Young Mainframe Programmers are the Cat’s Meow.

IBM today introduced a new line of mainframes, the massive computers that businesses have used to process data for decades.

Which raises the question: Where do businesses find people who remember how to program the things?

That’s a question IBM is grappling with, as well. Most computer-science students these days view mainframe programming as the tech equivalent of learning Latin. They’d rather learn Java, AJAX, Ruby on Rails and other hot new Web programming languages. So, since 2004, IBM has been trying to get colleges and universities to include mainframe classes in their curriculums. IBM estimates that 50,000 students have sat through a mainframe class since then.

Students like Elizabeth Bell, a 23-year old computer-programming student at Georgian College in Ontario, Canada, are starting to realize that while being a young mainframe programmer may not be sexy, it’s highly marketable. “There are so many legacy systems out there that it isn’t feasible to think that businesses will phase them out over the next 10 or 20 years,” she tells the Business Technology Blog. Rather than compete with 50 other Web designers for the handful of programming jobs that use the hot technologies of the moment – technologies that Bell says she knows – she taught herself COBOL, a mainframe computer language invented in 1959.

Bell says there are advantages to knowing an older technology. Sure, she probably won’t get a job at a startup. But she did land one at the Bank of Montreal that she didn’t even have to apply for: The bank sought her out because of her mainframe skills. And she’s not competing with any other people her age for managerial positions that are bound to come up. We asked her if it ever got annoying listening to her colleagues reminisce about Woodstock. She didn’t bite.

“I may be the youngest now,” she tells us. “But there are smart, practical kids who are in school because they want a career who realize that the mainframe is the way to go.”

The future looks bright for the mainframe.

Majority of IT managers surveyed said they will continue to use mainframes for legacy apps and move new workloads to the platform.

The future looks bright for the mainframe as a majority of IT managers report they will continue to use the systems for legacy applications and start moving new workloads that could benefit from the mainframe's availability and scalability onto the platform.

In its annual survey of 1,100 mainframe users, management software maker BMC discovered that IT's planned use for the mainframe as a computing platform continues to grow. For instance, 65 percent of respondents said the mainframe platform will continue to grow and attract new workloads in their environment, compared with 52 percent of respondents who said the same in the 2007 survey. Thirty percent said that the mainframe will continue as a viable long-term platform, but restricted to legacy workloads. And 4 percent indicated mainframe users should consider an exit strategy in the next five years.

Fewer organizations surveyed this year also plan to eliminate their mainframe environment in the short term. According to BMC's findings, 59 percent of respondents said they would be ridding themselves of the mainframe in less than three years, compared with 74 percent in 2007. Thirty-six percent said they would work toward removing mainframes in three to six years and 6 percent expected to keep mainframes in house for more than six years. (Compare server products.)

Nearly three-fourths of those surveyed said the availability advantages that the mainframe offers keep the systems running in their IT shops. For 65 percent the mainframe offers a superior centralized data serving environment. Sixty-two percent believe that transaction throughput requirements are best suited to the platform, and the same number value the mainframe's security strengths.

"In terms of stability, the mainframe is probably the best machine for transaction crunching. We service 2,000 end users at any given time, so having that kind of flexibility provides us with the ability to continue to support the health care environment while the mainframe processes applications and passes them down to other systems," says Paul Baquet Jr., a senior systems analyst at Duke Health Technology Solutions who oversees enterprise infrastructure and mainframe services and uses BMC software to monitor the environment.

Other reasons survey respondents choose to keep mainframes in-house include the ability to integrate the legacy platform with newer systems. For instance, 44 percent said that access to the platform is increasing through Web services and service-oriented architecture integration projects. And 42 percent reported they are leveraging legacy applications to create new business applications. Nearly one-third said specialty MIPS are supporting new applications and reducing overall mainframe total cost of ownership. And 16 percent said they are consolidating existing distributed workloads back to the mainframe.

"The mainframe is getting smaller and smaller, and the scalability just keeps getting better," Banquet says. "There is a place for the mainframe and there is a place for distributed systems. People in the industry are finding ways to make these work better together, but the mainframe is a very reliable machine and the distributed system just a junior still trying to grow up and be the mainframe."