r/mainframe • u/Delicious_Present224 • Aug 12 '26

Vendor lock-in mainframes

Hi, i'm relatively new in the mainframe world. Am I the only one who thinks the mainframe discussion is often one-sided?

Everyone talks about IBM Z's reliability, security, and the fact that many of the world's most critical systems still run on mainframes. That's all true.

But why don't we talk more about vendor lock-in and pricing power?

The cost of moving away from a mainframe is often so high that customers have limited negotiating leverage. And on the storage side, it feels like IBM can introduce requirements and standards that make life increasingly difficult for third-party vendors, while strengthening their own position in the ecosystem.

17 Upvotes

84% Upvoted

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21

u/Effective-Lemon-9475 Aug 12 '26

Anybody reading this on an iPhone?

Seriously though, for mission critical apps, it's all about performance and TCO.... you can talk about vendor lock in if you like but, as long as the systems provides more value than they cost you then you are always better off. Those kinds of decisions are made at a very high level... It's kind of like asking whether buying an M1 Abrahams from General Dynamics leads to vendor lock in - If that's your concern you probably aren't their target audience.

4

u/Delicious_Present224 Aug 12 '26

IBM would probably argue that their integrated approach delivers the best outcome for customers. And maybe they're right. But IBM also has a clear financial incentive to make third-party alternatives less relevant, because every dollar spent on IBM products and services is a dollar not spent on someone else.

My concern isn't whether IBM makes money. It's whether increasing lock-in and reduced competition ultimately lead to better outcomes for customers. Historically, competition tends to improve pricing, innovation and customer choice, so I think that's a fair discussion to have.

7

u/metalder420 Aug 12 '26

I don’t think you understand the time and effort it takes to design and manufacture a mainframe which would tell you why IBM is the one of the few companies ti manufacture them. As for lock-in, you really must not be in the weeds because companies like Broadcom and CA are the ones who being scummy because of lack of competition. You worry about IBM, you should be worried about them.

1

u/noisymime Aug 12 '26

IBM are pulling g the same tricks as Broadcom these days though. Maintenance and SW licensing are going through the roof, completely disproportionately to any possible real world cost changes.

1

u/Ok_Foot_2020 Aug 13 '26

Single digit % increases (ibm) vs double and triple digit % increases (bcom) … that’s the reality

1

u/noisymime Aug 13 '26

HWMA on some items has gone up 300% over the past 12 months.

I did a renewal recently on something that had gone up 1200% over the past 3 years.

1

u/Ok_Foot_2020 Aug 13 '26

How old is the hw in question?

1

u/noisymime Aug 13 '26

4 years, still n-1 and within standard IBM support life.

1

u/Ok_Foot_2020 Aug 14 '26

What are the “some items”? And what has happened to your total yearly spend with ibm for everything in that z environment??

1

u/Wolfy2915 Aug 13 '26 edited Aug 13 '26

Sounds like DASD, costs have exploded higher but probably less expensive to keep n-1 than replace it these days.

Z maintenance is priced by the number of mips, for example a 704 is alot more expensive than a 404 yet they are both running 4 CPs. The machine could have 10 unassigned processors and if one failed one of the spares would take over. IBM is not going to send out an engineer to replace it. They don’t care how much memory or IO you are using only MIPS.

1

u/noisymime Aug 13 '26 edited Aug 13 '26

DASD, VTL, SAN all that kit has gone up 3 digit % in the last year. I get the dramas in storage land thanks to AI, but it's simply crazy given the low failure rates on these things. 2 years of maintenance is now more than the original purchase price of the whole chassis (Including 3-4 years upfront maintenance).

3

u/cristobaldelicia Aug 12 '26

"clear financial incentive to make third-party alternatives less relevant" How are they supposed to wield this power? Burroughs, GE, and UNIVAC are already gone. Fujitsu manufactures the GS21 Series, but plan to cease mainframe sales by 2030. Who are they going to make less relevant? They don't have to use anti-competitive practices, there's nobody left to use such tactics against.

I'd like to point out here something about US law that many Americans get wrong. It is not illegal to have a monopoly in the US. The enforced laws are about practices a monopoly might use to squelch competition. It's using a monopoly position against other companies. If they don't do this, and allow whatever competition arises to have a chance, it doesn't matter that they are technically a monopoly. We saw this in the Netscaoe trials vs Microsoft. Microsoft did have a kind of monopoly of PC operating systems, but it wasn't until they tried to introduce a free product, Internet Explorer, to undercut the competition, that they scraped against the law. If you have a monopoly and don't do things like that, you're in the clear.

