Shopping

It seems that as you get closer to Christmas and the New Year, everything starts to run down like an old clockwork toy. Meetings scheduled for 2013 seem ages away, even though some are at the beginning of January. And phone calls so often find the person you’re ringing out of the office – whether that’s doing a bit of family shopping or attending the numerous party and lunch invitations. And as for e-mail, people seem to leave their out-of-office message on permanently!

To be honest, I’ve been closeted away trying to get the bulk of the Arcati Mainframe Yearbook 2013 sorted out. I’ve been calculating the numbers for the user survey – and very interesting they are too. But I’ll talk more about them next year. I’ve been busy placing articles and organizing entries for vendors and consultants in the appropriate sections. So, no partying for me this week. BTW if you wanted to be included in the Yearbook, e-mail me immediately here.

I’ve also been working away at a speaker programme for the Virtual IMS user group and the Virtual CICS user group. The first meeting is on 15 January when IBM speakers will talk about the CICS V5.1 - Portfolio Update. But, as I say, it’s in January and seems an age away! If you or your company are interested presenting to either group during the year, then let me know here.

It seems that no matter whether you’re Christian, atheist, agnostic, or a person of any other faith, everyone likes a present from Father Christmas (Santa). So what do you buy the IT guy who seems to have pretty much everything? Somehow socks just don’t seem to show any real thought. Alcohol is usually well received, as are things from the more expensive end of the catalogue. But I’ve got a couple of other suggestions.

I’ve been playing with a magic magnetic balls cube. It’s 216 small magnetic balls that you can shape into all sorts of 3D things. And then you can scrunch them all up and start again. But the really hard part, is getting them back into the cube shape. Remember magnets repel as well as attract. So you can play with them for ages.

I’ve also been working with a variety of organizations on social media – getting Facebook fan pages set up, starting using Twitter, and putting videos on Youtube. And I found the like and dislike Facebook-like stamps can be quite fun. Whatever happened to the paperless office? As documents pass across my desk, I can (mainly for my own amusement) stamp them with a Like or Dislike (thumbs up or thumbs down). You’ll probably enjoy doing much the same!

There are lots more ideas at www.paramountzone.com, such as touch-screen gloves, iHat music hat, USB mug warmer, flying monkeys, a one million pound bank note, alcohol breath tester keyring, tap shower radio, and light changing glow ball.

And, for the mainframer in your life, you could try to get hold of a “Proud to be part of z” poster. You can see a copy here.

So, whatever you’re doing over the next couple of weeks, have a great time. See you next year.

Putting it all together

I was chatting to Tony Amies, product architect at William Data Systems, about the best way to get information from a mainframe (and about what’s happening on that mainframe) out to someone who has access to a browser. He had a number of nifty techniques that I’d like to share with you.

Assuming you want to get the information from your mainframe to a browser, your first really big decision is do you want to go with two-tier architecture, or do you want to go with three-tier architecture? Tony’s advice was that two-tier was enough.

That leads to the second really important decision to be made, which is where should the processing take place? You’ve got to look at what needs to be done and then make a choice about which platform does that work best on. So, for example, and perhaps quite obviously, if you want to monitor what’s going on with IP, FTP, or EE (Enterprise Extender) on your mainframe, you want that processing to take place on the mainframe. That all seems fairly easy!

But what do you want to do with your results from those different monitors (and indeed any other monitoring software you have running)? Do you want to look like mission control and have a 3270 screen for each monitor that’s running. Now, I remember how impressed visitors used to be when they saw something like that, but if my plan is to get the information to laptop or tablet device running a browser, then I probably need to consolidate the different feeds first. And, again, I want to do that on the mainframe, in the same LPAR (Logical PARtition) that the monitors are running in. It makes sense because much less work has to be done than if I choose to send that data somewhere else for processing.

If you’re familiar with WDS products, you know about their ZEN monitor for their other products. They’re written in Assemble and C and they use a little DLL inside each product that talks to a DLL in ZEN and you can see a nice display of what’s going on – on everything. As a side note, using the DLLs allows the products to talk to each other, so that if the IP monitor spots something, then the IP trace tool can be used to investigate further.

So, using the two-tier architecture, ZEN is logically split into two parts. One part is mainframe friendly and one part is Web friendly. Associated with the Web-friendly part of ZEN are the necessary JavaScript libraries and JQuery libraries, and the usual HTML bits. If you’ve not come across JQuery before, it’s like a lot of clever JavaScript that’s been already written that you can use to make your Web site look very modern. Lots of sites use the jQuery lightBox plugin to show photos.

