Most people I work with now know that I am a relatively active user of social media and business networking tools, including Facebook, Twitter, Delicious, LinkedIn and Plaxo.  In fact, over the past six months, my blogging dropped off significantly, but my use of social media and business networking tools accelerated.

One of my clients was asking about the size of the installed base of Geographically Dispersed Parallel Sysplex (GDPS), wondering if it was a market large enough to justify the investment needed to integrate with  their own solution.  They also wondered about the penetration rate for GDPS within the installed base of z/OS licenses.  That’s rather esoteric stuff, unless you cut your teeth on IBM mainframes, as I did.

It’s been more than a few years, since I closely followed the mainframe market.  But, as I said, I am a rather active user of business and social networking sites.  So I decided to push this market-sizing challenge out through my network of friends and associates, collected and maintained over the past 25 years.  I posted the question on LinkedIn, since with the number of out-of-work experts, I thought someone might just be watching the questions pulse by and be looking for an opportunity to demonstrate their unique knowledge.  I also used LinkedIn to push the question to a few specific people I thought might know the answer.  I posed the question under my status update on Facebook.  And finally, I put the question into Twitter, to see if any of my followers might know.  Oh, yes, and I also emailed the question to a small number of industry analysts.

I did all of this Monday night, and by Tuesday night, less than 24 hours later, I had a pretty good idea of the installed base of GDPS licenses and of z/OS licenses.  No, I won’t put the answer here, because a friend at IBM said, “the numbers are not in the public domain.”  But I will tell you how I got to the right-enough answer.  One winning answer came through Facebook. That’s right, Facebook, the application that so many think is just a time waster.  Another right-enough answer came through a direct message from a LinkedIn contact that forwarded the request to a knowledgeable source.  A third came from someone who saw the question on LinkedIn and responded directly. 

For the statisticians in the audience, the answers were reliable – meaning that with repeated “measures,” I got a high degree of consistency.  I also believe it was valid, because when I shared the estimates with someone in a position to know, they said my numbers were very close.

Thank you to all that responded.  Even as I am writing this, a fourth response came from one of my industry analysts friends.  Again, the answer was consistent to the 10%-variability level.

Now, does anyone have a reliable, quality list of EMC Recover Point customers?