Many of the 2,000 or so conference attendees were from large companies that continue to rely on mixed installations of IT systems, despite being pushed by some vendors toward commodity servers. In fact, when the audience members at the kickoff keynote session were asked as part of the electronic poll whether they run their data centers on either Windows or Unix exclusively, only 4 percent said yes.

Abdul Khan, who manages servers and storage at Blue Shield of California, said the San Francisco-based insurer's mainframe setup supports custom applications that would be too difficult to move to other systems. "It would take a long time to change our software," Khan said.

Although users such as Khan may stick with mainframes to run legacy applications and to take advantage of the reliability of the systems, Bill Homa, CIO at Hannaford Brothers Co. in Scarborough, Maine, sees the mainframe as an ideal platform for ongoing software development.

Saving money with Cobol

In a phone interview, Homa said Hannaford, a grocery chain with annual revenue of about US$5 billion, continues to develop custom Cobol mainframe applications through Bangalore, India-based IT services provider Infosys Technologies Ltd. The company's software costs, including maintenance and development, are as much as 30 percent less than what it would pay for packaged applications, Homa said.