There’s always a problem with busy Web pages in that lots of information has to come from the server to the browser, resulting in lots of network traffic – and if you’re monitoring your mainframe’s network from a browser there can be even more. So the first technique they’ve used is AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML), which means that only the parts of the Web page that have changed are sent, the rest of the page stays the same. They also use JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) as a lightweight data-interchange format.

But there’s always an issue with any User Interface and that’s how to separate the actual user interface itself from the business logic behind it. In technical terms, these are known as the view model and the data model. To make this work as effectively as possible, they’re using MVVM (Model View ViewModel), which is a framework or architectural pattern coming originally from Microsoft, but now extended to include JavaScript MVVM. You can get a clearer idea of the sorts of things they’ve done – and perhaps the sorts of things you could do from knockoutjs.com. The site describes itself as “simplifying dynamic javaScript UIs by applying the Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) pattern”. The WDS developers also familiarized themselves with prototypejs.org, a site describing itself as “a foundation for ambitious web user interfaces”. They go on to say: “Prototype takes the complexity out of client-side web programming”.

For WDS, basically an object is requested from the browser by the user. This goes up to ZEN. Using JSON, a data object comes down and binds with the layout defined in the MVVM skeleton. As a user, you see dynamically updated information in your browser. If one new value affects other values, those other values are automatically update appropriately.

I’m not endorsing WDS’s products, I’m saying that they have very effectively made use of the very latest technology at the browser end to make their product work very efficiently. I’m suggesting that the two-tier architecture with really clever stuff on the browser side is definitely worth taking a look at.

Computer futures

It’s December. It’s the time of the year when people are either reviewing what kind of a year it has been for them or predicting the future. I thought that this week I’d look forward to next year.

The big news for mainframe users is, of course, the price hike promised by IBM. If you go to http://www-01.ibm.com/common/ssi/ShowDoc.wss?docURL=/common/ssi/rep_ca/9/897/ENUS312-129/index.html&lang=en&request_locale=en you can see that from 1 July, the price of Flat Workload License Charges (FWLC) will increase.

According to Timothy Prickett Morgan writing for The Register: “IBM has a wide variety of monthly software pricing schemes for its System z mainframes, but the FLMC scheme is interesting in that it applies to all machines regardless of size or vintage equally and as you increase the capacity of the mainframe, the software fees stay flat.

“The bad thing about the FWLC scheme is that it does not have what IBM calls sub-capacity pricing, where customers use virtualization to isolate capacity on a particular mainframe and then only get charged for that software based on the MSUs consumed in that logical partition.” MSUs are Metered Service Units. It looks like the average price rise will be around the 10 percent level.

We probably won’t be making use of Application Performance Management Software as a Service (perhaps more easily written as APM SaaS). A survey conducted by IDG Research Services online among members of the CIO Forum on LinkedIn during August found that 61 percent of organizations have no plans to implement APM SaaS. But around a quarter (24 percent) already use APM SaaS in some capacity, with a mere 4 percent are using an APM SaaS vendor to monitor all their critical applications.

A CA Technologies survey found that 80 percent of Australian organizations are expected to face a shortage of mainframe skills in the future, with 57 percent already experiencing difficulties. The skills shortage issue is one that IBM, CA, and other companies are addressing with graduate and undergraduate programmes of study on mainframes.

The good news from the survey is that the mainframe is also playing an increasingly strategic role in managing the evolving needs of the enterprise. Again this comes as a surprise to no-one who knows about mainframes. With the growth in use of Linux on the mainframe, organizations can save lots of their budget. And the new hybrid models allow sites to get the best of all worlds.

The survey also found that 36 percent of respondents anticipate an increase in hardware spending in the next 12 to 18 months. Good news for hardware vendors. 44 percent of respondents are planning to increase their spending on mainframe-related services.

And while our focus is on mainframes, we all use laptops, tablets, and smartphones, so it’s interesting to see that Steven Sinofsky has left Microsoft. Who’s he, you say? Well, he was one of the driving forces behind Windows 8. Similarly, Scott Forstall has left Apple. Both were working to get laptops, tablets, and smartphones to use much the same interface and appear to the user to all have the same look-and-feel. Perhaps that touchscreen-style way of working will make its way to the interface to mainframe applications? Or perhaps in many ways it has in so far as remote access to mainframes can be achieved over the Internet from a browser on any platform.

