The Guide Share Europe Conference at Whittlebury Manor was as excellent this year as in previous years. I was only able to make Day 1 on 5 November, but I had a great day. Apart from the 5 star presentations, it’s always fun to catch up with old friends and people I’ve spoken to at webinars, but never actually seen. Plus there’s an opportunity to catch up with a number of vendors and find out what’s happening with them and business in general.
The day started with a couple of keynotes from Tesco’s Tomas Kadlec talking about Technology the retailers battlefield – zSeries reports for duty!”, and the University of Bedfordshire’s Dr Herbert Daly talking about “Re-framing the mainframe: new generations and regenerations on System z”.
I chair the Virtual IMS user group and the Virtual CICS user group, so my time is always split between the CICS and IMS sessions. This year, I started with IBM’s Kyle Milner’s “z/OS Explorer and CICS Explorer (5.1.1)”. Kyle started by saying that z/OS Explorer is really called IBM Explorer for z/OS, and V2.1 is separate from CICS Explorer, which integrates with it. Z/OS Explorer is a desktop tool that integrates with MQ Explore, Data Studio, Rational tools (RTC), Rational Developer for z (RDz), IMS Enterprise Suite Explorer, and other tools. It allows users to view, delete, and create files on z/OS and Linux; work on SPOOL files; and much more. It’s installed using Installation Manager in a process that’s much like getting apps from the apps store. CICS Explorer lets users create new program definitions, clone resources, and other life-cycle operations. It’s built on the Eclipse framework V4.2.2.
IBM’s Greg Vance spoke about “GDPS Active-Active and IMS replication”. He described how recovery involved two concepts: the Recovery Point Objective and the Recovery Time Objective. He looked at how recovery had evolved to the point where people wanted almost immediate recovery with almost no lost data. Active-Active replication involves stopping sending transactions to one database, waiting for the last transaction to replicate across, and then sending transactions to the second database. The transactions caught before the switch over just appear a bit slow to the user. For this to work with IMS, you need InfoSphere Data Replication for IMS for z/OS V1.11. Because it uses asynchronous replication, there are no restrictions on the distance between databases. There’s low latency because of the use of parallelism. And there’s transaction consistency.
Back at the CICS stream, I saw IBM’s David Harris talk about “Eliminating the batch window with modern batch”. David starting by explaining that batch jobs often had to run when online services were down because they needed exclusive access to resources. However, there are many drivers to keep the online system available the whole time leaving little or no time for traditional batch applications to run. The solution he proposed involved running batch at the same time as the online system – and this batch system relied on Java. It comes with a big plus in that it can run in a zAAP coprocessor. Using the Batch Data Stream Framework (BDSF), it allows checkpointing, and business objects can be re-used. The batch container is a long-running CICS job, and WebSphere Application Server (WAS) is used to schedule the jobs into CICS.
Informatica’s John Boyle spoke about “IMS test data management”. He explained that we needed only a subset of data to work on in testing, and we need to hide sensitive data – particularly in light of data privacy legislation and to reduce the risk of sensitive data loss. John also stressed the need for the test data to be kept current and internally consistent. Data masking is the technique that hides personal data and it must be consistent across the data. Test software must allow policies to be applied and maintain referential integrity. It first has to establish what to mask and how to mask.
IBM’s Paul Fletcher spoke about “IMS 13 Native SQL for COBOL”. A pre-req for this COBOL V5.1, which has only just been released. COBOL programs supply SQL keywords and support static and dynamic SQL. At the moment, IMS supports only dynamic SQL. Users need to declare tables, define an SQL Communication Area (SQLCA), which is like a PCB, possibly define an SQL Descriptor Area (SQLDA), declare data items for passing data between IMS and host languages, code SQL statements to access IMS, check the SQLCA to verify the execution of the SQL statements, and handle any SQL error codes. Paul told the group that there are three types of dynamic SQL. Firstly, where the whole SQL is known when the program is written. Secondly, where the SQL is known but the value can vary. And, thirdly, where none of the SQL is known – it’s read from a file. Users need to fully qualify all tables and columns; use a WHERE clause for key fields; and use PREPARE.
The exhibition hall was packed and lively, giving people a chance to find out about various products and services. An excellent day of learning and networking was rounded off by fireworks and a barbecue dinner. I’m sorry I couldn’t make the second day. If you didn’t make GSE this year, I recommend that you go next year.
Showing posts with label Share. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Share. Show all posts
Sunday, 10 November 2013
Sunday, 13 October 2013
Guide Share Europe annual conference 2013
The Guide Share Europe (GSE) UK Annual Conference is taking place on 5-6 November at its regular home in Whittlebury Hall, Whittlebury, Near Towcester, Northamptonshire NN12 8QH, UK.
