by Dr. John E. Kelly III, Senior Vice President,
Solutions Portfolio and Research
In December, I
had the opportunity to take part in a tribute to one of the great architects of
the IBM mainframe, Erich Bloch.
In 1985,
President Ronald Reagan presented Bloch and two of his IBM colleagues, Fred
Brooks and Bob Evans, with the first U.S. National Medal of Technology and
Innovation. The award cited "their
contributions to the IBM System/360, a computer system and technologies that
revolutionized the data processing industry."
Jim Collins,
author of Good to Great, ranks the S/360 as one of the all-time top
three business accomplishments, along with Ford’s Model T and Boeing’s first
jetliner, the 707. That’s pretty exclusive company.
This S/360
evolved over time into what we know today as “z System,” now 50 years young. Today,
IBM launched the latest, most powerful iteration of the mainframe: the
z13. This remarkable technology
continues to power the platforms upon which entire industries and much of our
global economy depend.
What sets the
z13 apart? The same thing that
differentiated its predecessors from the competition: the world-class IBM
research and development inside every machine. There is no greater font of innovation in our industry.
That’s
critical, because clients today require systems of insight. They must bring
together massive amounts of data — customer data, enterprise data, mobile,
social, streaming and genomic data — and analyze all of it to provide insights
we’ve never had before. And they must do it securely.
IBM Research
contributed significantly to achieving these goals in the z13, especially in
the architecture and design of the processor and memory-cache systems,
optimizing the technology for performance gains. Research
results also factored into the high-security crypto devices inside, strengthening
hardware protection.
We are now
entering a new era of cognitive computing, in which computers will increasingly
analyze problems in more human-like ways. And so it’s fair to ask: will the mainframe still be relevant in this
context?
The answer is a
resounding “yes.” In fact, it may be one
of very few systems that can make this leap.
The perfect combination to perform this task is mainframes and cloud,
sometimes attached, sometimes one and the same where the mainframe is the
cloud.
As part of this
transformation, we are bringing the computation to the core data. z13 is designed to speed the mobile
transaction experience by allowing organizations to conduct analytics on the
mainframe without the need to offload data to other systems. z13 "native
analytics" can handle billions of transactions per day while analyzing
data in real-time. It delivers faster, more personalized services with new
levels of fraud protection. This is a competitive differentiator made possible by IBMers in
Research.
We’re already
starting to infuse cognitive sensing technologies inside the machines. We’ll
continue to embed our most advanced learning machine technology into the
mainframe, not only to gain greater efficiencies, but also to extract better
and deeper insights for our clients from the tremendous amounts of data they
possess.
All of this
innovation is accelerating on z13. In
just the past year, IBM has received more than 500 patents on mainframe
technology. There are companies that would be thrilled to have 500 patents in
their entire portfolio.
This is
innovation with a purpose. We listened
to clients from retail to healthcare, from global finance to transportation,
from energy to government. They told us
what they needed to drive their industries forward and to serve their customers
and constituents better. We took that feedback and brought together the
brightest minds — thousands of IBMers who are passionate about solving the
world’s greatest challenges — to design a system that is unmatched.
Every new
generation of the IBM mainframe is state-of-the-art technology that has the
power to transform industries and society. The z13 is the latest product of this remarkable legacy.
The revolution continues.
Tune in to the Livestream event on Wednesday,
January 14, from 2 – 4:30 p.m. ET (US)
when IBM will share a whole new generation of IBM z Systems; and watch the new z Systems movie: New Possibilities (beginning
11:30 a.m. ET on January 14) to find
out how today's IBM mainframe is built for the needs of today’s digital
economy.
Labels: ibm research, John Kelly, mainframe, s/360, system z, z13