I definitely predict more things will decide they are ‘cloud’ things. Mainframe users have been saying all along that they used to sit at a terminal and not worry where the application software lived, or where the data was stored – they just knew it was ‘out there’ and got on with their work. I’m sure this ‘cavalier’ attitude is one most users would like to be able to embrace. We’ve all had the problem with a file being on our office computer when we need it in the evening or weekend, or being on our home computer on Monday morning when we’re in the office. IT departments can sweat the security issues, but users will love the idea of it all (data and apps) being out there and available from anywhere.

Finally, if you’re a vendor, don’t forget to update your information in the Arcati Mainframe Yearbook 2013 – you can do it here. And if you’re a mainframe user, then help us by completing the user survey here.

End of an era - goodbye Lotus

It was announced this week that IBM is dropping the Lotus brand from its much-loved Notes and Domino workgroup products. That’s the end of an era for a brand that first saw the light of day 30 years ago (in 1982). From Version 9.0 onwards, we’ll be calling it IBM Notes.

Let’s turn back time to 1982. We’ll gloss over the clothes, the music, and the politics, and remind ourselves about that king of spreadsheets – Lotus 1-2-3. Mitch Kapor founded Lotus Development Corporation in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA in that year. Lotus 1-2-3 was so popular that many people bought PCs simply to use it!

Over the years, a number of other products came from Lotus – with names such as Approach, cc:Mail, Hal, Improv, Jazz, Manuscript, Magellan, Organizer, and Symphony. You can just feel the memories as you say the names – although the truth is that they weren’t all wildly successful. But with the triumph of Microsoft Office in the desktop environment, Lotus could still hold its head high. It had the best groupware product around – Notes.

In the 1990s, every presentation seemed to be how client/server was the only computing model worth considering, and Notes’ combination of messaging and database fitted the bill perfectly. And as soon as PCs could produce enough power for it to work, Notes took off.

And then in 1995, in the spirit of the old Remington catchphrase, IBM liked the product so much, they bought the company! And they paid a whopping $3.5 billion for it. IBM added Lotus Domino (the server-side version of Notes), and the product became popular for collaborative working.

Lotus ran some major jamborees, labelled Lotusphere, where the faithful could get the latest news on products and developments, and talk to like-minded users. At Xephon, where I was working in the 1990s, we published Notes Update and then Notes/Domino Update, with me as the editor.

IBM also acquired Ray Ozzie, who’s company Iris Associates, developed Notes for Lotus. But soon Ozzie was on the move and formed Groove Networks, which was taken over by Microsoft. In 2006 he became Chief Architect at Microsoft, but left at the end of 2010. His new company is called Cocomo.

So, the good news is that Notes and Domino go on. The sad news is that the Lotus brand name finally disappears. 

Meanwhile, don’t forget to complete the mainframe users survey at www.arcati.com/usersurvey13. And vendors - make sure your free entry in the Arcati Mainframe Yearbook is up-to-date by going to www.arcati.com/vendorentry.

Guide Share Europe - my impression

Yet again, I could only get to the first day of this year’s Guide Share Europe conference on the 13 and 14 November – which was shame. I hoped I could arrange my meetings to take place at the conference, but there we are. So, I thought that, for those people who were unable to make even the first day, I’d give you a flavour of what you missed.

As usual, the conference was at Whittlebury Hall – which is near Silverstone, but just into Northamptonshire. The location is stunning, so a walk outside to get a breath of air is always worthwhile.
 
The exhibition hall is big, and busy, and its where lunch and coffees are served, making it easy to chat to the vendors and other attendees. I always find it’s a great opportunity to put faces to people I usually talk to by e-mail, to catch up with old colleagues, and make new friends. The quality of the food is always good, particularly the conference dinner.
 
 With 14 streams and pretty much 10 sessions in each stream, it can be hard to decide which sessions to attend. I chair the Virtual IMS user group and the Virtual CICS user group, so I split my time between the CICS and IMS streams. 

The first session I went to, I saw IBM’s Steve Foley and the new CICS Director, Danny Mace, talk about CICS TS Version 5.1. They highlighted improvements in CICS capacity and scalability suggesting users could have two or three times more workloads per region. They spoke about new autonomic policy-based management, and increased availability including being able to refresh SSL certificates without a CICS restart. They also spent some time clarifying the concepts of what an ‘application’ is and what a ‘platform’ is. You may think you already know, but this way, it becomes easier to move an application to a different platform. Steve also ran over some of the portfolio updates too. And the session ended with an interesting conversation about pricing.

