In my most recent Blog article “Have you Hugged Your Mainframe Today?” I noted that many companies around the world express an important part of their corporate identity through the design of their headquarters buildings. The point was to draw attention to the fact that LRS put its mainframe data center—a crucial factor in LRS’ rise as a global software leader—right in the atrium of our main building for all visitors to see.

The first paragraph of the Blog also made reference to a far more iconic architectural work. BMW’s world headquarters, located next to the site of the 1972 Olympics, is charmingly called “The Vierzylinder”—four cylinder engine—for reasons that are obvious to automobile fans. Four stainless steel cylinders rise out of the ground, connected on top by metal frames that recall overhead cams. Nearby sits the BMW museum, formed in the shape of a cylinder head. Taken together, they drive home an important point: this building is literally the engine behind the success of this legendary 110-year old company.

What does this have to do with computers or printing, you ask?
I’m getting to that.

When I started as a writer at LRS, one of my favorite parts of the job was getting out into the field and seeing how LRS customers used our software to solve real-world problems. And of all the case studies I have written over the years, my visit to the BMW headquarters is my favorite. Thankfully, through the magic of the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, I can still read that story I wrote more than 30 years ago.

I recall going through the most secure access portal I had ever encountered and taking the elevator two floors underground to the very root of BMW’s global nervous system: their mainframe data center. Around that massive climate-controlled room, dozens of 3270 terminal screens beamed information to the IT teams tasked with keeping the company’s critical systems running. These were the applications that tracked every order, initiated every shipment, and managed all of the financial information for the company’s global operations.

As detailed in my story, every build sheet slapped on the windshield of a Z3 roadster in BMW’s (then) brand-new plant in Spartanburg, South Carolina began as an IBM mainframe transaction in that very data center where I was standing. Data that started out as application output in Munich was sent over secure TCP/IP links to Zebra barcode printers more than 7,500 kilometers away in an instant. And without those documents and printed stickers, the highly-automated, state-of-the-art assembly line in the United States would grind to a halt.

At that moment, it dawned on me that the reliability and high performance of LRS software were just as important to BMW as the reliability and performance of a sports car are to a BMW driver.

But just as BMW depended on the reliability of LRS software, LRS depended—and still depends—on the reliability and performance of the underlying IBM Z hardware and software where our solutions are installed. This is especially true of the legendary JES spool facility built into the z/OS operating system. In the mid-1990s when I first wrote this story, most LRS employees brought out their LRS-branded “JES is Good” t-shirts on casual Fridays. Those shirts are sadly gone, but JES truly is still good, and our z/OS solutions would not work as well without it. In fact, our creative use of this proven IBM facility was one of our primary advantages over our competition at the time (of which only a handful exist today).

Being a “Throwback Thursday” story, you may ask yourself whether all of these facts are still relevant today or just a distant memory. To be honest, I wondered that myself. So I looked in our CRM system to see whether this customer I had visited 31 years ago was still using the software I had written about. I was happy, but not surprised, to learn that all of the LRS mainframe products I wrote about in 1995 are still being used there today, along with two more mainframe solutions and several of our open systems solutions that had not yet been developed at the time of my visit.

Decades ago, I concluded my case study on BMW with the words of Kurt Heydemann, a network specialist who sadly passed away some years ago. When asked to name the best feature of LRS products, he replied: “Das funktioniert einfach.” This simple sentence can be translated in multiple ways. While Heydemann intended to say “It just works,” another interpretation would be “It is easy to use.”

Both can still be said of the IBM Z mainframe. Which is why it, like BMW and LRS, remains best in class to this day.