It's an interesting thing they have going on. I worked at a large retailer who depended on an IBM mainframe running DB2. That thing was crazy expensive and their migration to their cloud mainframe offering was even more expensive for the raw compute, but made sense when maintenance and everything was added.

Something like 90%+ of the top 100 banks depend on mainframes and same with the top 100 retailers. Few customers that pay a lot is a solid model.

One of the more surprising metrics I've heard from Andy Jassy is that despite trillion dollar companies generating huge amounts of cash from cloud, 95% of enterprise workloads are still not on cloud.

I think it's more than just a few customers.

Realistically, the cloud is just too expensive compared to most other solutions. AWS, Azure, and G Compute are all easily 10x the cost of hiring a good team of sysadmins. When you require a lot of computing power, it just doesn’t scale financially

I work pretty extensively with DB2 (and a little bit with IMS) for my day job. I'm curious how much of those software sales are mainframe software sales / software that is designed to integrate with the mainframe somehow (DB2 Connect). DB2 is one of the more expensive mainframe licenses. Not quite as pricey as Oracle, but close.

>>migration to their cloud mainframe offering was even more expensive for the raw compute

Mainframes were always cheaper. The only reason things like Hadoop and MR even picked up for heavy batch jobs, was because in the last decade lots of cheaper consumer hardware was available, due to companies having over invested in building data centers. The excess capacity was sent to hadoop work. If you have continuous ongoing investments in Mainframe tech or wish to start something new, you are better off using Mainframes.