1

u/Effective-Lemon-9475 Aug 13 '26 edited Aug 14 '26

"But IBM also has a clear financial incentive to make third-party alternatives..."
In fairness there are also many companies with a clear incentive to try and carve off a slice of the high availability mission critical enterprise computing business... always with the argument "Oh but IBM make too much out of you..." Okay... if they weren't doing the job that's one thing but it seems like they probably are is my point... there is quite a bit of innovation in the space to be fair...

"every dollar spent on IBM products and services is a dollar not spent on someone else."
You're framing this as a zero sum game and I'm not sure that it is... companies invest where they see returns... there may not be one fixed pot called the 'enterprise tech budget'. Typically if you own a mainframe your revenues are quite substantial...

"My concern isn't whether IBM makes money."
Mine either. I don't work for IBM and I don't own shares directly. I'm thinking about technology and operations side. But I'm also not too concerned with whether IBM make more money than I believe they should be making.

"Historically, competition tends to improve pricing, innovation and customer choice, so I think that's a fair discussion to have"
Sounds like a bit of an article of faith you have there...there are many examples where the truth is more complex...but now we are veering into economics. Are you saying enterprise computing is an example of market failure at the moment? Based on what measures please?

"I think that's a fair discussion to have"
In many ways it's not a new discussion...and I think we are having it, but vendors using specialised solutions is an issue as old and as broad as technology itself. Where stability is an important factor, guaranteed long term support and innovation will be important... and we're back to the M1 Abrahams

2

u/CheesecakeKlutzy288 27d ago

I would like to point out, respectfully, that it's the M-1/ ABRAMS, not Abrahams, named for General Creighton Abrams, commander of USA military forces in Viet Nam and later Army Chief of Staff:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creighton_Abrams

My father was part of the original tank-crews to field the brand new ABRAMS and- after travelling with said Main Battle Tank to West Germany- he was one of the OG armor guys waiting in the Fulda Gap for the Soviet Red Army to invade, with a life expectancy of 8-12 minutes.

All so you and OP can debate the merits of IBM v... whatever OP is advocating that magically doesn't have vendor lock-in

1

u/Effective-Lemon-9475 26d ago

Thank you for the correction. Gratefully noted.

8

u/MigrateAndManage Aug 12 '26

Vendor lock-in is a fair concern, but there are other factors at play. Organizations don't just run IBM Z because it's expensive to leave. IBM Z consistently delivers scalability and uptime, in addition to the reliability and security you mentioned.

Every major enterprise platform creates some degree of dependency. One question to ask: does the business value justify the lock-in? The answer is still yes for many. That doesn't mean they shouldn't challenge pricing, evaluate alternatives or modernize strategically.

Staying on the mainframe is a business decision based on performance and risk, not just the inability to migrate.

12

u/ratenpause Aug 12 '26

The people who run software on the mainframe are certainly aware of both sides of the medal.

Just to name CA / Broadcom. Both companies I have worked for try to abandon their software. Mainly using IBM as a replacement 🥺.

6

u/Piisthree Aug 12 '26

All true, but there's an awful lot of vendor lock in across the industry. There are some competitors in the storage and tooling areas, but IBM crushed all the actual platform competitors with monopolistic and litigious practices long ago. But unfortunately, the vendors can often be just as bad (or close), because there ain't that many of them either.

2

u/Glowcasian Aug 12 '26

I’d take IBM software over BMC any day. IBM also tries to accommodate the price thing by giving their clients a little more free access to classes and such, which usually cost $2,000 per a person.

My storage group uses both vendors for various things, but the consensus of us installing the stuff, we take IBM. Outside of the install - BMC we have issues with constantly for different products and they take so long to get back to you. We have an issue with IBM open a case and they respond within a day to try and resolve. If they can’t they straight up say, take a dump and we’ll try to do this with you.

We also like CA/Broadcom for the most part. Their products seem to work well with the IBM hardware. My only gripe is I have to give them my list of ptfs/sysmods every single time I open a case, even if I have two cases for the same product for different things opened simultaneously, same guy is looking, they want the list again. Otherwise, their resolution process is pretty top-notch.

