Mainframes Still Top-Of-Mind For Mainline

Ask PEMCO executives why they continue to use an IBM 9672 mainframe and they might say it ensures high availability for their credit- and debit-card authorization services to credit unions. They might also note that the mainframe gives them the scalability they need for growing data-processing needs.

Press further and they may even mention the service they get from Mainline Information Systems, a Tallahassee, Fla.-based IBM solution provider that's worked with PEMCO for the past seven years to make sure it can serve customers' financial needs.

While Mainline works with the entire IBM server line, about half its employees work specifically with mainframes, said Conrad Vigo, the regional account executive at Mainline who works with PEMCO.

The latest deal between the two companies, an upgrade to the mainframe run by PTSI, was a preemptive strike against the possibility that the existing system could get overloaded with authorization requests, said Ken Hall, technical services supervisor at PEMCO.

The number of authorizations PEMCO served last year grew 38 percent over the prior year, Hall said. But it's impossible to accurately predict growth, so PEMCO decided to upgrade the mainframe before its capacity maxed out, he said.

The two companies started studying capacity trends last March and planned the upgrade for last October, before the peak holiday authorization season.

Mainline swapped 2 Gbytes of memory for faster chips. Then the solution provider replaced three fourth-generation processors that allowed 165 million instructions per second (MIPS) with fifth-generation chips that can churn out 214 MIPS.

The installation was only the latest project completed by Mainline for PEMCO, Hall said. The two companies plan to reassess the mainframe's capacity in a few months, he said.

PEMCO, like the majority of mainframe customers, leases its systems from IBM, Vigo said. The fact that Mainline gets called in by PEMCO for upgrades and other services is a reflection of a rapport these two companies share.

"Ours is not a contractual situation, but they have been working with us for a couple of years, and they know us," Vigo said. "They checked with [research firm Gartner [Group, which said our proposal made sense."

Predicting future needs is difficult, as the organization is always looking to work with new clients, Hall said. "PTSI may be talking to a new credit union for quite some time," he said. "Sometimes [we're caught off-guard, which is a pleasant surprise. But we have to make sure we have enough gas left by keeping the holiday season in the back of our minds."

PEMCO currently has no plans to move authorization services to non-mainframe platforms, Vigo said.

In 2001, the mainframe was online 99.8 percent of the time, including scheduled and unscheduled downtime, a statistic that earned PEMCO its seventh award for high availability from credit-card company Visa, which offers its services through PEMCO's credit union customers.

According to Visa's requirements, an authorization service provider has to provide authorization within 10 seconds or Visa will take over the process and keep the fees that would have otherwise went to PEMCO, Hall said.

"We need the capacity and scalability in the crunch times," he said.

For Vigo, PEMCO's high-availability requirements are sweet music to the ears of a solution provider serving a market in which it is getting harder to find new customers.

"We don't see a lot of new accounts," Vigo said. "It's a matter of skill availability. There's not a lot of mainframe skills in the market today. IBM has been working to develop mainframe programming courses. . . . IBM itself has a need for mainframe people."

Vigo said IBM's latest entry-level mainframes,the z800 series, which were introduced last month,are good products and will help IBM continue to work with solution providers to ship 70 percent of its mainframes through the channel.

"In the mainframe area, we have a joke," Vigo said. "[Microsoft's Windows NT is taking you back to the future. Reliability, availability,[mainframes have had that for years."

Despite a traditional focus on mainframes, Mainline has started working with IBM's other server lines, including the iSeries, the pSeries and even the Intel-based xSeries. "Customers like one-stop shopping," Vigo said. "So we rounded out our portfolio."