Sponsors this year include IBM, Computacenter, EMC2, Attachmate Suse, PKWARE, Blenheim Software International Ltd, BMC Software, CA Technologies, Compuware, IntelliMagic, Optica, Oracle, RSM Partners, and Sett. And there will be over 30 vendors in the associated exhibition.
There’s the usual amazing range of streams – and, to be honest, there are a number of occasions when I would like to be in two or more places at once over the two days. The streams are: CICS, IMS, DB2, Enterprise Security, Large Systems Working Group, Network Management Working Group, zLinux, Storage Management, TWS (Tivoli Workload Automation), Automation & Monitoring, New Technologies, 101, Application Development, MQ, Workshop: IBM z/OS Explorer, UKCMG, and Workshop: Linux Installation.
There are also keynotes from Tesco’s Tomas Kadlec talking about “Technology the retailers battlefield - z series reports for duty!”, Dr Herbert Daly (Department of Computer Science and Technology, University of Bedfordshire) talking about “Re-framing the Mainframe: New Generations and Regenerations on System z”, and Trident Service’s Bob Rogers talking about “A Perspective on System z Capacity Delivery - Past and Future”.
At this year’s conference there will be well over 160 hours of education covering most aspects of mainframe technology – more than last year. This year, there will be 17 streams, many with 11 sessions, plus three keynotes.
There is still time to register, and the organizers are expecting the daily total of delegates to exceed 300 – as it did last year.
The popular 101 sessions give newcomers and those unfamiliar with parts of the mainframe infrastructure a basic understanding of that mainframe technology and how it works.
You can find out more details about the conference at http://tyc.gse.org.uk/.
If you’re still debating whether to go, let me recommend it to you. The quality of presentations is always excellent. And the networking opportunities are brilliant. If you are going, I look forward to seeing you there.
Sponsors this year include IBM, Computacenter, EMC2, Attachmate Suse, PKWARE, Blenheim Software International Ltd, BMC Software, CA Technologies, Compuware, IntelliMagic, Optica, Oracle, RSM Partners, and Sett. And there will be over 30 vendors in the associated exhibition.
There’s the usual amazing range of streams – and, to be honest, there are a number of occasions when I would like to be in two or more places at once over the two days. The streams are: CICS, IMS, DB2, Enterprise Security, Large Systems Working Group, Network Management Working Group, zLinux, Storage Management, TWS (Tivoli Workload Automation), Automation & Monitoring, New Technologies, 101, Application Development, MQ, Workshop: IBM z/OS Explorer, UKCMG, and Workshop: Linux Installation.
There are also keynotes from Tesco’s Tomas Kadlec talking about “Technology the retailers battlefield - z series reports for duty!”, Dr Herbert Daly (Department of Computer Science and Technology, University of Bedfordshire) talking about “Re-framing the Mainframe: New Generations and Regenerations on System z”, and Trident Service’s Bob Rogers talking about “A Perspective on System z Capacity Delivery - Past and Future”.
At this year’s conference there will be well over 160 hours of education covering most aspects of mainframe technology – more than last year. This year, there will be 17 streams, many with 11 sessions, plus three keynotes.
There is still time to register, and the organizers are expecting the daily total of delegates to exceed 300 – as it did last year.
The popular 101 sessions give newcomers and those unfamiliar with parts of the mainframe infrastructure a basic understanding of that mainframe technology and how it works.
You can find out more details about the conference at http://tyc.gse.org.uk/.
If you’re still debating whether to go, let me recommend it to you. The quality of presentations is always excellent. And the networking opportunities are brilliant. If you are going, I look forward to seeing you there.
Sunday, 11 August 2013
Facebook and your business
Your organization can only stay in business if it sells products or services. And you can only sell stuff if people know what it is you have for sale. One way of achieving this is to use Facebook as a way of communicating with the public, and letting them communicate with you.
The first thing to do is to create a Facebook Page for your organization or product on Facebook – and you probably already have one.
One thing that Facebook introduced recently is the “Boost Post” button at the bottom of a post:
If you click on “Boost Post”, you’ll see:
Boosted posts are seen by existing fans and their friends. There is a facility for targeting by location, age, gender, and language, but not by interests or category. The posts are visible in news feeds on laptops and smartphones. Of course, you may not want to pay to get your message to people who have already liked your Page.
The advantage of using this technique is that you don’t need to understand how to create adverts, and you can set your own budget, whereas, if you’re advertising, you pay per click.
You can set a price limit for a boost – as long as it’s over $5. It’s possible to reach lots of people for a small amount of money. And you may find that other posts on your Page are being read by those friends of friends.
