more pn it........

So it turns out my feeling on who was running WebSphere on z/OS, and whether that was common, were not correct. Such is the value of going to conferences!
I talked to some IBM folks, as well as some end-users, who are making quite good use of WebSphere on the mainframe. In fact, I talked about general feelings in the industry that these platforms were being pushed aside by distributed deployments of J2EE, and the reaction I got was that others were making decisions, financial and technical, to run these platforms on Z/OS.
I have a bead on some other universities that have gone distributed and come back to WebSphere on Z/OS, and will try to persue those for more info.
I went to an excellent session this morning on the new CICS Transaction Gateway v6. Great speaker! It sure sounds like the strategic way to leverage the mainframe will be via JCA, running the gateway on Z/OS. IBM seems to be doing a good job supporting and leveraging the JCA standards, which look like they play well with SOA architectures.
I know one problem with bringing new services up on the mainframe is the need to then add horsepower, which in turn drives up unrelated licensing costs to an unjustifiable level. It looks like a factor that has not been considered there is the zAAP processor technology from IBM, that essentially acts as a JVM co-processor, while not counting as additional power for general mainframe pricing...or something like that...if you thought web services standards were confusing, try figuring out how much something costs from IBM.