Commenting on a recent Economists article titled "The Return of the Mainframe," Gregg Willhoit explains how IBM's improvements for servicing the cloud have positively impacted the Progress DataDirect Shadow product. This podcast runs for 1:48.
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Gregg Willhoit:
I think that what IBM has done for cloud computing has impacted Progress DataDirect Shadow twofold. One has to do with, from the management aspect, the management of services, the management of workloads, moving across the cloud. IBM has given vendors the ability to do this, to basically more easily dynamically configure their applications to run in the cloud, more easily manage them in the cloud as they move from system to system.
And secondly, from a TCO standpoint, IBM has understood that many of these cloud-based computing environments are going to be standards-based. And so IBM has done a very good job of making standards?based APIs or interfaces eligible for zip offload. And if not, then they’ve allowed vendors such as us, Progress Data Direct, the products like Shadow, to achieve a really, really significant benefit in the TCO area with regards to standards-based access to all the mainframe computing assets.
Because cloud computing is definitely dependent upon standards-based access. There’s no two ways about it.