Mainframe work still a safe career

"Mainframe" computers are often described as dinosaurs that will soon be extinct. Most detractors say they'll be replaced by servers closer to where the work is being done. Companies that have tried both almost never get rid of the mainframes, because they turn out to be cost-justified.

Often a building full of servers can barely do the same volume of work being done by the mainframes in a single room. For the equivalent results, the mainframe can do the job with fewer salaries to pay, lower energy costs, and more reliability. Often a corporation will end up splitting their processing, with the user interface on servers located near the users, and the data & business rules on mainframes in a secure central location.

With modern telecommunications capabilities & costs, location is not significant. I know of one corporation that saved money by bringing data centers from Europe & Asia to a single centralized facility in the US. Users in the other countries still see their familiar applications operating in the same time zones, with the same reliability. This same corporation has developers world-wide creating and maintaining business applications on those US based mainframes.

Bank of America touts mainframe work as a safe career:
"IBM said this week that 600 colleges, universities and high schools around the world are participating in the mainframe training program, which began in 2004.

The training initiative provides interns and new hires to Bank of America, while some members of its IT staff audit the initiative's courses and provide feedback to help tune the training to business needs.

IBM says it's mainframe revenue has grown in eight of the last 13 quarters. It did note that mainframe revenue plunged by 39% in the second quarter, mirroring server revenue declines for most vendors.

Competing vendors have been arguing that distributed systems have become a strong alternative to mainframes.

However, IT researcher IDC says that MIPS (Million Instructions per Second), a measure of processing power capacity used by mainframes, is on the rise. The mainframe is continuing to grow in terms of the amount of work that processed on the mainframe, which reflects improvements to the platform, said Tim Grieser, an analyst at IDC."