IBM is such an iconic and Big company and yet I have no idea how they make their money. What are some of their best selling product/services?
Company X has Problem Y that can be solved with technology. Company X feels they don't have the know how to do it so they pay IBM to help them do it.
IBM has a suite of products/services that have been put together to speed this process up, but they will also put together custom products/services (for a handsome fee).
Their competitors are Oracle, SAP and big consultancy firms. Think big budgets.
After a while, it had the effect of making students getting interested in banking and transaction orientated software engineering, completing the cycle, joining internship programs and maintaining the mainframe paradigm for the next couple of generations.
Wouldn't you? A massive mainframe you can play on as a student, no need for a VM, just log right in!
IT budgets for large banks and financial firms usually dedicate something like 20% their budget to mainframes, but it usually accounts for about 80% of the firm's workload/processing.
[0]: http://www.economist.com/blogs/schumpeter/2012/09/ibms-mainf... [1]: http://blog.nullspace.io/mainframes.html