A mainframe user echoed this assessment.

"It's easier to manage the mainframe than a bunch of Windows servers. We have a smaller staff running the mainframe and those functions run 80 percent of our business," said Bill Homa, CIO of supermarket chain Hannaford Brothers, headquartered in Scarborough, Maine.

Hannaford Brothers deployed a System z mainframe last October to serve as the hub of its SOA.

"We used to be fairly distributed, but the difficulty of managing thousands of distributed servers was just a nightmare. In the past five years we've made an effort to make everything we can centralized," Homa said.

Key components of Big Blue's SOA initiative are new IBM Rational Cobol generation tools, which enable developers using Java, Visual Basic, PL/1, and Cobol to build SOA-enabled mainframe applications. The tools include Rational Cobol Generation Extension for z/OS and Rational Cobol Runtime for z/OS.