I guess this this market of ultra-conservative customers are mostly US companies? I have hard time imagining companies in other countries getting into the habit of buying such kind if hardware?
I traveled all over the world while at IBM in the 1990s. They were doing a very nice business with the biggest banks in Europe as well as many of auto companies in Europe. Major ibm customers in Japan as well.
They wouldn't build these if they couldn't sell them. With the io and data flow rates these thing can handle, there really aren't alterntives on the market. the debate I keep spinning through in my head is will the market stop caring about the hardware (it's all just in the cloud or grid) before the mainframe goes away or will the cloud be partially mainframe.
1. So far no cloud provider tried to provide reliability at the level of a mainframe.
2. Those conservative customers want to keep their data in-house. So a cloud is probably impossible to sell here.
They can either build their own "in-house cloud" (paradox?!) or buy a mainframe. The later is simpler and proven. Cost savings of the roll-your-own-in-house-cloud are questionable.
You could try to sell an ultra-reliable (maybe distributed) system for in-house use. However, you cannot call it a "mainframe".
