The impact of IBM’s SPSS acquisition on the mainframe

On July 28, IBM announced it would acquire business intelligence software company, SPSS. The merger may have a big impact on the mainframe’s business intelligence abilities in the future.

James Governor on the impact of IBM’s SPSS acquisition, via The Mainframe Blog:

IBM has done a lot of really solid work making the mainframe less expensive for non-CICS and IMS workloads like Linux (IFL), DB2 (zIP) or WebSphere (zAAP). IBM is determined to drive datawarehousing workloads to the mainframe. But SAS Institute was a “stick in the mud”, effectively forcing users to pay capacity-based mainframe charges, and so making it less likely customers would run Big Data analytics on z. Well now IBM is in a great position to offer specialist offload processors for data analytics workloads, but also push SAS Institute into a price war that can only benefit customers interested in mainframe consolidation- and don’t think that’s an isolated group.