Fernando Labastida: Technology, Austin, Latin America

Fantastic article in The New York Times online’s Techology section on Saturday, “Why Old Technologies Are Still Kicking.” by Steve Lohr.

The two most important implications about this article for this blog, because it speaks to the heart of the existence of this blog in the first place:

1. Legacy technologies are not going way, meaning integration between disparate systems is a perpetual need for corporations, and

2. Strategic technology decisions are business decisions, pure and simple.

The gist of the article is that the mainframe is not only here to stay, but IBM has invested huge sums to retool the mainframe and modernize it because of the demand within key sectors of the economy, such as the financial industry, for it’s mission critical capabilities.

“I.B.M.’s most recent model, the z10, represents an investment of $1.5 billion and the work of 5,000 technical professionals,” says Lohr in the article.

This despite the prediction in 1991 by Stewart Alsop, cites Lohr, that mainframe technology would disappear by 1996. Why is this? Here’s the money paragraph of the article:

The unfulfilled predictions of demise, experts say, tend to overestimate the importance of pure technical innovation and underestimate the role of business judgment. “The rise and fall of technologies is mainly about business and not technological determinism,” said Richard S. Tedlow, a business historian at the Harvard Business School.

So for all those who say they don’t need to worry about integrating legacy technologies or invest in integration skills or technologies because “all applications are now web services enabled,” think again. The mainframe, and hence legacy technology, are alive and well, and getting stronger!