IBM walks away from £870m T-Systems mainframe deal amid competition concerns

The proposed buy of T-Systems' mainframe unit by IBM has withered amid competition concerns from the German cartel office. The reportedly €860m (£870m/$975m) agreement first emerged in mid-January. T-Systems told us it was not selling the unit, although some 400 employees were expected to transfer to Big Blue. The German …

[Anonymous Coward]

PHEW, T-Systems dodged a bullet there!

[TeeCee]

Ever tried to get anything done for a mob who have their IT services supplied by T-systems?

IBM dodged a nuke...

[Ian Michael Gumby]

@AC No bullet dodged...

If the infrastructure is moving away from on premise to the cloud... what do you think will happen to the mainframe?

Most enterprises that have mainframes have been offloading projects over the past years and net new projects have been done on Linux boxes. Or Linux LPARs if they had the capacity but not the infrastructure to land.

So once all of the legacy code is untangled ... poof. Otherwise why go to the cloud? ;-)

(That's a whole different conversation... and worthy of an article... )

So T-Systems could be looking for an out because this group could be a money loser.

W.R.T the mainframe... the interesting thing would be to port Hadoop/MapR and Kubernetes to the mainframe. Now you have a very secure, higher performing base system which can be virtualized as cloud infrastructure. If IBM were 'smurt' they would be doing this already.

But the bottom line... T-Systems would want to sell, thus its not dodging a bullet.

[Cesar Maciel]

Re: @AC No bullet dodged...

>W.R.T the mainframe... the interesting thing would be to port Hadoop/MapR and Kubernetes to the >mainframe. Now you have a very secure, higher performing base system which can be virtualized >as cloud infrastructure. If IBM were 'smurt' they would be doing this already.

It's been done years ago, dude.. By IBM and also by non-IBM - Veristorm ported Hadoop to the mainframe in the 2014 timeframe.

IBM's own ICP - IBM Cloud Private, it's own Kubernetes environment - runs on Linux on the mainframe.

It is not true that most enterprises are offloading the mainframe - yes, there are applications migrating, but it is not all of them, and some times they are being migrated to leave more space to other applications that are growing. The following link puts an interesting perspective on where the mainframe stands today.

https://blog.syncsort.com/2018/06/mainframe/9-mainframe-statistics/

[trevorde]

Two peas in a pod

T-Systems having massive RA's? Looks like a perfect fit for IBM. Just have to confirm that CEO still gets a massive bonus and it's a done deal (private helicopter optional).