Defying concern dating back a decade or more that megacomputers are becoming obsolete, IBM held something of a party at the company”™s Poughkeepsie plant last month to celebrate the success of its mainframe computing line and to lay groundwork for even stronger partnership between the company and regional stakeholders in coming decades.
The meeting, luncheon and tour event May 21, called “Made in New York ”¦ with Pride,” brought more than 100 people to the Poughkeepsie plant, home of IBM’s largest computer systems, to hear William Zeitler, senior vice president of IBM’s Systems and Technology Group. The unit accounts for most of the 11,600 IBM employees working in Dutchess County. Also speaking was Steven Mills, senior vice president in charge of the Software Group, which also has a large contingent in Dutchess.
Mainframes enable users to process large amounts of data at high speed. IBM calls its mainframes “System z,” and in February introduced its IBM System z10 line. The top 50 banks in the U.S. and 22 of the 25 largest retailers use IBM System z machines, according to Rick Bause, an IBM spokesperson, speaking after the event. Additionally, according to IDC, an international data collection company, since 2000, IBM”™s market share for its System z line has doubled from 17 percent to 34 percent and includes strong penetration into the emerging markets of China, Russia, India and Brazil.
Those mainframes are made in Poughkeepsie; their chips are manufactured in Fishkill. While a breakdown of financials from those facilities was not provided, overall, revenue from IBM operations in New York produced sales of $2.2 billion in 2007, with 27,000 employees earning more than $1.85 billion.
Besides large-volume data processing, the System z approach can reduce costs for businesses by allowing for greater efficiency in energy use. The System z machine can do more with less energy than running parallel servers, for example, and that appeal to businesses as an energy saver should continue growing along as energy costs increase, IBM believes.
Zeitler said mainframes will keep performing core data processing functions and evolve to handle whatever new tasks emerge in the future. And he said of the Poughkeepsie plant, “We”™re going to make sure that this is the center of it 20 years from now.”
Poughkeepsie has a history of hosting IBM facilities that dates to 1941. Neighboring Ulster County also once had a huge facility and thousands of company employees. But in the 1990s IBM downsized in the Hudson Valley and ended its Ulster operations, sparking fears that Dutchess County facilities might be next. Instead, the facilities in Fishkill and Poughkeepsie are thriving. Efforts to develop the defunct plant are ongoing.
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Events like the May 21 celebration are designed to ensure that a thriving future comes about in the Hudson Valley, according to Sheila Appel, IBM”™s manager of corporate affairs for the New York region.
There is “high intellectual capital here” in the Hudson Valley and throughout New York, she said. She said that an emerging “tech-valley corridor” exists from Armonk, where IBM is headquartered, all the way to Albany, where nanotech initiatives are showing results. But she said to bring the emerging IT business potential to fruition will require the cooperation of educators, academics, municipal officials and entrepreneurs as well as corporations. And she said, none of this needs to be created, only coordinated, a process that events like the one held May 21 will facilitate.
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