* Mainframe staff shortages delaying projects, study finds
A somewhat self-serving study shows that mainframe use is on the rise in enterprise-size businesses.
The study was commissioned by Williams Data Systems, a mainframe specialist in Herndon, Va. It surveyed 135 mid- and upper-level IT executives. These results appear to match those by IBM that mainframe processing will double by 2010.
The study found that almost 70% of respondents say that they must operate at elevated rates to accommodate service-level agreements.
They say however, that they do not know how they will be able to do this based on network staff shortages in the next five years. As many as 30% of the organizations surveyed expect it will be difficult to hire experienced mainframe staff in the next several years.
The study also indicated that companies are relying on less-skilled mainframe workers – almost half of the respondents said they are hiring staff with one to five years of experience. Almost half – 44% – said that staff shortages are responsible for delayed projects and the deployment of new technology.
The study also highlighted the source of mainframe problems – 42% attributed problems to application failure; 36% to network failure. Of the respondents, 71% run applications on both Systems Network Architecture (SNA) and TCP/IP.
Thirty four percent of the respondents say that they will continue to run on SNA in order to avoid rewriting expensive applications. Another third of the respondents – 37% – are implementing IBM’s Enterprise Extender technology, which allows SNA application to extend into the Internet.
Williams has management tools for z/OS mainframe operating environments.
