You can’t help but wonder sometimes just how open minded proponents of open systems really are?

With integration between mainframe and distributing computing models close at hand, there is a tough question that people that have espoused the virtues of open distributed computing systems will need to answer. There’s simply no getting around the fact that with the introduction of the zEnterprise mainframe, IBM has successfully integrated mainframe and distributed computing models. In fact, you could argue that the zEnterprise is really just another instance of an open computing system.

Eugene Tuijnman, CEO of SLTN, an IBM business partner and IT services company based in The Netherlands, says he suspects that IT organizations that are mainframe-centric will have a much easier time adjusting to this new reality than customers that have already invested heavily in open system architectures. The real issue, however, is to what degree will enterprise architects allow IT extremism stand in the way of real meaningful progress that has huge implications for their organization.

We now live at the back end of an age where vendors routinely exploited IT passions in a calculated bid to divide the IT community. With the arrival of the first year of the first decade of a new century, the time has come to set aside old biases that were generated in a bygone era of enterprise computing. Every platform has it place in the hierarchy of enterprise computing. The challenge facing enterprise architects is finding the way to dynamically balance application workloads across the most appropriate platform to run that workload at any given time.

The good news is that the tools needed to automate the management of these application workloads are getting increasingly more sophisticated . The tougher challenge might not actually be the technology at all, but rather the parochial concerns of the internal IT staff that may be at odds with the best interests of the overall organization. The better news is that the zEnterprise mainframe provides an architecture under which the various constituencies that make up the enterprise can begin to work more closely together . Ultimately, this new architecture will put an end to the need for dedicated IT specialists, which when you think about it is what causes much of the dissension within the ranks of the internal It departments. (For more about this topic, see: Death of the IT Specialist? )

The real question that enterprise IT architects then need to ask themselves is do they work for an organization that can put all those legacy concerns behind them in order to make a truly open leap forward? Or will they continue to manage stacks of servers that do more to create islands of infrastructure that ultimately don’t really serve the best interests of companies they work for.

The Future of IT Architecture blog is written by Mike Vizard