David Mastrobattista, marketing manager for the IBM zSeries mainframe, says that the goal is to extend the capabilities of the mainframe in a heterogeneous enterprise environment.

Although IBM's announcement focused on the company's overall direction, it did offer some product news.

In particular, IBM plans to develop a 64-bit version of its z/Transaction Processing Facility on Linux, a mainframe operating system now used in the travel, finance and public sector markets.

The move to Linux and 64-bit, which should be available by the third quarter of next year, will roughly double transaction processing to 25 000 transactions per second.

CIM is a standards effort that has been undertaken by Distributed Management Task Force.

The task force is a broad vendor consortium that includes IBM, as well as Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems and Intel.

The road map envisions the spread of mainframe capabilities throughout an enterprise.

Those capabilities are said to include IBM's Geographically Dispersed Parallel Sysplex (GDPS), a clustering technology designed for dynamically managing and mirroring critical storage, processor and network resources, and for extending the technology to the Linux environment.

Ultimately, IBM wants to make it possible for other platforms to use GDPS capabilities.

One zSeries user, Paul Mercurio, the senior vice-president and CIO at Mobil Travel Guide, was unfamiliar with the plan details, but said IBM's overall goal appears to make sense.

"I think it is inevitable that, if the mainframe is going to survive as a platform, it must be part of an overall environment," says Mercurio. Mainframes "can handle a lot of work dependably, and that is why people buy them".

Mercurio, who is running Linux on his zSeries, believes most companies have plans to migrate to an open software environment, even if it is running on a mainframe.

Gordon Haff, an analyst at Illuminata, says that the message IBM is trying to send is that the "mainframe is still the best at doing certain types of things".