Trevor Eddolls at the Mainframe Update says that IBM should embrace alternate mainframe technologies — such as those from Platform Solutions, Inc. — for example, instead of “smashing them like the Hulk.”

How do you get people interested in mainframes? The answer is to have lots of them around and let people play with them. Now before you start sneering and saying that will never be possible, let me suggest a way. How about FLEX-ES from Fundamental Software? It provides a way for developers to test mainframe software on a laptop. Or there was UMX technologies. And, of course, Hercules – the Open Source mainframe emulator. Platform Solutions has a product called the Open Mainframe. There’s even Sim390. If IBM was to embrace these technologies and not try to smash them like the Hulk, people would be more familiar with mainframe systems because they would be more commonplace.

The post really is about more than just the open mainframe, of which there has been much talk this year because of lawsuits between IBM and PSI and PSI introducing its own Intel-based mainframe. Eddolls also talks about IMS, saying that IBM should be more aggressive in selling it, and that it should try to get its VM operating system onto other platforms such as Intel.