The alternative is to try Page Post Ads. Page Post Ads allow you to promote a post that you made on your Facebook Page, and they come in two types – there’s simple Page Post Ads, and Page Post Sponsored Stories. You have to use the ads create tool. The first thing to decide is whether you want to advertise a Page, event, app, or Web site. Facebook now provides image customization for Page Post link ads.
Before you start boosting posts or advertising, you’ll want to know how many people are actually looking at your Page. And you may be a little confused by some of the technical terms used by Facebook, when you look at the admin panel for your Page. Page ‘Likes’ is fairly obvious – the number of people who’ve liked your Page. But what about ‘Reach’? According to Facebook, Reach measures the number of people who received impressions of a Page post. The reach number might be less than the impressions number since one person can see multiple impressions. OK, you say, so what’s an ‘impression’? Again, Facebook tells us: Impressions measure the number of times a post from your Page is displayed, whether the post is clicked on or not. People may see multiple impressions of the same post. For example, a fan might see a Page update in News Feed once, and then a second time if their friend shares it.
At the bottom of a post you’ll see:
‘Like’ allows people to say they like the post. ‘Comment’ obviously allows people to comment, and ‘Share’ allows people to share the post with their friends. And these numbers are shown on the Admin panel.
‘People Talking About This’ is defined by Facebook as the number of people who have created a story from your Page post. They add that stories include: Sharing, liking or commenting on your post; Answering a question; Responding to an event; and Claiming an offer. Finally, ‘Engaged Users’ is the number of people who have clicked anywhere on your post.
As well as looking at the ‘Reach’ figure, you can look at the bottom of each post to see how many people have seen a post. If you move your mouse over this, you’ll see a pop-up window showing how many ‘Organic’ and ‘Viral’ views there have been.
Organic is the number of people who saw a Facebook Page post through their News Feed, Ticker, or on the Facebook Page itself. It’s usually the highest number.
Viral counts the number of people who’ve accessed a Page post from one of their Facebook friends. Cute animals and ‘uplifting’ phrases are often shared by people, and so the viral number can increase.
Paid Reach is the number of people who saw a post in an ad or sponsored story. All three types added together give the total reach for a post.
And how do you get people to visit your Page and like it? Here are some suggestions:
• Post frequently – at least once a day
• Post pictures – they’re more likely to be commented on and shared
• Post short comments rather than longer ones
• Post questions – so people will answer them
• Ask people to like, share, or comment on posts
• Run contests to get more likes
• Try to be entertaining and educational.
Whatever you do, you want people to come to your Page and you want them to return regularly, and, most importantly, you want them to buy your product or service.
And while we’re talking Facebook, click on the link and Like the iTech-Ed page at https://www.facebook.com/iTechEd.
The first thing to do is to create a Facebook Page for your organization or product on Facebook – and you probably already have one.
One thing that Facebook introduced recently is the “Boost Post” button at the bottom of a post:
If you click on “Boost Post”, you’ll see:
Boosted posts are seen by existing fans and their friends. There is a facility for targeting by location, age, gender, and language, but not by interests or category. The posts are visible in news feeds on laptops and smartphones. Of course, you may not want to pay to get your message to people who have already liked your Page.
The advantage of using this technique is that you don’t need to understand how to create adverts, and you can set your own budget, whereas, if you’re advertising, you pay per click.
You can set a price limit for a boost – as long as it’s over $5. It’s possible to reach lots of people for a small amount of money. And you may find that other posts on your Page are being read by those friends of friends.
The alternative is to try Page Post Ads. Page Post Ads allow you to promote a post that you made on your Facebook Page, and they come in two types – there’s simple Page Post Ads, and Page Post Sponsored Stories. You have to use the ads create tool. The first thing to decide is whether you want to advertise a Page, event, app, or Web site. Facebook now provides image customization for Page Post link ads.
Before you start boosting posts or advertising, you’ll want to know how many people are actually looking at your Page. And you may be a little confused by some of the technical terms used by Facebook, when you look at the admin panel for your Page. Page ‘Likes’ is fairly obvious – the number of people who’ve liked your Page. But what about ‘Reach’? According to Facebook, Reach measures the number of people who received impressions of a Page post. The reach number might be less than the impressions number since one person can see multiple impressions. OK, you say, so what’s an ‘impression’? Again, Facebook tells us: Impressions measure the number of times a post from your Page is displayed, whether the post is clicked on or not. People may see multiple impressions of the same post. For example, a fan might see a Page update in News Feed once, and then a second time if their friend shares it.
At the bottom of a post you’ll see:
‘Like’ allows people to say they like the post. ‘Comment’ obviously allows people to comment, and ‘Share’ allows people to share the post with their friends. And these numbers are shown on the Admin panel.
‘People Talking About This’ is defined by Facebook as the number of people who have created a story from your Page post. They add that stories include: Sharing, liking or commenting on your post; Answering a question; Responding to an event; and Claiming an offer. Finally, ‘Engaged Users’ is the number of people who have clicked anywhere on your post.
