IBM's Workstation synergy is run from IBM Endicott, home of IBM's Client Server unit. VM has a deep association with this unit (and formerly was included with it) and its products, much as products like VTAM and NetView are associated with MVS.
Workstation synergy directions and products originated with VM, not MVS. TCP/IP, Novell LANRES, E-mail, ADSM, and other interoperability interfaces all originated on VM, and then eventually made their way to MVS, enriching the entire S/390 line. The traditional personal computing style of using VM makes it much easier to conceive and implement this type of program on VM. These developments are essential to VM, as they are for other systems: systems that cannot participate in these environments will become isolated and abandoned.
Pragmatically, the resources available on VM make it much easier to do this sort of thing than on other IBM systems. SFS, TSAF, STEVR, and APPC/VM should make it much easier for IBM to implement POSIX and OSF DCE program interfaces on VM than MVS.
OpenEdition emerged on MVS before VM, but it should be remembered that the MVS group funded the port to 390 architecture, and then passed the code to the VM group. OpenEdition came up on VM before MVS in my company! Where the marketplace of programming talent chooses freely, VM is the place the code gets written first, as demonstrated by the dozens of VM Web sites out on the Internet.
A great example is provided by Neale Ferguson, formerly of TAB NSW in Australia (and now at Sterling Software) who ported LDAP, Perl, Apache, XPG4, Regina, Syslogd, Gnumake and several other open source pages to OpenEdition to VM. If you want to, you can do Unix-style computing on VM - including the most popular web server in the world (Apache).
For these successes to continue, IBM must increase their funding for VM TCP/IP, since that sparks the capabilities that broaden the capabilities of all S/390 systems, and provide support for services originally intended for MVS, such as the MQ series. Neglect in these areas will reduce the vitality of the entire mainframe product line.
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