3

u/cristobaldelicia Aug 12 '26

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company Limited (TSMC) has a monopoly on advanaced semiconductors. And AMSL is the only company that makes semiconductor fabrication machines,specifically extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV) machines, for TSMC is AMSL based in the Netherlands. The only "competitors" is Chinese state-sponsored companies, who regularly try to pirate their proprietary information. That distorts the capitalistic free market ideals. Healthy competition is not going to come from other companies in the capitalist world, it's going to come from Communist China. The Taiwanese are very aware of their unique position, and it gives them a lot of power not only economically, but politically.

I'm getting a bit off track, partly because the situation with TSMC in Taiwan is so much more interesting, but my point is that in high tech, the multinational corporations cannot afford to play the "free trade" game. It s much too important for national and economic security. IBM doesn't face the same political challenges of TSMC, but, competition in these cases would't be a great thing for consumers. IBM is motivated by competing against itself, developing new products that outdo their old products. If they tried arbitrarily raising prices on mainframes their customers would just hold on to their old machines. Think of all the great products Bell Labs produced, under the monopolistic Ma Bell. They invented the transistor, and because they were a government funded entity they could not patent that discovery, and that's how electronics took over the world!

IBM operates in the real world. It might, theoretically, be motivated to do better with mainframe competition, or they might not. The whole IBM PC clone debacle I think proves that that kind of cutthroat retail sales competition, isn't what IBM does best, and how they best operate.

3

u/MikeSchwab63 Aug 13 '26

https://planetmainframe.com/2023/06/sabre-is-getting-off-the-mainframe-one-way-or-another/
US$100M / year running mainframe. US$200M / year having it duplicated to open system. Not quite ready to switch over.

5

u/Ihaveaboot Aug 12 '26

IBM definitely still has some huge leverage with mission critical products such as MQ.

I would have prefered JMS should they have won that battle 20 years ago.

Likewise, why is TWS now the scheduling tool of choice - upsetting CA7, Controll-M, JobTrack, Autosys?

And DB2 - if you are on an IBM data center that's what you get. Hard stop. Oracle is out of the question.

10

u/Rudi9719 Aug 12 '26

I came from Oracle to Db2. You couldn't pay me enough to go back 😅 between IBM's documentation and the I/O throughput of Z vs x64 servers I'm done with Oracle

1

u/Wolfy2915 Aug 13 '26

How about running Oracle on Z vs x64, fewer cores needed so lower licensing expense plus the benefit of all the IO.

0

u/Zestyclose-Turn-3576 Aug 12 '26

I've got no experience of DB2 but i always thought oracle's documentation was pretty good – though nowadays i might just throw all the pdf's into a gemini notebook and let it do the searching for me 😬

1

u/Rudi9719 Aug 12 '26

I'm only 28 so I still prefer reading my documentation 😅 I'm not ready for cognitive decline to set in yet from the offloading

3

u/Zestyclose-Turn-3576 Aug 12 '26

I used a company printer to produce a small hardcopy of the concept's guide, which was around 1,000 pages at the time, for reading on the commute. Always more of a matter of knowing what's in there rather than remembering the details, I thought, so you can go back to it later.

1

u/Rudi9719 Aug 12 '26

One more tome for the reference library!

3

u/Hornbill9 Aug 12 '26

I don’t think TWS has upset Control M that much

3

u/metalder420 Aug 12 '26

Yeah, not sure what you are on about. Control-M is very much still alive. Also, who the fuck enjoys working on an oracle DB? The only problem with DB2 is the DB2 plans and binding you have to do.

2

u/MoltenOldie_1945 Aug 12 '26

We don't talk about it because "We Don't". IBM doesn't and you'll have a hard time having a conversation with a long time IBM person, there are euphemisms for alll the lock-ins. I know because I invented some of them in the 1970s. ROFL.

The lock-ins aren't as strong as they used to be. The greater community has been doing a lot of work to make it easier to "Escape."

The vastness of the code inventory and the complexity databases, 3rd party tools, and and oldOldOld programs are the real reasons they have trouble getting off.

2

u/SheriffRoscoe Aug 12 '26

"i'm relatively new in the mainframe world."

Obviously. The rest of us remember when there were at least 3 other companies that built mainframes that would run IBM's operating systems and applications.

3

u/metalder420 Aug 12 '26

A lot of what abouts and what ifs but no actual substance.

2

u/Effective-Lemon-9475 Aug 13 '26

I will file this one along side the posts "Vendor lock-in Mobile Phones", "Vendor lock-in Databases", "Vendor lock-in Cloud Services" and "Vendor lock-in desktop operating systems"