AIX folks are rather rare to run into. In the US, you'll find more AIX in the north mid-west and east coast. In those cases, a lot of them are insurance, manufacturing, or financial services (getting rare in FS these days though). Most shops that have AIX are really legacy mainframe shops that have a long standing relationship with IBM. It is very rare to find a non-IBM shop that decides out the the blue (no pun intended) to bring AIX inhouse. I am seeing new interests in AIX, but most of it is focused on consolidating AIX into smaller and smaller foot-prints. The same kind of thinking has been going on for the past 10 years in the mainframe space, which makes sense because of how small the frames are getting these days. Holding onto AIX talent is a huge challenge for AIX shops. In one of the banks I use to work for, they had a small amount of AIX servers to manage and finding enough qualified folks to manage them was extremely hard.
Another UNIX that's having issues is HP-UX. Most shops I've worked for or done consulting work for have killed off their HP-UX installs or are in the last throws of tossing them. I've only run into a few mid-west insurance companies that have HP-UX. It seems that the move to Itanium really didn't help out the HP-UX cause and the lack of HP development doesn't help either. It's kinda shocking to think that HP-UX is still on version 11 after all these years. Things are even worse for Tru64 after HP bought out Compaq. That's one platform that until recent years was way ahead of its time with the Alpha processor, TruCluster, AdvFS, and of course being completely 64-bit clean. Sadly HP didn't know what to do with the platform at all and it's dead. So it's really up to Solaris and AIX to carry the torch for UNIX. We should all be happy that Solaris was open sourced and now we have lots of distributions that will carry it's history on regardless of what happens at Oracle. I'm very confident that Oracle will make Solaris successful and invest more into it. FYI, at LISA this year there is a whole track on Solaris 11 Express;) *-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-* Octave J. Orgeron Solaris Virtualization Architect and Consultant Web: http://unixconsole.blogspot.com E-Mail: unixcons...@yahoo.com *-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-* ----- Original Message ---- From: Erik Trimble <erik.trim...@oracle.com> To: opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org Sent: Sat, October 30, 2010 5:31:44 AM Subject: Re: [osol-discuss] Quick question about the future On 10/30/2010 2:52 AM, Kees Nuyt wrote: > On Fri, 29 Oct 2010 08:49:22 -0700, you wrote: > >> That said, AIX admins are rare, and will become and endangered species >> soon. Particularly, anyone under 40 at this time. I'd be willing to bet >> that there aren't more than 100 people world-wide born after 1980 who >> could actually lay claim to being a serious AIX admin. > Depends of what 'serious' means. All three AIX specialists > in my 2nd line Unix Support support team are under 40. Three > of the AIX specialists in our peer Project / 3rd line > support team are under 40. > And this isn't a very large company. (I'm sure they'd count - but, are they under 30?). That's, well, amazing. After being out here in San Francisco for 12+ years, I have yet to meet an AIX person younger than me. And I turn 40 soon. All the places AIX seems to remain (insurance, finance, even a little biotech) have senior woolly-bearded folks looking after the AIX boxen. Perhaps my generalization is only valid for the US. (and, not just Silicon Valley. I know enough folks in the various other major IT markets here to think that AIX is well on the way to being just a legacy system OS). Anyhow, the point here was that if you want your OS to remain relevant for anything other than a tiny niche market, you need to get it in front of the young. Otherwise, the only way they'll learn it is via happenstance, and that's not a good way to grow a business. -- Erik Trimble Java System Support Mailstop: usca22-123 Phone: x17195 Santa Clara, CA _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
