In recent months, I stumbled on something I would like to share with you and would also appreciate your feedback.  More than a year ago, CA Technologies conducted a survey in EMEA that clearly showed mainframe ran 55% on average of the mission critical workload, and the respondents stated they their typical spend is around 23% of their IT budget.( http://www.ca.com/gb/content/campaign.aspx?cid=208005 )

But in many interviews with CIOs I see the statement; "The Mainframe is too expensive" is always there!  So I decided to spend some more time on this and the results simply blew my mind.

Let me start by saying that our industry, in general, is still in its infancy. There still is a lot of growing up to do. And cost management is complex because the environments we work with are very, very complex. My suspicion was raised about 12 months ago. A few Mainframe folks from a customer complained that the higher cost of mainframe software meant that they had difficulties convincing their management to move workload back to the mainframe. I happened to know the customer very well, and was surprised because I knew that the mainframe component was not increased at all.

After some further investigation I found that almost 30% of the cost allocated to the Mainframe was not Mainframe software at all. Someone in the company decided that a good part of what they called "Infrastructure Management" belonged to the Mainframe!  And when I asked more questions, I found that they also did this for energy and storage management costs and expenses they specified as "other"... And especially the "energy" bit was (as you will understand) a lot of money!  In one case, the Mainframe was charged with 50% of the energy cost. 2 z10's, 17,500 distributed servers... Because "the mainframe runs 50% of all the workload." 

So, during my travels around EMEA, I continued to ask customers questions and the answers were often the same;"Yes, the Mainframe Cost Center is the dustbin of the IT Procurement people. When in doubt, put it under Mainframe....."

I understand that the Mainframe is NOT some dirt cheap IT platform. Efficiency, security, reliability and a system that runs 50% of the mission-critical workload (at least) 365 days a year, can make- or break a company and all that speed and reliability come at a cost.  But please, calculate the REAL cost!

But I realize all too well that this will cause huge controversy. Because suddenly, all the systems that we now think are so cheap, will suddenly be a lot more expensive!  And, politically, this is hard to swallow. But if we want to properly measure business success, it's time we start doing things right, based on the right metrics. And we should stop defending past decisions  to implement distributed systems  LOOK right by allocating charges to the Mainframe that don't reflect the real costs.

It's all about making informed decisions, and the pains that come with it. Let's get it right while we still can.

Are your organizations also having these issues? What are they allocating to the Mainframe? How are you trying to change that?  Give examples please.....