What can we look forward to in 2022?

It’s always interesting to see what Gartner highlights as the top 10 strategic technology trends for the year ahead and beyond. This year, they are predicting the following:

Synthetic data for better privacy – by 2025, they say, synthetic data will reduce personal customer data collection, avoiding 70% of privacy violation sanctions. Synthetic data is artificially-created data rather than being data that’s generated by actual events. It is often created using AI techniques. Its use is growing in popularity, because it can serve as a proxy for real data, reducing or eliminating the risks of exposing private consumer information or sensitive data. A second benefit that comes from it not being real data, is that it lessens regulatory concerns and can actually provide more precise insights because AI can better model often-unpredictable customer behaviour. Synthetic data can be used to train and test AI models to handle unplanned disruptions, unexpected events, and scenario planning, which, ultimately, will make an organization more resilient.

Consumers fight data collection – by 2024, 40% of consumers will trick behaviour-tracking metrics, thereby intentionally devaluing the personal data about them that’s collected, which will make it difficult to monetize. Consumers know that vast amounts of data about them is being collected by various organizations. This tactic becomes a way for them to stop being treated as a commodity by these organizations

Mining brain data – by 2027, a quarter of Fortune 20 companies will be supplanted by companies that neuromine and influence subconscious behaviour at scale. Neuromining is the application of behavioural intelligence and related technology to analyse, understand, and influence human behaviour at scale. It will enable organizations to gain a deeper understanding of consumers, which will drive better customer relationships and elevate employee engagement. As neuroscience continues to evolve, this technique will grow increasingly sophisticated and precise. By 2027, Gartner estimates, a quarter of Fortune 20 companies will be supplanted by companies that neuromine and influence subconscious behaviour at scale.

Agile in; managers out – by 2024, 30% of corporate teams will be without a boss due to the agile and hybrid nature of work. With agile adoption at 30% and hybrid work at 50% of organizations, about one-third of teams can operate without a traditional manager role. The pandemic has driven increased need for organizational resilience, driving more embedded agility within businesses. By definition, agile requires an environment of trust that doesn’t lend itself to traditional hierarchies. The increase in hybrid workforces reveals that a large portion of managers lack the skillset necessary to manage employees in remote or hybrid situations, and only 47% percent of employees believe that their manager can lead the team to success in the future.

Africa: the next great start-up hub – through 2026, a 30% increase in developer talent across Africa will help transform it into a world-leading start-up ecosystem, rivalling Asia in venture fund growth.

Modular business or bust – by 2024, 80% of CIOs surveyed will list modular business redesign, through composability, as a top-five reason for accelerated business performance. Composability, ie the modular redesign of operational assets to minimize interdependencies, enables work to be recomposed quickly, easily, and safely. Currently, 74% of organizations have some kind of modular or component-based technology implementation underway. Generally, organizations will be focused on flexibility and adaptability over stability in order to counter market volatility.

The war on cyberattacks – by 2024, a cyberattack will so damage critical infrastructure that a member of the G20 will reciprocate with a declared physical attack. While recent large-scale cybersecurity attacks on hospitals, governments, and energy facilities have been considered crimes, the increasingly devastating fallout means they’ll soon be considered acts of war. An increase in regulation on a national level will highlight that enterprises cannot be solely responsible for limiting the scope of damage. Cyberattacks by non-state actors against critical infrastructure will eventually diminish in frequency and intensity as cybercriminals adjust to the reality of kinetic reprisals by military and intelligence agencies.

Breakup with bad customers – by 2025, 75% of companies will ‘break up’ with poor-fit customers because the cost of retaining them eclipses good-fit customer acquisition costs. Organizations often accept poor-fit customers into the sales pipeline and attempt to retain them without adequately considering how costly those customers are for the organization. It costs time and money to satisfy poor-fit customers: for example, to customize offers or design solutions to suit them. As leaders understand more about those costs, they’ll become more comfortable with letting go unproductive customers, given the drain on brand and long-term profits — not to mention the emotional toll on employees.

Hyper-fixation on hyper-tokenization – by 2026, non-fungible token gamification will propel an enterprise into the top 10 highest valued companies. A non-fungible token (NFT) is a unique and non-interchangeable unit of data, eg a photo, video, audio file, or even a tweet that can be verified. Companies are quickly recognizing the potential of non-fungible tokens to grow business models and drive new revenue streams. Public blockchains are exponentially growing the ability to digitally connect value represented by tokens, bringing yet another wave of seemingly limitless opportunities in the digital world. Fungible and non-fungible tokens are driving a segment of this new phenomenon, which is called ‘hyper-tokenization’. By 2024, Gartner predicts that 50% of publicly listed companies will have some sort of NFT underpinning their brand and/or digital ecosystem presence

More Internet for less – by 2027, low-orbit satellites will extend Internet coverage to an additional billion of the world’s poorest people, raising 50% of them out of poverty. Establishing cellular bases in rural areas is expensive and inefficient. Low orbit satellites offer a cheaper, more flexible solution. They’re able to provide islands of connectivity, so networks can deploy directly where the customers are, rather than rolling out across a country in a linear fashion. Also, new satellites can be launched to address increased need. As the Internet becomes more widely available, it will add billions of newly connected ‘netizens’ shifting the internet in terms of content and culture.

