A 'no gain, no fee' consultancy offering is being made to IBM
mainframe users who want to slash their processing costs.
A study of 100 UK mainframe users by mainframe performance
management firm Macro 4 shows
that 84% want to reduce their processing power consumption.
Chris Limberger, marketing manager at Macro 4, said, "With
budgets tightening, reducing processing power consumption can bring
huge cost savings, including delaying purchases of costly CPU
upgrades.
"It also means immediate reductions in monthly systems software
licence charges, which vary in line with how much CPU power was
used the previous month."
Macro 4 is offering mainframe users a short term consultancy
project, which guarantees to achieve processing power savings
worth at least twice the value of its fee, or they will not be
charged.
Analyst firm Gartner has estimated that most large mainframe
users can expect their power consumption to increase by 15% to 20%
annually, when measured in million instructions per second
(MIPS).
This forces them to upgrade their CPU or risk slower application
response times and ultimately reduced productivity and customer
service.
Limberger said, "Even in the most stable IT environments, MIPS
consumption gradually increases over time due to small changes to
applications, environments and databases.
"And the negative effects of these essentially minor alterations
in programming code can be multiplied as database size and
transaction volumes grow. Macro 4's MIPS reduction programme
provides a risk-free way for organisations to identify and correct
these changes."
The initial consultancy phase of the programme uses Macro 4's
performance management software to guarantee to free up CPU
capacity equivalent to at least 200% of the project fees, or
customers pay nothing.
The initial short term engagement will also identify further
savings that could be made by undertaking a more detailed project
using Macro 4's software.