I'm largely in agreement with Brian and Martin, although I can think of some more country-specific differences, in no particular order:
1. Encryption still has some "odd" national boundaries. 2. Network reach and quality still vary a lot, and thus branch/channel architectures vary to some extent. Some of the countries in Africa, for example, are struggling with network infrastructure. 3. The geographic risks are different when considering, and reconsidering, disaster recovery. Many clients in Japan, for example, do not view two data centers separated by a "metro" distance to be adequate, primarily because of earthquake risks. 4. I recall a couple clients asking if IBM Z machines could be placed on moving (or at least movable) vehicles. Short answer: yes. You might be able to guess what they were thinking. It was/is logical. 5. There are a few internationally embargoed countries. 6. There are some brand new mainframe countries from time to time. 7. Each country has a unique history, culture, business climate, and other factors that have some impact on the IT sector and talent development. 8. Regulations vary, and some regulations can have significant impact on IT. Europe's GDPR initiative is a recent, topical example. 9. Some countries have "odd" deadlines that might, for example, have some "odd" effects on batch workload patterns. 10. Some countries have crazy high peaks that can influence IT, such as Black Friday for the U.S. retail industry and Lunar New Year in many countries. 11. Forced antitrust-related splits, forced mergers (e.g. "bad bank" liquidations), Brexit, and other such phenomena can impact IT in interesting ways. 12. A few countries use different calendars, and there are sometimes timezone changes and such oddities that have mainframe impact, at least if you run your mainframe on local time instead of UTC. (Not necessarily a good idea.) 13. Currency changes can have mainframe impact, as the introduction of the euro did many years ago. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Timothy Sipples IT Architect Executive, Industry Solutions, IBM z Systems, AP/GCG/MEA E-Mail: sipp...@sg.ibm.com ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
