Web services take off. "...break through the constraints of the company's legacy mainframe system... Integration points to external vendors were very limited and very brittle. To extend the system to incorporate customer requirements was close to impossible..."

Presidential Life Rejuvenates Valuable Legacy Code. If an application works well for a business, why risk staff and financial resources on a replacement system that may prove to be substandard? Many insurers are still using software originally written in the 1970s and 1980s for mainframes, but which continues to support critical operations... Presidential Life Insurance Co. took in early 1999, when it moved its COBOL applications off its IBM mainframe to Microsoft Windows...More than 160 screens and 650 COBOL programs were part of that migration... Presidential Life dramatically improving the performance of its applications, but it is also able to take full advantage of the skills of its IT staff

infoUSA Reports Record Revenue and Strong Results for FY2004. "We are also investing in migrating our mainframe-based infrastructure to a server-based environment to deliver more expedient, reliable, and affordable data processing solutions to our customer base in 2005 and beyond. The effective migration to a server-based architecture will enable us to reduce significantly our data processing hardware and software costs."

Starwood's Mainframe Is Ready To Check Out. "For us to get to full realization of our technical direction, we were going to have to, once and for all, shut down the mainframe... should save Starwood $15 million to $20 million a year in operating costs alone, more than enough to pay for the entire contract"

World's largest Linux migration gets major boost. the German national railway announcing today it has successfully moved all its 55,000 Lotus Notes users onto the open-source operating system. Describing the moment as the first important milestone in its company wide move to Linux, Deutsche Bahn said it expected the move to provide it with continuous cost savings, greater flexibility and integration benefits as it gradually moved the rest of its business over.

Linux starts to take a more central IT role. "running key applications and databases on Linux-based systems -- a sign that the open-source software is penetrating deeper into corporate enterprises...moving mission-critical Oracle databases from an aging 24-CPU Hewlett-Packard server running Unix to four-way HP servers that are based on Intel Xeon processors and run Red Hat's Linux... Reports that once took five to six minutes to produce are now ready in 30 seconds, Fraley said. He noted that the replacement servers cost less than the support fees for the old hardware"

Windows Server Takes on Big Unix Boxes. "up in the enterprise server space, Unix dominates, but vendors of Linux, Windows, and proprietary machines are all trying to get a piece of the action, too. With Windows Server 2003 firmly established in the departments and data centers of a majority of companies in the world, it is a foregone conclusion that anyone looking at adding applications today is looking at Windows... Windows, Unix, Linux, and OS/400 servers that have roughly from 100,000 to 1.5 million transactions per minute (TPM) of processing power."

Database Replication Is the Ticket. "Leveraging database replication and testing tools... allowed the travel service site to improve performance and functionality, as well as to maintain close to 99.99 percent availability... can complete an average of 300 to 400 transactions per second and—to accommodate occasional bursts in traffic—up to 1,000 transactions per second... can run tests and apply patches on replica servers without disrupting the core business... eliminated the need for downtime due to maintenance..."

Server Migration Strategies Made Easy. "The primary reasons for such moves generally boil down to upgrades or standardization on a more open platform, as well as consolidation onto fewer, more-powerful machines... most enterprises want to retain their current functionality, look and feel, and minimize the cost/risk of major changes. No one wants to throw out 20 years of business logic just to have the "latest" system, as this would quickly turn the upgrade into a significant downgrade."

Can Linux Take on Big Unix Boxes? "Unix dominates, but vendors of Linux, Windows, and proprietary machines are all trying to get a piece of the action"

HP to rejuvenate OpenVMS. "HP is vulnerable because its OpenVMS customers face a major hardware and software transition: HP is phasing out the Alpha processor that is the primary foundation for OpenVMS today."

Mainframe Migration Alliance Helps Businesses Transition Their IT Environment. "opted to migrate its mainframe system to a client-server solution based on Microsoft Windows 2000 Server... operational IT costs decreased 67 percent. Performance also improved, and the productivity of the company's software developers increased tenfold"

Red Hat CEO sees user focus on architecture, stability. "What user trends have you been noting?... What oftentimes gets missed is that customers are increasingly deciding on an architecture and not on a point product. The leading companies that we're doing business with are all focused on how do they get to a standardized, commodity Intel architecture as fast as possible. Most of them are migrating from something, whether it be an IBM mainframe or one of the 61 Unix variants..."

InfoWorld Names VMware ESX Server a Top Technology Impacting IT in 2005... ESX Server is virtual infrastructure software for partitioning, consolidating and managing systems in mission-critical environments... ESX Server implements the consolidation, dynamic provisioning, resource pooling and all-bases-covered availability assurance of expensive system and storage hardware," commented Tom Yager, technical director at the InfoWorld Test Center. "But ESX Server does it with ordinary servers, modular SANs and vanilla operating systems."

Fiorina ouster raises questions about HP plans. "...users faced some major product changes, including the company’s eventual exodus from its Alpha and PA-RISC chips in favour of the Itanium chip. HP also pulled the plug on two popular operating systems, MPE and Tru64 Unix... may try to accelerate that transition and may not try to have too many products supported all at once...