Next I headed for a presentation about IMS 13 by Paul Fletcher (also from IBM). He said that the new version came with improvements in performance, reductions in storage usage, and reduced TCO (Total Cost of Ownership). The HALDB ALTER and the DEDB ALTER commands allow changes to be made without needing a database outage. You can have multiple views of a physical database in the IMS catalog. And he talked about IMS Connect enhancements.

After lunch it was back to the CICS stream to see IBM’s Inderpal Singh talk about CICS and cloud computing. He said that an ‘application’ contained a collection of CICS bundles. It seemed that no-one in the room was using CICS bundles at this time. He also spoke about the life-cycle of an application – install, enable, disable, and discard. It’s that final stage that doesn’t seem to happen at most installations, where things are left in-place, just in case they’re needed in the future. You can create a CICS bundle in CICS Explorer using the new-look Cloud Explorer interface for CICS.

Next up in the IMS stream was IBM’s Dougie Lawson. Dougie is another fantastically knowledgeable IBMer, who you may have come across when you’ve had an IMS problem. He talked about DRD and the IMS repository – and tried to break the record for the most slides you can show in an hour!. He explained that the repository is a data store of resource information and the repository catalog is points to repository and is quite different from the IMS Catalog.

The final technical session of the afternoon was an old friend of the Virtual IMS user group, GT Software’s Dusty Rivers, talking about IMS modernization. The main thrust of his presentation was about making data and applications available on other platforms. He suggested that mainframe modernization means different things to different people and he grouped these into adding a Web look-and-feel, getting access to mainframe data, getting to mainframe business logic, the need to consolidate logic, the need to reduce MIPS, and the need to integrate with new technologies (such as cloud and smartphones). 

After a day full of so many technical presentations, you might think people would give an extra session a miss. But it was standing room only for the always-excellent Resli Costabell, who talked about dealing with ‘difficult’ people. Her definition of difficult people, is that they are just people that you’ve run out of skills to deal with! And she said that the power in such a situation is with the person being difficult – so we should accept them as they are and stay calm. She even gave us a strategy. You talk as if you’re talking to a friend and say: “I know you’re only [insert positive intention], and [insert negative effect], so [and here you ask for what you want them to do]”. She also suggested that whatever someone does, they do with the best intentions, and they are doing the best that they know how. Resli explained to the group that some people look for similarities between what you’re telling them and their experience, and some look for differences. In the latter case, again she had a strategy. Tell them that they won’t like what you have to say and that there are only a few situations where they can use it. Your difficult person will immediately find lots of ways that they can use it (which is really what you wanted all along!). A really great session – and I haven’t even mentioned Mark Wilson’s contribution!!

Over drinks in the exhibition hall sponsored by Vanguard, Attachmate, and Suse, and an excellent dinner sponsored by Computacenter and PKWARE, I chatted more informally with vendors and real mainframe users. As usual, I was encouraging vendors to complete their entry in the Arcati Mainframe Yearbook, and explaining the benefits of sponsoring it. And I was asking mainframe users to complete the user survey.

My overall impression of the conference was that it was excellent. Mark Wilson (the GSE technical coordinator) and his colleagues made sure everything worked well. I picked up loads of information, and had a really good day.

Well done everyone who organized it and spoke at it. And if you missed it, go next year.

How important is e-mail?

As the bulk of the mainframe population gets older, you can expect that some of them will retire. You can also expect, in any job, that people will get promotions or transfer to other organizations. And so it comes as no surprise to me when I e-mail my list of members of the CICS or IMS virtual user groups each month that perhaps one or two will be undeliverable – like Elvis, they’ve left the building. And each year when I e-mail people about the Arcati Mainframe Yearbook user survey, I’m even less surprised to find their e-mails are bouncing.

It seems a pretty fair assumption to make – if an e-mail address stops working, then the person is no longer working for that company. And in my case, I tend to delete them off my list. I guess it’s what most people do in order to keep their e-mail lists up-to-date. Just delete the bounce-back/undeliverable e-mail addresses.

And that strategy seemed to make sense up until late last Friday night – that’s over a week ago!

I never give e-mail a thought these days. I’ve been using it forever. I’ve been using the Internet since the days of Bulletin Boards. I can access my e-mail on my phone. E-mail has always been just there. It’s like electricity and running water – I know there’s an infrastructure that delivers it to my home, but, most of time, I just take it for granted. It’s there, I use it, and I don’t give it a second thought!

