How many Unisys mainframe customers are still arround?

[hji...@synthesis-mc.de]

It seems to be a well hidden secret how many mainframe sites are still arround, especially those that run Unisys MCP or OS/2200 mainframes.

When IBM announced their new z13 mainframe a few weeks ago, this article seemed to forget about any mainframes except IBM,

http://www.itwire.com/business-it-news/hardware-and-storage/66649-the-big-blue-mainframe-lives-on

but corrected this here,

http://www.itwire.com/opinion-and-analysis/c-level/66813-hey-unisys-does-mainframes-too#disqus_thread

What was interesting to me was this statement:

"My friends at Unisys called and reminded me that the company does indeed still make mainframes, and they are still in use by hundreds of Unisys customers around the world."

... which might give a hint how many Unisys mainframe customers are still arround.

Does anyone have other numbers?

[Paul Kimpel]

On 2/6/2015 4:35 AM, hji...@synthesis-mc.de wrote:
> It seems to be a well hidden secret how many mainframe sites are still arround, especially those that run Unisys MCP or OS/2200 mainframes.
>
> When IBM announced their new z13 mainframe a few weeks ago, this article seemed to forget about any mainframes except IBM,
>
> http://www.itwire.com/business-it-news/hardware-and-storage/66649-the-big-blue-mainframe-lives-on

There's nothing new in that. We've been living with the IBM===Mainframe
attitude for at least 60 years, especially from the press.

>
> but corrected this here,
>
> http://www.itwire.com/opinion-and-analysis/c-level/66813-hey-unisys-does-mainframes-too#disqus_thread
>
> What was interesting to me was this statement:
>
> "My friends at Unisys called and reminded me that the company does indeed still make mainframes, and they are still in use by hundreds of Unisys customers around the world."
>
> ... which might give a hint how many Unisys mainframe customers are still arround.
>
> Does anyone have other numbers?

It depends on how you are counting -- customers or systems. Six or seven
years ago, someone who knows about this told me there were a couple of
thousand ClearPath MCP systems in North America and a like number in the
rest of the world. That number continues to suffer attrition, of course,
so my guess would be there are perhaps two thousand but no more than
three thousand MCP systems left world-wide. Most of those will be the
smaller emulated-under-Windows models (e.g., Libra 4xx).

That number does not include the laptop-based MCP SDK systems, of which
there are probably thousands, but are licensed only for development work.

My numbers for OS2200 systems are fuzzier, but my guess is that they
number in the dozens, and probably less than a hundred, world-wide.

What dies are the applications, not the mainframes. People are not so
much moving to Windows/Linux/Intel as they are to packages like SAP and
Oracle.


--
Paul

[Marc Wilson]

In comp.sys.unisys, (hji...@synthesis-mc.de) wrote in
<00fff433-2a6c-4a69...@googlegroups.com>::

Perhaps half a dozen in the UK on 2200. Though none of them have a
long-term commitment. The Met Police are going with an alternative
platform, though I seriously doubt they'll make their target date.

--
Marc Wilson

Cleopatra Consultants Limited - IT Consultants
Fernrhoyd, Chester Road, Alpraham, Tarporley, Cheshire CW6 9JE
Tel: (44/0) 1829 262696 Tel: (44/0) 161 408 6449
Fax: (44/0) 844 779 0968 Mobile: (44/0) 7973 359850
Skype: cleo-marc Mail: enqu...@cleopatra.co.uk
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Registered in England and Wales no: 2588943 VAT Reg: 561 1182 69
Registered office: St George's House, 215-219 Chester Road
Manchester M15 4JE

https://plus.google.com/100816173414569062406

[hji...@synthesis-mc.de]

Paul,

I heard about the "thousands of clearpath systems worldwide" as well and am well aware of the difference of systems and clients.

Just wanted to figure out if someone has some better feeling about the numbers.

My educated guess is that there are one third 2200 sites and 2 thirds MCP sites.

Regards Hans

[RWT]

Is everyone considering all the Miser bank sites running MCP platforms? I believe there is other banking software besides Miser that uses smaller A-Series machines.

[hji...@synthesis-mc.de]

No, I'm not counting them as mainframe sites. What model would these sites use?

[IceMan_F1]

We have been running the Miser core for over 10 years now and have done so on various Unisys financial series mainframes. Our latest mainframe is Unisys' FS600 paired to an EMC (dell) VNX SAN. The FS600 is a beast!