It will be interesting to see how many of these come true!

Also, don’t forget that you still have time to complete the mainframe use survey at itech-ed.com/AMY22/usersurvey22/.

And it’s the second week of the excellent GSE Conference. To register, go to https://conferences.gse.org.uk/register.

Guide Share Europe Annual Conference 2021

It used to be that you needed to live in the UK or western Europe to be able to attend the UK’s premier mainframe conference and exhibition. However, because of Covid, the Guide Share Europe Annual Conference is online again this year. And that means anyone from anywhere can enjoy the presentations.

The conference runs from Monday 1 November to Thursday 4 November and Monday 8 November to Thursday 11 November, and has presentations in eight ‘virtual rooms’. There are all the usual streams: 101; 102; AIOPS, System Automation, Monitoring and Analytics; Application Development; Batch and Workload Scheduling; CICS; DB2; Enterprise Security; IMS; Large Systems; Linux on Z; Mainframe Skills & Learning; MQ; Network Management; New Technologies; Storage Management; Women in IT; and z/Capacity Management and zPerformance. If you want to register, the address is https://conferences.gse.org.uk/register.

The conference is made possible by sponsorship. This year’s Platinum sponsors are IBM, BMC Software, and Broadcom. Other sponsors include MainTegrity, Beta Systems, Micro Focus, SMT Data, Luminex, and Rocket Software. The charities being supported this year by the raffles are: RNLI (Royal National Lifeboat Institution) and Guide Dogs UK.

There are a number of keynote presentations. The first is on Monday 1 November at 2pm, when Mark Wilson opens the conference. That’s followed by Broadcom’s Greg Lotko, whose keynote presentation is entitled, “Colleagues in Corvettes Getting Cappuccinos”. That’s followed at 3:15pm by IBM’s Geeth de Mel, whose keynote is entitled. “AI Driven Knowledge Discovery”.

The keynote on Tuesday at 5pm is from Chris Booth from NatWest and is entitled, “Don’t call us special”. “Infrastructure and Application Modernization on IBM Z with Red Hat OpenShift” is at 5pm on Wednesday 3 November. It’s presented by IBM’s Marcel Mitran.

Mark Wilson opens the second week of the conference at 2pm on Monday 8 November. He’s followed at 2:15pm by BMC Software's John McKenny’s keynote called “The Road to Digital Transformation is Paved with AIOps, SecOps, and DevOps”. At 3:30pm, it’s Saghi Amirsoleymani from Rocket Software asking, “Does the future DBA need to be a data scientist?”. On Tuesday at 5pm, Ian Thompson from Next will be asking, “Where Next? Keeping the mainframe relevant at Next”. On Wednesday at 5pm, IBM’s Meredith Stowell will be speaking. Mark Wilson wraps up the conference on Thursday 11 November at 6:15pm.

There are also a number of lunch and learn sessions. On Tuesday 2 November, Misty Decker from Micro Focus will be asking, “Do You Really Understand Mainframe Modernization?”. On Wednesday at 1pm, conference favourite Resli Costabell will be discussing, “Imposter Syndrome”. On Tuesday 9 November Glenn Anderson from GlenAndersonSpeaks will offer, “Five Tips to Energize Your Next Presentation”. On the Wednesday, BMC Software’s Edward Shim looks at, “SecOps, SOAR and how to build a strategy for your mainframe”. SOAR stands for security orchestration, automation, and response – in case you weren’t sure. Thursday lunch time sees BMC Software’s Atul Bhovan talking about, “Mainstream the Mainframe with Automated CI/CD Pipelines and Shift Left Automated Testing”.

Being an online conference means that you don’t need to drive or fly anywhere. There’s no need to book hotel rooms. There’s no need to arrange cover for staff who are off work because they will just be in a meeting for part of the day. There are just so many reasons on the plus side for registering to attend. The presentations are the usual high quality – and there are so many of them. The only downside to a virtual conference is that you don’t get to meet and chat to other mainframers from other sites. And you don’t get to hear all those horrendous revelations about what has actually happened at other sites while you’re sitting with new friends in the bar late at night!

You may be interested in a session on the last Thursday at 10:30 until 11:30, “Defending your mainframe against hackers, ransomware, and internal threats”.

I would definitely recommend the conference to everyone.

The Arcati Mainframe Yearbook 2022

How do you know what’s really going on at other mainframe sites? One answer, each year, is to read the annual mainframe users’ survey published in the Arcati Mainframe Yearbook. If you’re prepared to give up 10 minutes of your time to complete a survey form, we will send you a FREE copy of the survey results before they are published in January. As in previous years, we’re inviting all mainframe professionals to complete the annual user survey, which is up and running at itech-ed.com/AMY22/usersurvey22/. The more users who complete the survey, the more accurate a picture of what’s happening in the mainframe world we can produce, and therefore the more useful the survey report will be.

