They make $8-9B a year (~90% profit margins) selling software to mainframes, which were deployed ages ago but still have to be maintained because critical COBOL business code was written on their systems - and migration is too riskly/costly.
To give you an idea:
- of the risk in regulated industries like banking: a UK bank was once fined *$62 million* for botching a mainframe migration and causing downtime.
- of the difficulty and risk in non-tech industries: Australia once spent *$120 million* trying to migrate its social security system off mainframes... and failed.
Mainframes are not their only business, of course, but it's a major cash cow that's under appreciated. I, for one, didn't know that business keeps growing.
To give you an idea:
- of the risk in regulated industries like banking: a UK bank was once fined *$62 million* for botching a mainframe migration and causing downtime. - of the difficulty and risk in non-tech industries: Australia once spent *$120 million* trying to migrate its social security system off mainframes... and failed.
Mainframes are not their only business, of course, but it's a major cash cow that's under appreciated. I, for one, didn't know that business keeps growing.
Coincidentally, I wrote about the topic of mainframes with relation to IBM's acquisition of Confluent here today: https://blog.2minutestreaming.com/p/ibm-confluent-acquisitio...