Who looks after the mainframe community?

There are really only two ways of selling products like mainframe software. The first way is to simply have products and descriptions about them on your website and expect your sales team to convince potential customers that your product offers the best facilities at the lowest price. So, customers buy it, and you stay in business. The second way is to build a relationship with customers. Let them know the facilities and features in the product, but also let them know what it won’t do for them – so they won’t be disappointed once the product is installed. That relationship built on trust extends to things like conferences, which you might sponsor, give presentations, and have a booth where you take the time to chat to those customers that you know well. You’ll listen to what problems they are facing and report those problems back to your developers to see what they can come up with. It‘s a relationship.

I know one company that often needed temporary IT staff to cover holidays and illness amongst their regular staff. They would always go for the cheapest cover staff available. And would often complain about the quality of their work. I am friends with the CEO of a local company that supplies cover staff to local businesses, and I asked him whether he ever worked with the first company I mentioned. He said that he had, but he didn’t now. He explained that his company valued building relationships with local businesses, and that made it slightly more expensive to use his people than the cheaper companies. He said that they never got any complaints because, if there was ever the slightest issue with the people they supplied, he, or one of the execs, would resolve the situation straight away, and the problem would disappear. That was the value of the relationship.

For mainframe software vendors, to be successful is all about sharing knowledge with customers and letting those customers benefit from the experiences of product experts. It’s a way of helping customers and potential customers to learn new skills. And that’s why many vendors sponsor large conferences like SHARE and GSE UK. And some vendors sponsor user groups such as the Virtual IMS user group and the Virtual CICS user group. The vendors also produce articles or blogs, and they give presentations at conferences and user group meetings. They share their knowledge and experience, and they can also highlight industry trends. It’s a way for vendors to ‘pay it forward’.

One huge benefit for vendors of this level of involvement with the community is that it raises their profile amongst potential customers, and potential customers have a positive feeling towards them. That vendor stops being a faceless organization, and becomes a company with a known face and personality. It becomes someone that the potential client would at least want to have a conversation with about a product purchase. And for a vendor, a foot in the door is better than being unaware that organization was looking for new software.

A strong community is also important for vendors because, if the community starts to drift away – for example moving off mainframes to cloud environments – then those vendors have no-one to sell their software to. They need a vibrant community, and they need to support it as much as they can, so it stays vibrant for the foreseeable future.

Let’s take a look at the Virtual IMS user group, which started life towards the end of 2007. It was originally sponsored by Neon Enterprise Software. In 2010 it was sponsored by Fundi Software, who used to make software products that were sold by IBM. In 2019 Rocket Software took over sponsorship, And in 2021, BMC Software became co-sponsors with Rocket.

For the Virtual CICS user group, it was first sponsored by Fundi Software in 2010, and Rocket Software took over in 2019. In 2020, HostBridge became the main sponsor. And in 2021, Rocket became a co-sponsor with HostBridge.

I was having a conversation with another vendor recently about the importance of the mainframe community and how important it was for there to be a way to easily share technical information during the months between conferences and for people who couldn’t attend conferences. We also discussed the role of vendors in maintaining that community so that mainframe users could learn the skills they needed to get the most out of the mainframe for their organization.

The bad news for the user groups is that Rocket Software has decided to focus its attention elsewhere and is stopping support for both user groups.

So, in order for the Virtual IMS and Virtual CICS user groups to continue with their alternate monthly meeting – six per group per year – they need a new co-sponsor. Both have over 600 members, and both have well-attended online meetings. It would be a shame to see that source of knowledge exchange lost from the user community.

If you work for a software vendor and you can see the benefit to your company and the user community of co-sponsorship of either user group, please contact me (trevor@itech-ed.com) for a without prejudice conversation.