever imagine and continues to invests $5-6 million in research every year. Among IBM’s contribution with we find programming languages, relational databases, DRAM memory, RISC processors and a total of four IBM employees has been rewarded the Nobel price for their research.

Among IBM’s server platforms we find System/390 which is now known as System z and the RS/6000 AIX platform (later known as System p) that’s been merged with the AS/400 platform (later known as System i) to become Power Systems. Both the System z and the Power Systems platform has the ability to partition hardware providing true hardware virtualization, a heritage from the mainframe platforms. IBM also develops the supercomputer Blue Gene which in 2009 was rewarded with the National Medal of Technology and Innovation by U.S. President Barack Obama.

Lately IBM has gained worldwide attention for their artificial intelligence project Watson that was exhibited on the game show Jeopardy! where it won against the game show champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter.

If anyone haven’t figured it out yet (hence the counter on my website) I’m proud and honored to become an IBMer in September this year and to join IBM on their continuous journey and challenge to build a smarter planet.

Lately concepts like SOA, consolidation, green computing and cloud computing has been the buzzwords in every CIO’s dream and every technicians nightmares, except mine. In my dreams I see datacenters filled with mainframes and I’m pretty sure that’s not what the CIO’s are dreaming about, then it would be called a nightmare. Before we continue on this subject I have to state that I’m a Linux/UNIX consultant, female and not 60+ years old, just to avoid future confusion…

In the dark, behind the headlines of death sentence after death sentence for the mainframe, companies like IBM, HP and Unisys has been working on bringing the mainframe back on the market. We all know that mainframes are huge, power hungry, complex and most of all OLD, but that’s not true. Mainframes are 1500 virtual servers in the same space where you can fit three racks with 126 1U servers, unless you get heat problems. Reduced heat means less cooling for the same amount of servers in the datacenter and together with a focus on power saving mainframes becomes the ultimate choice when it comes to green computing.

Some of the features IBM has been focusing on is new technologies for partitioning, virtualization and smart solutions for load balancing inside the mainframe. Most companies that are already using mainframe invest in more mainframes and are consolidating their Linux systems inside the mainframe. IBM mainframes seems to get their way back to the market with a growth of mainframes world wide with 30.7%, and the latest model IBM System Z10, released in the beginning of this year, has led to a growth of mainframes in Europe with  58%.

With all due respect, mainframes are stable and just as made for cloud computing, but who’s going to operate them? The amount of System Administrators that are familiar with mainframes and applications running on them is barely enough for what’s needed at this point. Same story goes for System Developers that are familiar with languages like Cobol and RPG. My hope is that this lack of competence won’t impede use of mainframes and that more people will see their possibilities for virtualization and cloud computing.