Mainframe Meets 'The Office'

BBCWatcher writes "Tom Foremski (a.k.a. Silicon Valley Watcher) claims that IBM is doing some guerilla marketing for the mainframe. The three videos, now on YouTube, show how IBM allegedly trains new mainframe salespeople, in the style of the BBC's "The Office." IBM's videos arrive in the midst of a Microsoft "Office" controversy. Microsoft was not amused when somebody leaked internal training videos from 2004 that feature Ricky Gervais, The Office man himself. Gervais wasn't happy either."

Comments

Funny?

[homer_s]

It is as funny as a coporately funded, PHB-driven campaign could ever be.

But the IBM employees who are forced to watch this will laugh though. They better.

Oh wow

[Anonymous Coward]

It's nice to see some coverage of mainframes here on Slashdot once and a while. Even more so when it's these videos.

The mainframe market tanked in the 90's. In the past year it's starting to see some life in it again. There's even one company of former Amdahl people who are doing mainframes with Linux (and z/OS on top of it). Here's the link: http://www.platform-solutions.com/

Disclaimer: I know some of these people.

Honestly, without some sort of life, and especially competition, the mainframe market was looking quite dead. Which would be a pity, as mainframes are still quite cool in the niche they fill.

Re:Oh wow

[btarval]

Mainframes are absolutely competitive. The main reason why people have stuck with mainframes is IO bandwidth. The PC solutions (even clustered) just can't touch the channel architecture, and never have been able to.

The second main reason why people go with mainframes is that it's more cost-effective to centralize your compute resources in one system, when it comes to maintenance, for many solutions. One single rack or so is a heck of a lot easier to maintain than a Beowulf cluster of boxes, particularly if the latter are scattered.

So yes, for certain niches, mainframes are the way to go.