points by SV_BubbleTime 4 days ago | 0 comments
I’ve been in tech for a long time… I have no idea what IBM does. Now, I get that I’m not the customer, that their customer is “business” but not my business… no… bigger business. The biggest of businesses I assume. I think it must either be a club I’m not in, or IBM is three half racks in a trenchcoat submitting invoices for millions to companies where people just pay it because “it’s IBM, it must be important”.
[–] bob1029 4 days ago
[–] zombot 4 days ago
> an appropriate workload
Honest question: What would such a workload look like? Why would Salesforce or GitLab not make sense on a mainframe?
[–] jamesfinlayson 4 days ago
Ironically one of the smaller places I've worked at tried to use an IBM product once - I'm still not clear on what it was meant to do or how it was better than any cheaper alternative, so I assume someone in leadership was fooled by a very impressive pitch.
Lots of work went into integration and it never went live.
[–] andsoitis 4 days ago
> I have no idea what IBM does
For one thing, amongst many, IBM mainframes process 70% of global transactions on a value basis
[–] le-mark 4 days ago
Transaction can be a nebulous term; think of credit card transactions, ach and wire transfers, mutual fund buy/sells, bank deposits and withdrawals, etc.
If you absolutely need to scale something vertically, IBM Z is the final stop on the line.
X86 is great at hosting an entire farm of applications. You would never want to install salesforce or gitlab on a mainframe. That would completely defeat its purpose. If you've never encountered an appropriate workload, IBM might never make intuitive sense.
Also, the roadmap:
https://newsroom.ibm.com/2026-08-24-ibm-unveils-next-generat...