InformationWeek: The Business Value of Technology

Due to ship later this month, OS/390 version 2, release 9, will support more than 1,000 concurrent E-commerce transactions per second, up from about 150. IBM says it was able to accomplish this by more tightly integrating support for the Secure Sockets Layer security protocol into the operating system.

Added functionality in OS/390's Workload Manager will let customers define service levels for visitors to their Web sites. The software also will support a shared Unix file system, giving IT users a single view of multiple Unix applications running on the same mainframe.

CommerceQuest Inc. in Tampa, Fla., a systems integrator that provides outsourced infrastructure services, says the new transaction-processing features in OS/390 will be important to its customers. "They don't ask how many nodes we have on our System/390 Parallel Sysplex," says Colin Osborne, chairman of CommerceQuest. "They ask us if we can support a million transactions per day."

When IBM unveiled Unix support in OS/390 a few years ago, it often had to provide independent software vendors with financial incentives to create versions of their applications for this environment. But as large customers begin to ask for these capabilities from their software vendors, IBM is finding that it doesn't have to hand out as many carrots.

"Among our existing customer base, around 200 of the huge ones want us to move our application suite to the mainframe," says Brett Queener, director of business development at Siebel Systems Inc. Siebel needed no enticement from IBM to reprogram its CRM software. "To roll the software out to as many as 50,000 users, our customers need us on System/390," Queener says.

The OS/390 version of Siebel, which is not yet priced, will ship in early summer. An OS/390 version of Trilogy MultiChannel Commerce 2.0 is available now, starting at $1 million.

The OS/390 upgrade will be free to existing customers.