I have a personal e-mail address and a company account. I use Yahoo and Gmail. I can get to my e-mail on anyone’s laptop, on my tablet, and, like I said, on my phone. I can choose to check my e-mail during the day, wherever I am. I can check it last thing at night and first thing in the morning. I get Listserv e-mails from CICS and IMS sites. I get newsletters and other consolidation information. I get Google alerts about mainframe news. And, of course, I get lots of spam. Or, at least, I did, up until last Friday evening.

I tend to keep my e-mail open all day and I answer e-mails during a break from whatever else I’m working on. It acts like a refresher – unless the e-mail is causing more work, in which case I flag it and come back to deal with it later. I keep abreast of what’s going on and what people are saying. I can then answer press or client inquiries as they come in. I use e-mail to send articles to various publishers.

So, that’s not very different from hundreds of other people. I use e-mail a lot. I get around 50 e-mails every hour (plus spam). Some are just trying to sell me something, but a lot are work-related and useful.

But, late last Friday evening, my e-mail stopped working. Or, to be more precise (and sound less like a typical end-user!), my e-mail forwarding stopped. All the people writing to trevor, admin, virtualims, virtualcics, arcati, and lots of other addresses @itech-ed.com had their e-mails flagged as undeliverable. As far as they were concerned my company had disappeared. I, along with everyone else here, had probably retired, resigned, or just left!

It was all to do with my IT provider being taken over. The new company ‘updated’ my service – and took away all my e-mail forwarding. By Monday, I was concerned. By Tuesday, I was very concerned. All these bouncebacks meant people would be thinking not only that I didn’t exist, but my whole company had disappeared. By Wednesday my frantic back-and-forth with my provider was leaving me tearing my hair out. And here we are now. Over a week of frantic messaging and tweeting by me still hasn’t made a difference. Come on Dotster – I need my e-mail working. I need people to know that iTech-Ed Ltd is still in business.

I now have a much greater appreciation of e-mail and its importance to any business. And how a glitch can cause no end of problems. It’s as if the water and electricity to my office had been turned off!

If you have any suggestions about what I can do next, I’d love to hear from you.

What’s really going on?

One of the problems with being a mainframer these days is finding out what’s going on at other sites and being able to compare your experiences with other people’s. There used to be rooms full of mainframe staff, and regular turnover meant that new ideas were easily examined. Apart from Google, nowadays you can keep in the loop by joining a user group (like the Virtual IMS and Virtual CICS user groups that don’t require you to be out of the office to attend meetings), going to conferences (you’ve just missed IOD, but Guide Share Europe takes place next week), or you can read survey results.

Or there’s survey results. And as we’re coming to the end of another year, surveys seem to be happening more frequently.

BMC Software recently published a survey from their AsiaPacific area. They found there was a growth in processor engines, which was driven by transaction processing requirements. And driving that is users wanting to have data available to them at any time and anywhere – particularly users with mobile devices. BMC also found that some of the growth could be attributed to legacy application development and some to newer applications where the mainframe provides the back-end delivery of that application.

Respondents liked mainframes for security and data integrity reasons, as well as its centralized manageability. One result that won’t surprise anyone who’s investigated the option was that the cost of moving away from the mainframe is very high!

CA Technologies has published a survey of 800 IT and business leaders. They found that IT and business leaders often have two different views on innovation, with IT respondents suggesting that they are more likely to position themselves as driving innovation, being an expert on innovation, and having the required skills to foster innovation. Business executives identified IT’s shortcomings in regard to its ability to support and drive innovation and gave themselves credit for innovation.

With results that could have been published any time up to the 1990s, the survey found large gaps can be found in rating IT’s knowledge of the business, IT’s business and communications skills, and overall speed and agility. I thought this division had healed over many years ago, but maybe the pendulum is swinging back the other way? Perhaps the paucity of IT staff makes it harder for them to get to meetings and interact with other execs? Or maybe the CIO (Chief Information Officer) is disappearing from organizations and IT is being relegated into a silo all over again?

Not surprisingly, the survey found common frustrations such as organizations’ lack of agility, and budget and staff resource shortages. Interestingly, new IT initiatives include mobile and business intelligence/analytics. Organizations reporting high levels of innovation are also planning investments in cloud, security management, business analytics, service management, and virtualization.

If you want to have your say about what’s happening at your site, the Arcati Mainframe Yearbook is conducting a user survey now. You can find the survey at www.arcati.com/usersurvey13.

If you’re interested in the Virtual IMS or CICS user groups, you can find them at www.fundi.com/virtualims/ and www.fundi.com/virtualcics/ respectively. More information about the GSE conference is at www.gse.org.uk/tyc/.