Merrill Lynch stays on the bleeding edge of the financial services industry with multiple IT resources - one more critical resource being IBM mainframe systems.

"The mainframe is not going away at Merrill Lynch. We have been experiencing about 10% growth per year in our capacity, so it's not gong down any time soon," says Tony Lotito, first vice president, enterprise computing services for Merrill Lynch in New York. Merrill Lynch uses the mainframe for their primary trading activities, but uses distributed systems in remote locations for sales and customer information, Lotito says, and online trading touches on all facets of IT. "Our main trading backbone, all of our accounts processing, our private client arm are all heavy users of the mainframe at Merrill Lynch."

Merrill Lynch is not alone in its dependence on the mainframe, at least according to Gartner. A recent report states that enterprise companies with large mainframe environments are expected to grow these deployments through 2009. Among those, most large mainframe customers will continue to grow their installed MIPS at a compound annual growth rate of between 15% and 20% over the same time period. And with a pending shortage of mainframe skills and existing challenges to move large applications from legacy to distributed platforms, enterprise companies today need better tools to ease mainframe management and integrate the legacy systems with distributed systems.

For Merrill Lynch, with critical applications and data residing on the mainframe, Lotito says it's critical his team maintain the systems with management tools that can cover the IBM systems as well as the company's distributed systems. Merrill Lynch has been a user of BMC Software products both for the mainframe and DB2 since 1982. The company upped its relationship with BMC in 2002, when it signed a contract to put Mainview in place. Also included in the package were BMC Performance Manager (formerly Patrol) and Mainview for Linux/Z. In total, Merrill Lynch runs about 37 BMC products in their mainframe environment. Among the many tools in place are Mainview AutoOperator, along with Backup and Recovery Solution for IMS.

"Mainview helps us run our mainframe operations. It delivers alerts that tell us automatically if we have a problem whether it's a function not completing or an infrastructure component that is not available," Lotito says.