.B.M. has just completed a three-year, $100 million overhaul of the software engine behind the world's airline, hotel and rental car reservations systems, and credit card systems like Visa and American Express.Posted on 10/04/2004 10:33:43 PM PDT by Ernest_at_the_Beach
By STEVE LOHR
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.B.M. has just completed a three-year, $100 million overhaul of the software engine behind the world's airline, hotel and rental car reservations systems, and credit card systems like Visa and American Express.
The company plans to announce the retooling of the little-known program, an aging workhorse of mainframe computing, this week. Its goal, executives said, was to rejuvenate what it considered a strategic product - T.P.F., for transaction processing facility - with the help of the Linux operating system.
The potential new markets, according to the executives and industry analysts, include serving as the transaction-handling back end for instant messaging and logging data from mobile sensors and radio tags used in retailing or homeland security.
The program generates hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue a year for International Business Machines in hardware, software and services. The potential for new business in the banking, financial services, retailing, government and manufacturing sectors could reach $2.7 billion by 2007, according to a study by a research firm.
"The retooling of T.P.F. opens up a new ecosystem of potential partners for I.B.M. to work with," said Scott McLarnon, a consultant at IDC, which conducted the study for I.B.M.
The program is a computer operating system, but a very specialized one - a kind of traffic cop for transactions, handling several thousand each second. A small community of 3,000 or 4,000 programmers worldwide have worked with the program, all of them fluent in arcane software tools like I.B.M. 370 assembly language.
The costly reworking to place the program in the Linux camp means that applications can be developed by programmers working with widely used programming languages like C++ and writing on the Linux operating system.
"We've jumped to Linux," said Stuart Waldron, a senior technical staff member in I.B.M.'s software group. "Anybody who works on Linux can now work on T.P.F."
The shift to Linux as a development environment will drive down the programming and maintenance costs. But I.B.M.'s big corporate customers have also pushed the company to rewrite the transaction processing software to make it more flexible.
The Web has vastly increased traffic for reservations systems and other merchants as browsers shop for the best prices, and many companies have moved price-finding and comparison-searching off their mainframe T.P.F. systems and onto cheaper computers. Unless I.B.M. modernized the program, it risked losing business as customers looked for alternatives.
John Partridge, president of Inovant, the technology processing subsidiary of Visa, said that his company began prodding I.B.M. to open up T.P.F. a few years ago. Inovant, he said, has been sampling some of the more open T.P.F. code recently and the change has been impressive.
I.B.M. plans to announce on Thursday that the beta, or test, version of the overhauled T.P.F. will be widely available starting immediately.
The release of the finished product is scheduled for mid-2005.
The embrace of Linux might seem an odd pairing. T.P.F. is a highly specialized, proprietary system. Linux, which is distributed free, is a leading success story in open-source software, a development model in which the code is modified and debugged by a network of programmers.
But the T.P.F. programmers are a tight-knit group, meeting in big conferences twice a year, where they share code and tips. "It's a community process and has been for decades," said Mr. Waldron, the I.B.M. software designer. "In that sense, T.P.F. is similar to open source."
Linux going bigtime.
Back in the late 80's I was assigned to the Holiday Inn support team as an IBM Program Support Rep. My job was maintenance of IBM software on their multiple systems, which included the T.P.F. based HOLIDEX reservation system. I had come from 18 years of hardware service, so my strength was a better than average understanding of the hardware/software interface, and knowledge of machine language at the op-code level.
But the TPF specialists worked at this level all the time. I finally decided that the key characteristics of TPF programmers were a thorough knowledge of 370 assembler, combined with an inability to read a clock, because they all seemed to work crazy hours and shifts - for which they earned about 50% above the usual salaries.
My only contribution to TPF was to fix a failure in its SADUMP program, that occurred on a 3083 mainframe with exactly 16384 kilobytes of main storage. It failed to handle the (expected) error on the 2k page instruction at the upper boundary and got into a loop. By that time, most mainframes either had more storage or used a little of the upper end of main storage internally, and shifted the top end down away from 16384k, and so did not have the problem. And VM hid the problem if it was running in a virtual machine.
Holding in there for 31 years was pretty good, I managed 28 . I was a Tech Support Rep in the marketing division so we really were not that technical, although I did have to learn some level of detail when working with VM.
IBM's education benefit paid for me to get a MS in info. systems management and an MBA before I retired, and I was lucky enough to leave just in time to get into consulting on the Y2K problem. And since I was the last technical person in the area and IBM did not replace me with anyone technical, I had a bunch of captive clients! They put me in the 39% bracket a couple of times.
Today I teach managerial economics to MBA students part-time, and have almost nothing at all to do with computers. Not much money, but no more 2 AM calls, or working for 3 days without sleep to resolve some glitch. Strangely enough, I don't have the ACADEMIC credentials to teach anything in information systems at the graduate level, which is a bit irritating. And my wife isn't happy about the lower income, but we have a million or so stashed away, in addition to social security and the IBM pension, so I like it just fine.
Sounds like you have done well....my timing was lousy.....left
well before the 2k event.
When I retired at the end of '95, I was a bottom-feeder. Although I did some work in the large systems, my primary customer set was the small mainframes that ran VSE, and sometimes VM. At one time, as a PSR I had been assigned all 57 customers in and around Memphis that ran VSE. Then IBM tried to kill VSE. They shut down the development lab, and sent me off to MVS school so I could work at FedEx and Holiday Inn, but I still had to take calls from my old customers.
And new mainframes were getting more powerful all the time. My VSE customers had no need for the new power, and IBM eventually quit making the bottom end machines. They created the PC-based mainframe architecture systems that were large enough for some of my customers (6-8 MIPS). And when Fundamental Software came out with their Flex-ES mainframe emulator running on an Intel/Unix platform, IBM dropped out of the lower end entirely.
I replaced several low-end, non-Y2K compliant mainframes with these emulator systems, along with compliant software upgrades, and also switched most of their communications from SNA to TCP/IP. I get a call from one or another of them once in a while, but less than $1000 billed this year, versus $6800 for teaching 3 classes so far. But I LIKE the teaching a LOT more.
I worked with Stu Waldron when he was lead TPF SE on the American Airlines team from 1987-1994.
Of course, SABRE, the original test bed for TPF, is now migrating to Linux-based application software developed internally. They'll be running it on mirrored HP systems.
TPF is a magnificent product and could handle anything SABRE threw at it, but, man, at $30 GRAND a month, twelve copies was choking American Airlines.
I never worked with TPF, though I was in the BO that handled TWA....
Did you ever work with Paula Bush? She was my contact on the TWA team.
That name sounds faintly familiar,....,but I never worked with her. I was out of the BO for the last dozen years of my time ...
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