Quoting TechWorld 

CA recently announced "a series of initiatives to help customers derive maximum long-term business value from their significant investments in mainframe computing technology." Vince Re, CA's chief architect, talks about the importance of the mainframe to CA, and why it's decided to re-package its software and drop its prices.

Q: Why are we talking about the CA and the mainframe now? A: We want to reconnect with our customers - we never went away. We're the dominant player in security management of mainframes - it constitutes 60 percent of CA's revenues. And all large mainframe sites run our products. In the eight to nine markets we compete in around the mainframe, we are number one in almost all of them. Customers like to have a non-IBM vendor there.

Q: Why are mainframes proving so popular? A: Large customers are re-committing to the mainframe - they understand that their business depends on it. The driver is cost. The cost of entry looks expensive but in terms of cost per transaction it's cheap. Compare it to Unix, Linux or Windows, the mainframe wins hands down. Sure, you need a certain volume, you need to be a large organisation with lots of work to do to keep utilisation at 80 percent, running 24 hours a day, but once over that hurdle it's the obvious place to host commercial data.

And the platform is growing by 20 percent a year. That means there are opportunities for us and for IBM.

IBM says this as does IDC - mainframe market share is growing in terms of large server sales by which I mean $250,000 and up. HP and Sun also compete there, as do Fujitsu, Siemens and others.

Q: How do you account for this level of growth? A: IDC data shows the IBM trend line is up. It reflects the decline in Sun's business - we see IBM growing, with Fujitsu etc, flat. Sun's hardware business is flat but it's hard to relate that to the rest of Sun's business - ie software and storage. It'll take them time to recover - if they can recover, it's an open question. Also there's a question about their longer term viability but I'd like to think they'll sort it out. Sun's a large company with plenty of resources.

Read the rest of this article at TechWorld, here.