IBM made a big announcement today involving its mainframe computers — the $16 billion-a-year business everyone thought went the way of the dinosaur yesterday. Yet here is IBM announcing a new mainframe that is more powerful and less costly per pound of computing capacity than anything that came before.

The new mainframe, called the IBM System zEnterprise 196, packs a lot of leading-edge technology that amounts to techno-babble for most executives. It is easy to understand why the hardcore techies, especially the mainframe bigots, are excited. But why should the CFO and other C-level executives care?

Here is a report on the new mainframe that may get you thinking. wiredFINANCE can think of three reasons: reduced costs, risk mitigation, and service delivery performance. Each is key to the bottom line.

The CFO, COO, and other C-level execs may not appreciate or even understand the techno-babble, but they will understand saving money, risk mitigation, and better service delivery performance. In business terms, these translate into information systems that are cost-efficient, less likely to fail, and always there delivering fast response. That’s what mainframes do. Let’s look more closely at these factors.

Reduced cost: The new mainframe is expensive to acquire (probably north of $1 million just to get into the zEnterprise game), but acquiring any computer pales in comparison to the cost of its care and feeding over its productive life. That cost mainly consists of the salaries and benefits of the people it takes to handle the systems. The new mainframe will require far fewer people than are needed to handle the multitude of lower-cost systems required to run the same workloads with the comparable levels of performance and availability. It will also consume less energy, a cost that organizations are only just starting to consider.

Risk mitigation: This looks at the availability of the system. Mainframes historically come closer than other systems to delivering 99.999% uptime, the gold standard. Research from the Robert Frances Group suggests that the difference of just 1.15 points of uptime (between 99.975% uptime and 98.825% uptime) amounts to almost $20 million for a bank with $300 billion in assets, based on the cost of downtime in the financial services segment of $1.5 million/hour. Adding just fractions of a percentage point to your uptime can save big bucks.

Better service delivery performance: This goes beyond uptime to consider system response. When customers contact the company to place orders or request services, they expect the systems to be up and responding quickly, with a 1- to 2-second response at most. Think about trying to book an airline flight. How long will you wait while an hourglass or some other icon spins around before you click on a different airline? That’s lost business and possibly a permanently lost customer. Ouch!

Maybe your business doesn’t mind paying large IT staffs to keep your systems performing or you don’t run critical can’t-fail workloads or you can tolerate hours of downtime. Then the new mainframe won’t mean much to you. But if that’s not the case, it might be worth thinking about the new mainframe or even the previous model, the z10, that it’s replacing, which you can bet will be available at closeout prices. ###