For example, when looking at what’s new (or, perhaps more correctly, what appears on a lot of PowerPoint slides), last year’s survey found that 35 percent of sites are already using Splunk. And a further 20 percent said that they were planning to use it. The survey found that 35 percent of sites were already using DevOps (up from 20 percent last year), with a further fifteen percent planning to use it. And half of all respondents said that they were already reusing APIs to speed up application development. And a further 25 percent of sites are planning to reuse APIs. Blockchain has been in the news a lot, and 10 percent of sites reported already using it, with 15 percent planning to use it. With Docker, we found that 10 percent of respondents were already using it with 15 percent at the planning stage. When it came to Web-enabling subsystems, we found that 80 percent of organizations were Web-enabling Db2; 75 percent were Web-enabling their CICS subsystems; and 30 percent of sites were Web-enabling IMS, and 30 percent were Web-enabling WebSphere. In contrast, only eight percent of sites already use Liberty, with eight percent planning to install it.

When asked what, in their opinion, are the main benefits to their organization of the mainframe over other platforms, every single respondent highlighted security. Clearly, all the talk about breaches and ransomware is focusing the minds of mainframers. 90 percent of respondents highlighted the benefit of availability. 75 percent of respondents highlighted manageability, with 75 percent identifying scalability.

Linux is often in the news, so it was interesting to see what our respondents had to say about it. Just over half of respondents said that they run Linux on the IBM Z. There are considerable cost and management benefits from consolidating distributed Linux workloads onto the mainframe. However, 63 percent of respondents weren’t interested in LinuxONE mainframes. Six percent of respondents said they already had one, with 25 percent expecting to get one at some time in the future. But, no sites in the survey said their primary operating system was Linux.

Reinforcing the value of the mainframe to organizations, the survey found that 89 percent of sites have seen some kind of increase in capacity, and 83 percent have seen an increase in technology costs, and yet only 59 percent of sites believe their people costs have increased! Also, in terms of costs, 81 percent of sites surveyed said that the bulk of their IT budget is spent off mainframe.

If you’ve not come across the Arcati Mainframe Yearbook before, it has been the de facto reference work for IT professionals working with z/OS (and its forerunner) systems since 2005. The Yearbook includes: an annual mainframe user survey; a mainframe strategy section with papers on mainframe trends and directions; an up-to-date directory of mainframe vendors, consultants, and service providers; a guide to useful sources of mainframe-related information; a glossary of terminology; and a mainframe evolution section. Each year, the Yearbook is downloaded by over 21,000 mainframe professionals. The current issue is still available at arcati.com/newyearbook21.

So, very shortly, many mainframe professionals will receive an email telling them that we have started work on the 2022 edition of the Arcati Mainframe Yearbook. If you don’t hear from us, then email arcati@itech-ed.com and we will add you to our mailing list. All respondents completing a survey before Friday 26 November will receive a FREE PDF copy of the survey results. The identity and company information of all respondents is treated in confidence and will never be divulged to third parties. And any comments made by respondents will be anonymized before publication. If you’re in a Zoom or Teams call with mainframers from other sites, please pass on the word about this survey. We’re hoping that this year’s user survey will be the most comprehensive survey ever. Current estimates suggest that there are somewhere around 3,000 mainframes in use world-wide.

Anyone reading this who works for a vendor, consultant, or service provider, can ensure their company gets a FREE entry in the vendor directory section by completing the form, which is at itech-ed.com/AMY22/vendorentry/. This form can also be used to amend last year’s entry.

Also, as in previous years, there is an opportunity for organizations to sponsor the Yearbook or take out a half-page advertisement. Half-page adverts (5.5in x 8.5in max landscape) costs $990 (that's UK£790 or €850 Euros). To put that cost into perspective: for every dollar you spend on an advert, you reach around 25 mainframe professionals.

Sponsors get a full-page advert (11in x 8.5in) in the Yearbook; inclusion of a corporate paper in the Mainframe Strategy section of the Yearbook; a logo/link on the Yearbook download page on the Arcati Web site; and a brief text ad in the Yearbook publicity e-mails sent to users. All this for just $2590 (that's UK£1990 or €2230 Euros). To put that cost into perspective: for every dollar you spend on sponsorship, you reach around 9 mainframe professionals.

Last year’s sponsors and advertisers were: BMC Software, Broadcom, Model9, Action Software International, DataKinetics, DataVantage, Enterprise Systems Associates, Inc (ESAi), Fischer International, Fujitsu, Key Resources Inc, Software Diversified Services, Tone Software, and ZETALY.

Vendors, consultants, and service providers need to complete our survey form to get their free entry in the Yearbook as soon as possible. Also, they need to let me know, either by e-mail or by ticking the appropriate box at the end of the survey (at itech-ed.com/AMY22/vendorentry/), whether they wish to advertise in or sponsor the Arcati Mainframe Yearbook 2020. All entries need to be with us by Friday 26 November.

Clearly, not an opportunity to be missed. The Arcati Mainframe Yearbook 2022 will be freely available for download early in January next year. Let me thank, in advance, everyone who will help to make the new Yearbook such a success.

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