[jintelis...@gmail.com]

I work for the State of New York, we Utilize these mainframes

[Paul Kimpel]

My best guess today (2018) is somewhere between the high hundreds to low
thousands. That's not counting MCP Express, Developer Studio Personal
Edition, and the older MCP SDK versions.

MCP systems will be the lion's share of however many there are. I
suspect that OS2200 systems are on the order of 10% of the total.

It's a little difficult to know how to count "mainframes" these days, as
many of the larger systems are partitionable, and the lower end of the
product lines can be run on virtualized hardware. Perhaps a better way
would be to count the number of operating system instances that are active.
--
Paul

[Richard L. Hamilton]

In article <5be49e41-4f2b-98eb...@digm.com>,

But in terms of quantity and variety of involved people, the number of
sites is perhaps more interesting (IMO) than the number of OS
instances.

[rodger]

Heck, it was a secret back in 69! the only way I would discover Burroughs sites was to sneak into a CUBE. But even the Cubes were real restrictive. I discovered banks (Crocker), Kellogs, Michigan milk producers,
understandable Burroughs was afraid of IBM grabbing a potential customer.
Sperry mapper installations were also extremly invisible. Then I went to work for the state of Michigan, in 98,
and lots of A machines, They had an A18 at DMB and at Treasury, and at State Police and Lottery,
and welfare, and an A11 for us to play with for our Y2K work. thank you Cobol stupid year "19nn"
I had a guitar player, and he worked for Riverside County, they had B4700's. I loved that machine and BPL. Although I still consider the MCP development platform to be the best there is, and Mapper to be the best production statusing system there is. alas, not to be. when I worked in CAD, we had Apollo work stations, they were amazing, easy to use, and had a nice desktop. and HP bought em for their customer base, and squashed them. Eventually the HP was much faster.

[Scott Lurndal]

rodger <rodg...@gmail.com> writes:

>I had a guitar player, and he worked for Riverside County, they had B4700's=
>. I loved that machine and BPL. Although I still consider the MCP developme=
>nt platform to be the best there is, and Mapper to be the best production s=

>tatusing system there is. alas, not to be.

Hard to argue with that. Here's the web page for the B4700 and successors family:
<http://vseries.lurndal.org/doku.php>

>when I worked in CAD, we had Apo=
>llo work stations, they were amazing, easy to use, and had a nice desktop. =

Burroughs used Apollo workstations to design the final generation of the B4x00 family,
the V530 (which used ECL Gate Arrays).

[john smith]

On Friday, February 6, 2015 at 4:35:15 AM UTC-8, Hans Jürgen> It seems to be a well hidden secret how many mainframe sites are still arround, especially those that run Unisys MCP or OS/2200 mainframes.

This is an old thread which I just stumbled on but made me laugh. I think it was 2006 or 2007 when someone at unisys was asking the same question. This was just before I got redundant. Anyway, a guy in my group, can't remember his name, was supposed to survey mcp customers and report back. We had an all hands to hear the report which was surprising because it was pretty downbeat. As I remember, we had less than 100 spending 5-10 mill per year, and another 100 mostly smaller customers. It was pretty shocking but it also made sense. Doesn't answer your question I know but my guess would be about 200<. IBM though is still making money with it's z-series. Even where I live, I know several businesses with z-series.

Mgmt would never tell us who we were working on software for. The only way you could tell the number of users was by the bug reports. But for sure, most projects had 0 customers. I worked there for a couple of decades and I can't remember any project except maybe 1 or 2 that ever had any customers. My guess was that they developed these projects and then bundled them in the build to make it look like we were relevant. Microsoft, apple, they do it too. But, as the revenue dropped, everything went overseas mostly. So another way to tell is to look for clearpath mcp support, either programming or admin services. Mostly you will find only jobs on the unisys website. The company adverts for jobs for mcp programmers but they've done that for decades. They're not real jobs however. The company has no intent to fill those jobs. The reason why they have these adverts is to tell anyone asking that they try to find workers but can't.

[Andrew]

I saw the list of OS2200 machines in Europe some time in Summer 2018,
but a large proportion of them were small, older machines where the keys
would have expired a couple of years before. Maybe the list was global
but all I cared about were the European ones.