In the spirit of the open-source movement whose achievements it’s trying to harness in order to prep up the adoption of its mainframes, IBM Corp. is turning to the community for help with the endeavour. It’s recruited nearly a dozen other technology heavyweights to a new initiative focused on making big iron more appealing in the age of software-defined infrastructure and cloud services.
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The Open Mainframe consortium will work under the wing of The Linux Foundation, the home of many other such projects in the enterprise space, to develop the new capabilities needed to make that happen. IBM is jump-starting the effort with the contribution of some 250,000 lines of code, hailed as the biggest such donation in the community in the history of big iron, from its private war chest.

The highlight of the trove is a predictive analytics technology that IBM has developed to help its customers identify operational problems, which members of the initiative will now be able to port onto other platforms thanks to its open licensing terms. But the group will focus most of its efforts on big iron.

As the prime supplier of mainframes, IBM naturally wants to give organizations more reasons to buy its mammoth systems amid increasing competition from modern architectures. And many of the other members that have joined the group so far are partners such as CA Technologies Inc. and BMC Software Corp. that gain new opportunities to sell their value-added offerings with every system sold.

The rest are mostly existing users like Maris College, which are in turn looking to squeeze as much out of their mainframe investments as possible and see the software being developed as part of the initiative as a good way of doing it. But it’s the potential customers that IBM is ultimately targeting with its new open-source push, although whether there still remains a sufficiently large target on which to focus its growth ambitions for big iron still remains to be seen.

Photo via IBM