CA World: Skills gap as OAP mainframe staff leave

Despite the criticality of some applications running on the mainframe, many businesses are still relying on staff that are near retirement to look after them, meaning a massive and potentially catastrophic skills gap is looming.

Some 80 per cent of companies in Fortune 2000 companies admitted that some of their mainframe workers are either eligible for retirement now or within two years, according to research unveiled at CA World in Las Vegas today.

“[Companies] tend to let attrition occur on the mainframe. People quit or retire and are never replaced. Even though the workloads on mainframes has quadrupled, the number of people doing the care and feeding of this platform is actually less today than in 2000,” said Chris O’Malley, executive vice president and general manager of CA’s mainframe business unit.

“[Customers tell us] the average age of the people supporting this platform is 62 years old to as low as 55. They are somewhat rocket scientists. Their understanding of the platform over the last 30 years means they are the foundations for managing the quality of service of the platform. If we don’t create an alternate state of people who can manage as we transition to the next generation, this is going to be a significant problem.”

Despite mainframe capacity surging from 4.5 million MIPS back in 2001 to 14 million today, and the fact that 70 per cent of businesses trust these systems to run mission-critical applications, the people with the expertise and know-how will soon be waving goodbye to working life.

As such, CA has unveiled an initiative dubbed ‘Mainframe 2.0’ under which it will provide management tools to enable businesses to better get to grips with and secure their mainframe activity going forward.

“Today, one big issue we have is that CA products have historically come from acquisitions. It’s time to move CA products so that they can be [managed, configured] and installed in a common way,” said Scott Fagan, principal software architect at CA’s mainframe business unit.

“We’ve moving to a more browser-based, and some may say more sexy, [look and feel across mainframe management solutions]. This means that we can compete for the new talent coming out of schools.”

While some doomsayers have long predicted the death of the mainframe, in fact the opposite is true, according to O’Malley.

“1992 was declared the end of the mainframe by pundits who said that, by 2000, the last mainframe would be unplugged. At the time there was some reality to that,” he said.

Today, however, results of the research – which was conducted by TheInfoPro – show the mainframe is very much alive and well, with no signs of going anywhere other than up.

Half of research respondents said their mainframe spending had increased compared with two years ago, while 63 per cent predict that such spending will be higher than today two years from now.

“So we’ve got a strong revival going on here and the mainframe continues to be the workhorse engine that serves the business. There are significant trends taking place and significant needs that remain unresolved and putting the platform at risk,” O’Malley added.

“Mainframe 2.0 is our strategy that will change the way mainframes are managed forever.”

Click here to read more coverage from CA World 08.

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