Mainframes are in demand again as customers rediscover their reliability,but finding programmers for them is a big problem, writes Tom Foremski.

Once, pundits predicted that the mainframe computer was a dinosaur heading for extinction. These huge classics of the corporate computing world were reaching the end of the line and would give way to the new generation of server-based systems.

History proved them wrong. But although mainframes are surviving, the same cannot be said of the information technology workers who run them. And as this trend accelerates, a crisis is looming for the many companies and government departments that continue to rely on mainframes for critical operations.

Last week, IBM introduced its most powerful mainframe, code-named T-Rex, packed with the latest technologies and amply demonstrating that the mainframe remains a formidable IT system.

T-Rex is three times more powerful than any other IBM mainframe and is well capable of carrying the type of workloads that e-business requires.

In fact, the mainframe seems to be undergoing a resurgence as customers rediscover its reliability, security and adaptability. Compared with servers, the mainframe holds its own on measures such as speed, or the number of transactions per second. And it requires fewer people to operate a mainframe - an important issue, as labour costs continue to grow as the largest element of IT budgets.

But IT workers with mainframe experience are getting older. A study by the Meta Group last year found 55 per cent were over 50, compared with fewer than 10 per cent of those with Unix or Windows NT server skills.

In fact, younger IT workers have shunned the mainframe world over the past few years, preferring to hone their skills in internet-related areas of Web services, and programming languages such as C and Java, rather than Cobol, the mainframe standard.

Mr Nadav Aharonov, senior programmer at the University of San Francisco, is typical of mainframe programmers in that he is skilled in the Cobol programming language and is over the age of 50. Almost everyone on his team of eight programmers is more than 50 years old and one is retiring this year at 62.

"We still have a lot of legacy applications written in Cobol that we have to maintain; and so we are often looking to hire Cobol programmers," says Mr Aharonov.

He says most of the Cobol programmers that the universities hire are in their 40s or older. The generational difference is most apparent when compared with the university's network and Web-server programming teams.

"Those guys are mostly in their mid-20s; we are the old fogeys," Mr Aharonov jokes.

The university has no plans to put its mainframe out to pasture, in spite of the growing problem of finding programmers.

This is typical, says Ms Diane Morello, senior analyst at Gartner, a leading IT research and consultancy business.

"Very few companies have done the risk assessment they need to do, to work out a plan of when they retire a technology platform," she says.

Ms Morello advises companies on their IT skill set and related issues.

And despite the dwindling pool of mainframe IT workers, she says, many companies are not facing up to hard decisions.

Most affected by these issues are financial services, telecommunications and government, all heavy mainframe users.

Ms Morello says putting off the hard decisions can be risky, resulting in high retraining costs to keep the mainframe running or serious disruptions to critical business processes.

But moving off the mainframe is not easy and requires long-term planning, she says. Companies would have to rewrite critical business applications, test and debug those applications and make sure they have the skills to support the new systems.

General Mills, the US food giant, decided to do just that. Concerned about the dwindling mainframe IT talent pool, it decided to pull the plug on its Amdahl mainframe by the end of this year, in favour of three Hewlett-Packard super-domes, high-end Unix server systems.

As head of IBM's computer hardware business group, Mr Bill Zeitler should be worried about other large companies following General Mills, and the implications of the ageing mainframe workforce on his future mainframe sales.

"About three years ago, we were concerned about this issue of IT skills," he says. "But we have managed to keep the mainframe platform vital, which is the best thing we could do in ensuring a future for the mainframe."

And, with an estimated 60 per cent of US corporate data residing in mainframes, he is confident that the shift from the platform is likely to be glacial.

Also, the T-Rex mainframe will be used by some customers to replace several mainframes with just one system, thus helping to reduce the number of mainframe administrators needed.

IBM will be the biggest customer for its own T-Rex mainframes. As the world's largest IT outsourcing company, it operates hundreds of mainframes in data centres around the world for thousands of companies.

This also means that mainframe users could outsource their operations to IBM and let Big Blue provide the IT skills required.

But outsourcing means some loss of control and, for some companies, the greying of their mainframe programmers will mean consigning the computers they service to history. - (Financial Times Service)