If it's May it must be Madness

For the fourth year in a row, CA Technologies is hosting its free virtual trade show. As always, there are educational presentations to help mainframe users get more value from their existing products, and improve their technical skills. You can find out more and register by going to ca.com/mainframe/may. Last year’s event drew 5,000 registrants from 59 countries; and connected partners, industry experts, and colleagues via virtual booths and online chats.

MMM12 includes presentations by CA Technologies and leading industry experts including Julie Craig, research director, application management, Enterprise Management Associates; Jon Toigo, CEO of Toigo Partners, International LLC; Joe Clabby, president, Clabby Analytics; Craig Mullins, president, Mullins Consulting; Stu Henderson, president, The Henderson Group; and DB2 expert Sheryl Larson, president of Sheryl M Larson, Inc.

There’s also keynote speakers including: CA’s Dayton Semerjian; Dr Howard Rubin, President and CEO of Rubin Worldwide; Julie Craig, CA’s research director; Jon Toigo, CEO Toigo Partners; and Karen Sleeth, Senior Principal CA Labs.

From 1 to 31 May, CA claims it’s “the largest mainframe-focused event of its kind. Every weekday in May brings new insights, tools, and strategies to help you understand and maximize the strength and relevance of 21st century mainframe solutions. There are more than 100+ valuable sessions, demos, papers, and other valuable tools available over every business day in May, so you won’t want to miss a thing! From application development and performance, to databases and storage, to Linux on System z, MMM 2012 has your area covered!”

You may recall that Arcati’s Mark Lillycrop and I were involved in a Networking Lounge conversation during last year’s mainframe madness.

The great thing about this event is that you don’t need to leave your desk. There’s no travel costs, hotel costs, meals, replacement staff costs etc. You just log-in from your laptop.

The same applies to the Virtual CICS user group meeting on Tuesday 8 May. At 10:30am CDT, Stephen Mitchell, Managing Director of Matter of Fact Software Limited, will be discussing “Utilizing the Dojo Toolkit for Web browser-driven applications from CICS”.

Modern Web applications need a user interface that gives a positive experience, is functionally effective, and pleasing on the eye. Creating such user interfaces can be quite difficult using the browser’s native Javascript language. Javascript libraries such as the Dojo Toolkit facilitate the creation and delivery of modern Web applications. CICS on z/OS is fully capable of servicing the needs of Web applications. This presentation discusses how the Dojo Toolkit can be exploited by CICS Web applications. Reference is made to the business issues encountered when deciding to use the Dojo Toolkit in a software solution that already uses the CICS Web interface.

If you want to register for the presentation, you need to go to https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/624487633. If you want to find out more go to  http://www.fundi.com/virtualcics/. Or if you’re an IMS specialist go to http://www.fundi.com/virtualims/ to find out about future IMS-related presentations.

Online events like CA’s May Mainframe Madness and virtual user group meetings like the Virtual CICS user group this coming week save attendees time while delivering the information they’d get from physically attending an event. And for their organization, the savings are huge – which is why we’re seeing more events of this type, and why they are so successful.

Mainframe chatter

Mark Lillycrop, Director of Arcati Ltd, and I were asked to take part in CA’s May Mainframe Madness. We were part of a ‘Scheduled Chat’ in their ‘House of Mainframe’ section on 5 May. It was enjoyable chatting to other mainframe professionals and it was very interesting the direction the conversation took.

Clearly, there were two main strands to the conversation. One was the difficulty of convincing (converting?) non-mainframers of the potential of the mainframe. The second was the success of z/Linux at installations.

Looking at z/Linux success first, Murray Theriault told us: “I think what sold it for me was the idea that I could put up 100 z/Linux machines on the same box and have a very small footprint, not to mention no power costs”. Similarly, Marie Kennard added: “Same here – the app we’re putting onto zLinux currently runs on dozens of boxes, most of which are reaching EOL and needed replacing”.  Someone else reminded the group about Aliantz in Australia, saying that they’d “flipped their whole farm to z/Linux in a weekend with little to no outtage”. This led CA’s Reg Harbeck to comment: “zLinux seems to be taking over a decade to become an overnight sucess...”

So it appears that z/Linux is making headway in those sites that already have a mainframe and Linux servers. And it’s definitely the case that the arguments for doing so are irrefutable. Moving some of the applications or even all of them from other Linux platforms is a positive step and the sites doing so are going to see huge benefits in terms of performance, reliability, and, of course, cost savings both in man-power and outages.

But even the success stories seem to be the result of a battle between mainframers and management whose model of computing and whose expectations are the result of using Microsoft Windows. A lot of the hour long discussion was spent on how to get managers in organizations that have mainframes to appreciate what they have, and to understand how to exploit the mainframes potential. The truth is that there’s an even bigger battle to be fought and that’s to get IT people and IT managers at non-mainframe sites to appreciate the opportunities that a mainframe brings.

