14 DAY TRIAL // IBM hosted a "System z Summit" for customers and industry partners and did something almost unheard of in the world of mainframe manufacture and marketing: they published the sales numbers for System z. Even if most computer users never heard of it, much less saw or used one, the old mainframe still has a place in our world and still makes money for the company that practically invented the modern PC.
Timothy Morgan from IT Jungle was on hand at the summit and talked to IBM's vice president of sales for System z. IBM told Morgan that there are only 10000 System z locations in the world but that they are generating billions of dollars in hardware sales. Those sales have recently increased and now they are at a peak that IBM hasn't encountered since 1998. When you add to the hardware revenues the additional billions made from software sales, storage and peripherals, you realize that a tiny hardware base is generating massive incomes from its owner company.
When IBM launched the first of the z series line, in the 1960s-era, the company created the first mainframe computer system. At the same time, System/360 introduced the idea of legacy code and thus starting the computer era, as seen today. Even if Intel's x86 ISA and not IBM's mainframes become the most successful computer standard ever, we should thank IBM for inventing the backwards compatibility.
Even after years and years after their production, IBM's mainframes are still keeping the pace with today's industry, much to the chagrin of HP and other cluster vendors. In the closed world of System z, IBM gets paid to deliver performance and they deliver it through mainframes, using a dedicated operating system (a z-specific OS, plus the application stack). Despite the popularity of high-level programming languages like C, C++ and Java, IBM still needs and uses ISA.
Mainframes are not reigning supreme anymore as IBM and System z has serious competition from HP and other cluster vendors. HP has a line of clusters based on the much newer Itanium processors, but the industry seems to be happy enough with IBM's systems, as no massive transition ever took place. Maybe they all remember the 1980s old saying, when PC clones war was in full swing: "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM."