Not so. Trusty mainframes are alive and kicking and remain critical components of a company's IT infrastructure, especially for mission-critical high-volume transactional environments, like financial services, where the mainframe has proven itself to be a trusted platform for housing large amounts of data in a secure and centrally managed environment.

Research shows that mainframe revenues are rising and MIPS capacity is at an all-time high. We suspect that much of this growth is coming from existing mainframe users who are either upgrading or growing their mainframe usage. At the same time vendors are becoming sensitive to the cost and introducing new pricing strategies to make it more cost-effective on both the hardware and software fronts that extend its reach to companies that once felt priced out. The resurgence in interest in mainframe is also partly due to companies moving to consolidate their IT infrastructures. Mainframe systems like IBM's System z, with its large capacity, are good consolidation tools.