During the discussion it was said that ‘good news’ mainframe stories don’t make much of an appearance in the IT press. If they did, that would be one way that people would get to hear about mainframes. Mark suggested that many people view mainframes as: “Old, expensive, and your dad’s technology”. And yet, anyone who takes money out of an ATM (hole-in-the-wall) machine is probably linking to IMS on a mainframe. They just don’t know it. The press were not only blamed for sins of omission, but also sins of commission – for printing the same old stories containing the same old wrong assumptions about mainframes.

I reminded the chat room about William Data Systems ZEN product family and how users can control their network from the latest iPad gizmo, or get reports on their smartphones about what’s going on on their network. And, obviously, there was a lot of talk about cloud computing and mainframes – and how they go together like “peas and carrots” (well Forest Gump would have said that if he’d been logged in!). The point is that mainframes aren’t “your dad’s technology”, they very much embrace the very latest technologies and do it in a way that is secure and comes with all the benefits of years of successful operation in banks and airlines, etc.

I did think to run a competition, at this point but I don’t have a prize to give out. However, I would be interested in hearing people’s ideas of how managers and staff at mainframe sites and the rest of the IT world who aren’t mainframers can be convinced of the importance and proven-reliability of mainframes. You can e-mail me at trevor@itech-ed.com with your comments and I’ll put them together in a future blog.

Other topics that we discussed during our hour included the importance of virtual meetings with the current financial constraints when organizations are less-and-less keen to fund travel/hotels/food etc for people to attend. We looked at green computing and how this issue will most-likely grow in importance with future regulation. The fact that the word ‘legacy’ is actually a compliment. (How many of you have printers that don’t work with Vista or Windows 7, and just have to live with it?) And we suggested names for the next version of z/OS including z/2020 and z/Cloud.

All-in-all it was an enjoyable ‘Scheduled Chat’ in the ‘House of Mainframe’. Good luck CA for the rest of the month of mainframe madness.

CA provides May Mainframe Madness

Last week I was talking about the benefits of virtual user group like the Virtual IMS group (at www.fundi.com/virtualims) and the Virtual CICS group (at www.fundi.com/virtualcics). I was suggesting that attending this kind of group meant you didn’t need budgeting approval for time away from the office (meals, hotel rooms, travel, etc) and so made life easier for busy mainframe professionals. CA has taken this idea one step further – they’re devoting the whole May to mainframes, and doing it all virtually!

Details of CA’s May Mainframe Madness can be found at www.ca.com/content/page/May-Mainframe-Madness-2011.aspx.

CA describes it as the largest mainframe-focused event of its kind. They also say it’s the, “largest virtual Mainframe trade show in the world”. The information on the Web page currentlys says: “Every day brings new insights, tools and strategies to help you understand and maximize the strength and relevance of 21st century mainframe solutions. There are more than 100 valuable sessions over every business day in May, so you won’t want to miss a thing! Learn what’s new and find out how mainframe solutions from CA Technologies are leveraging Mainframe 2.0, CA’s innovative strategy to change the way the mainframe is managed forever.”

You can register now for the event at www.ca.com/mmm – which redirects to a registration page. CA claims that registration takes only 90 seconds, and go on to say: “The event will feature keynote presentations on everything from debugging to new backup and recovery techniques and 150+ virtual sessions and demos, as well as technical sessions, customer case studies, on-demand education materials, and various mainframe exhibits for approximately 7,500 professionals around the world.”

So why am I telling you about CA’s event in May? Don’t they have their own PR people who get paid to do it? Well, the reason I’m mentioning it is because I’ve been invited to take part, along with long-time friend, colleague, and iTech-Ed Associate, Mark Lillycrop, who’s CEO of Arcati Ltd – the people who produce the much-valued Arcati Mainframe Yearbook, which is freely available for download from www.arcati.com/newyearbook11. Mark and I will be available in what CA calls the Networking Lounge. This is a place where people can take part in scheduled chats as well as watch videos and have unscheduled chats with other attendees.

Other areas in CA’s virtual mainframe extravaganza are the Auditorium, the Job Role Resource Center, and the Exhibit Hall.

Mark and I haven’t finalized a time and date for this event, nor have we agreed on the topics we will be chatting about – but I’m sure it will be great fun and very informative. I’m also sure that I’ll let you have the exact details via this blog, Facebook, or Twitter in plenty of time. And I look forward to meeting you then and hearing your questions.

And if you’re looking for a virtual event to attend, then next Tuesday (12 April) at 10:30 CDT, Ron Haupert, a Senior Technologist with Rocket Software, will be talking to the Virtual IMS user group. The title of his presentation is: “Simplify and improve database administration by leveraging your storage system”. You can find out more about the event including how to register at www.fundi.com/virtualims.