Last week, I spent some time in New York, at the invitation
of technology company IBM for an important anniversary. In early 1964, Thomas
Watson Jr., the son of the company’s founder, essentially bet the company on a
new technology, the mainframe. This was a new era of computing, in which
heavy-duty computing muscle was put in the service of some of the most pressing
problems, including the space race, banking and management of large sets of
data.
At the New York anniversary last week, though, was an
interesting sight. The event was held on Park Avenue in midtown Manhattan. When
the main festivities were done however, and we got out, there was an
advertising van parked across the road. It was from a competing company, and it
bore the legend: ‘After 50 years of the mainframe it is time to embrace the new
style of IT’. Guerrilla marketing, to be sure, but in that tableau lay the very
question of the future of information technology.
In an era of telephones that can take pictures, and
computers you can hold in one hand and do not require a physical keyboard, it
is sometimes difficult to remember just how far we have come in a mere fifteen
years. At the turn of the century, it was a wonder when one sent a text from a
mobile phone. Laptops were only then coming into vogue in a widespread manner,
and companies in which every employee had access to a desktop computer was
rare, at least in Kenya. A mere five years before that, it was then easy to
divide computing by size – mainframe, minicomputer and microcomputer (which
included desktops). The different computers had unique tasks, delineated
conveniently by size (which corresponded to computing power).
But now, in the era of the internet, distributed computing
and the cloud, that delineation is breaking down in unpredictable ways. Because
current personal computers are so powerful (the oft-cited factoid is that
there’s more computing power in a modern smartphone than was available to the
Apollo scientists who crafted the moon landing 45 years ago), the implication
is that any computing power needed can be found in these personal devices.
That’s largely true for most personal computing needs, but it is when the
demands are greater, and needs not so linear, that the argument returns.
IBM’s bet is that the era of the mainframe is in its
infancy. As countries move into offering e-services to their citizens (and
Kenya has made bold claims in this direction), vast resources are needed to
crunch data on anything from live traffic to disease control to climate
modelling. The needs are equally great in the private realm. Banks, for
instance, are offering their customers the opportunity to access the full menu
of banking from their mobile devices. At the back end of this is usually a mainframe
computer, whose remarkable computing power does everything from calculate
interest rates and customer balances in real time, to taking care of security
and peak usage.
Can these requirements be met by cloud computing and other
ways of harnessing computers together? The jury is out on that one. On the one
hand, there are those who say that the ever-increasing abilities of personal
devices are just the ticket. There are others, though, who point to the
presence of mainframe computers even in cloud-based services, with these
behemoths doing the heavy lifting at what computer experts like calling the
back end.
I had a chat with a doctor from Ghana named Elijah Paintsil.
He’s currently a professor at Yale University, and is running a remarkable
project back home, which aims at eliminating mother to child transmission of
HIV, from the current 15% to near-zero by 2020. He told me that one of the
biggest hindrances is the lack of ability to correlate data about women who
visit health centres for pre-natal care and the ability to test them for HIV.
Often, the test kits will not be available where needed, and, when the
expectant woman leaves the clinic, off she goes with her unknown status. The
project aims at tracking these women all the way down to their villages, where
other data networks (such as the chiefs who know everyone) can be
cross-referenced to these visits. It’s an ambitious, presidentially-decreed project,
and Dr. Paintsil claims that it can only be delivered using the power of the
mainframe.
It’s another company-betting moment at IBM, which, if you
rememeber, sold its personal computer business to China’s Lenovo in 2005, and
also began to divest itself of its server business early this year. It’s now
mostly in services, and those of which are ambitious enough – like the Smarter
Cities project – to require the computing power of mainframes. Will it succeed?
Well, we’ll find out over the next fifty years.
Also published in the Business Daily on April 15 2014 at http://www.businessdailyafrica.com/Opinion-and-Analysis/Mainframe-computer-at-a-crossroads/-/539548/2279620/-/83t36l/-/index.html
Comments
Post a Comment