Following a research project which identified that 84 per cent of mainframe users are looking to reduce the rate at which their systems consume expensive CPU capacity in the current tougher economic climate, Macro 4 has announced a ‘no gain, no fee’ programme to help tackle the issue.

“We’ve just finished a study of 97 UK mainframe users in which we found an overwhelming 84 per cent wanted to free up processing power.  With budgets tightening, this can bring huge cost savings, including delaying purchases of costly CPU upgrades. It also means immediate reductions in monthly systems software license charges which vary in line with how much CPU power was used in the previous month,” said Chris Limberger, Marketing Manager - Application Availability, Application Performance, from Macro 4, which is a mainframe performance management expert.

Macro 4 is offering mainframe users a short term consultancy project which guarantees to achieve processing power savings worth at least twice the value of its fee or they will not be charged.

IT industry analysts have estimated that most large mainframe users can expect their systems’ consumption of processing power to increase by 15-20 per cent annually, measured in Million Instructions Per Second (MIPS).  This forces them to upgrade their CPU or risk slower application response times and ultimately reduced productivity and customer service. 

“Even in the most stable IT environments MIPS consumption gradually increases over time due to small changes to applications, environments and databases.  And the negative effects of these essentially minor alterations in programming code can be multiplied as database size and transaction volumes grow. Macro 4’s MIPS reduction programme provides a risk free way for organisations to identify and correct these changes,” said Limberger.