A very nervous group, there
I've been telling people for over 15 years: the primary focus of mainframe people is finding ways to keep mainframe people employed. Given a task, they'll _never_ find a non-mainframe solution. I saw this at my previous employer, where the company president told them to implement company-wide email (circa 1992). They spent $85K on a package and another $60K/year for a disaster called EMCC/TAO which was slow, lost mail, crashed the clients constantly, and had to be restarted on the mainframe daily to keep from crashing it (memory leak). This was after I recommended a solution for a couple of thousand $. EMCC/TAO was so bad that our managers and engineers used modems and their own ISPs with Hotmail, Yahoo, or AOL accounts so they could communicate reliably with customers. They seemed to go out of their way to sabotage any non-IBM networks, like the NetWare servers I supported.
netgeek