SaaS is the new TSO

Nice piece from my mate Dancing Dinosaur about SaaS on System z.

"Veteran mainframe data center managers were baffled when SaaS [...] appeared on the scene years ago. That’s what they had been doing for years, for decades, they would tell me. Only, it wasn’t called that then. How is it any different from time sharing, they would ask.

"Conceptually it isn’t very different. However, three things make it different enough: 1) the emergence of the Internet as a ubiquitous connecting fabric that everyone can use; 2) the browser as the universal client; and 3) the advent of services and service orientation. Previously monolithic code is now extracted as identifiable services and made accessible over the Internet via the browser following a requester-responder model. "

I'm not sure I would call myself a Veteran but I did raise an eyebrow or two when I read about some recent "advancements" in the fields of grid and cloud computing. DD's right, in many ways, cloud computing is very like mainframe time sharing (good old TSO), just much prettier. Which is why IBM have worked hard on System z in recent years to position it in the market as the perfect cloud provider. Even if you don't already own one.