[Info-vax] What does VMS get used for, these days?

[IanD]

VMS has been kind to me, it's allowed me to move across lots of different industries over the years

Sadly, VMS has exited most of those places I have worked or has been relegated to some corner on it's own, deemed too difficult to replace...yet

Some of them were/are...

- Pathology (integrated system, tracking customers, lab equipment interfacing, financials etc)
Replaced due to merger/acquisition

- Municipality (Billing, rates, equipment tracking etc - they ran their own gas and electricity divisions until government forced their exit from those industries)
Replaced by cheaper more flexible and up to date standardized offerings

- Government (Central healthcare across the board spanning a number of hospitals (lab interfacing/control, billing, patient care/hospital administration, financials, doctor/nurse registrations etc)
Replaced by cheaper more flexible and up to date standardized offerings

- Education (Central system maintaining student information, financials, course registration and course scheduling)
Replaced by cheaper more flexible and up to date standardized offerings

- Logistics (Logistics, intermediary warehousing, financials, billing etc)
Not replaced but in time will be. 
All the highly specialized functions around least path analysis, bulk discounting, special order processing (shipping military equipment, from plane parts to rocket launchers) will be scrapped and new more simplified offering set up in a new system. Companies often don't even bother porting functionality over anymore. Simplification is cheaper to manage than keeping extensive offerings going

- Telco (a few of them). (Billing, rating, order management, switch interfacing etc)
Most have gone, Replaced by cheaper more flexible and up to date standardized offerings.
One still remains but it only handles internal customers (external branded companies).
Despite it running a web server and having a more direct customer interface, I heard through the grapevine it's going to get to axed in the next few years
Telco used to be a VMS stronghold :-(

- Financial (banking). They have VMS systems that handle specific products. The systems are in a specialized group outside of standardized offerings.
It's very difficult to replace a system that handle 30 year old mortgages for example due to regulations protecting those customers. In Telco it was easy, you just offered them some sweet deal like a ton of free calls and customers would happily move to a completely new product and you could replace the supporting VMS system, not so easy in banking however.
I don't know the numbers but I suspect the customers left are not many because there is chatter about the VMS systems being retired in the 'next few years'

So many VMS systems get shown the door because they lack integration with the rest of the organisation. Things like Applications dynamics, Splunk (yes, there's VMSSPI), CyberARK,  etc. 
Then there's things like MongoDB and other NoSQL flavored stuff that people/products want to use. Yes, they might all be one off's in their own right but have a few of these missing on your platform and suddenly your seen as difficult to work with/non supportive of 'mainstream' technologies.

Risk drives everything and replacing VMS is seen as risk mitigation. I'm on a mainframe project that is trying to replace an application that runs perfectly fine and has done so for many many many decades but it effectively an in-house DBMS and the skills (not programming, but in the DBMS itself) are extremely difficult to find now, so replacing the system wholesale is the only option left because no young person is interested in training up in such a one-off system.

In terms of current deployments for VMS, I have not heard of VMS gaining any new business other than upgrades to an existing operation but I don't frequent VMS circles anymore