Another Super Bowl is over, and you’re reflecting on the Giant’s big win and Super Bowls past. You go back to one of the greatest games of all time: it’s 1989, and Joe Montana is throwing the winning touchdown to receiver John Taylor with 34 seconds left.

Something strikes you as oddly familiar, and it isn’t just that you’ve seen this particular Super Bowl replay year after year. You ponder on how every play requires intense teamwork and a balance between strength and agility. You notice that the players follow a tightly sequenced series of actions as they move down the field to the end zone. And every player depends on his teammates to execute perfectly. Hmmm… Isn’t that what your IT department does every day?

As great a quarterback as Montana was in his day, he couldn’t have done his job without a powerful line blocking for him while he threw. And without nimble receivers like MVP Jerry Rice, Super Bowl XXIII would have had a very different outcome. Similarly, for an IT team to be successful, it must combine the sturdy dependability of the mainframe with the nimbleness of a distributed system. All parts have to work together seamlessly so IT can help the business achieve its goals.

With this analogy, a new game plan for your IT department comes to mind -- one in which both enterprise and distributed systems interface easily to get the job done.

Like a great coach, your leadership in the IT department will help your team run operations that support the business. To be successful, everyone on the team must focus on doing their jobs correctly. And, by combining the strength and stability of the mainframe with the agility of the distributed system, you’ll score virtual touchdowns that will make you stars.

Coming Together for the Greater Good

IT organizations today are trying to run IT as a business while increasing the maturity level of their service management. In pursuing this goal, people in the distributed environment face many of the same challenges that those in the mainframe environment have addressed in the past.

In order to score touchdowns for the business, professionals from mainframe and distributed systems are rapidly uniting in a single, distributed IT environment. They’re coming together to architect, develop, and manage the resulting unified infrastructure.

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