With the development of the zEnterprise processor, IBM is positioning the mainframe to handle business intelligence and analytics, now in demand as the key to thriving in a hyper-competitive economy. "It's increasingly important to have a system that's capable of going compute-intensive work if you to extend applications with the capability to do more real-time analytics and introduce more intelligence into the systems," says Jeff Frey, IBM fellow, systems architect and design. Tom McPherson, IBM director, System z processor development, adds that "if you can do the right transactions and the right analysis and studying of that data, you can use that to increase your business velocity. You can make predictive decisions based on that data, to allow you to do smarter healthcare, or smarter banking, or move your inventory around the world to better meet customer needs. It really just is a massive wealth of information out there. You're going to need high-performance enterprise systems to help make decisions."

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