As well as looking at the ‘Reach’ figure, you can look at the bottom of each post to see how many people have seen a post. If you move your mouse over this, you’ll see a pop-up window showing how many ‘Organic’ and ‘Viral’ views there have been.
Organic is the number of people who saw a Facebook Page post through their News Feed, Ticker, or on the Facebook Page itself. It’s usually the highest number.
Viral counts the number of people who’ve accessed a Page post from one of their Facebook friends. Cute animals and ‘uplifting’ phrases are often shared by people, and so the viral number can increase.
Paid Reach is the number of people who saw a post in an ad or sponsored story. All three types added together give the total reach for a post.
And how do you get people to visit your Page and like it? Here are some suggestions:
• Post frequently – at least once a day
• Post pictures – they’re more likely to be commented on and shared
• Post short comments rather than longer ones
• Post questions – so people will answer them
• Ask people to like, share, or comment on posts
• Run contests to get more likes
• Try to be entertaining and educational.
Whatever you do, you want people to come to your Page and you want them to return regularly, and, most importantly, you want them to buy your product or service.
And while we’re talking Facebook, click on the link and Like the iTech-Ed page at https://www.facebook.com/iTechEd.
Monday, 1 April 2013
GSE UK 2012
You’re probably wondering why I’m talking about an event that happened last year – and one that I blogged about last November anyway. Well, the exciting news is that the video of last year’s event is now available. You can stream it from YouTube from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fNalXiM_4QI. And you can download a copy from http://www.gse.org.uk/tyc/video/GSE_UK_Conference_2012_HD.mp4.
The Guide Share Europe (GSE) UK Annual Conference ran 16 streams, had 32 vendors, 326 attendees on day 1 and 314 on day 2, with 260 dinner reservations at the end of day 1. It took place on 13-14 November at Whittlebury Hall, Whittlebury, Near Towcester, Northamptonshire NN12 8QH, UK.
If you were there, watch the video to bring back happy memories. And if you weren’t there, watch the video to see what you missed! The people who organize GSE UK are happy for you to share the link with your colleagues and post it on your own Web site and tweet it, and whatever other social media you’d like to use.
And if you like wallowing in nostalgia, the 2011 conference video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OfT9km93V0U.
So, if all that has whetted your appetite, this year’s conference will be on 5 and 6 November at Whittlebury Hall. Put the dates in your diary – don’t miss it.
The Guide Share Europe (GSE) UK Annual Conference ran 16 streams, had 32 vendors, 326 attendees on day 1 and 314 on day 2, with 260 dinner reservations at the end of day 1. It took place on 13-14 November at Whittlebury Hall, Whittlebury, Near Towcester, Northamptonshire NN12 8QH, UK.
If you were there, watch the video to bring back happy memories. And if you weren’t there, watch the video to see what you missed! The people who organize GSE UK are happy for you to share the link with your colleagues and post it on your own Web site and tweet it, and whatever other social media you’d like to use.
And if you like wallowing in nostalgia, the 2011 conference video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OfT9km93V0U.
So, if all that has whetted your appetite, this year’s conference will be on 5 and 6 November at Whittlebury Hall. Put the dates in your diary – don’t miss it.
Sunday, 18 November 2012
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.
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.
Sunday, 21 October 2012
Guide Share Europe annual conference
The Guide Share Europe (GSE) UK Annual Conference is taking place on 13-14 November at Whittlebury Hall, Whittlebury, Near Towcester, Northamptonshire NN12 8QH, UK.
Sponsors this year include IBM, Computacenter, PKWARE, CA Technologies, Attachmate Suse, Vanguard, Compuware, GT Software, RSM Partners, Blenheim Software, Sett, and Red Hat. And there will be over 30 vendors in the associated exhibition.
There’s the usual amazing range of streams – and, to be honest, there are a number of occasions when I would like to be in two or more places at once over the two days. The streams are: CICS, IMS, DB2, Enterprise Security, Large Systems Working Group, Network Management Working Group, zLinux, Storage Management, TWS (Tivoli Workload Schedular), Automation, New Technologies, Software Asset Management, MQ, Application Development, and Assembler Training.
There are also keynotes from Mark Anzani, VP and CTO for System z at IBM. And there’s the not-to-be-missed “Dealing with difficult people” session from Resli Costabell.
That means that at this year’s conference there will be well over 140 hours of education covering most aspects of mainframe technology – more than last year. This year, there will be 14 streams of ten sessions over the two days, plus Assembler Training, plus four keynotes.
There is still time to register, and the organizers are expecting the daily total of delegates to exceed 300 – as it did last year.
A number of the streams have 101 sessions at different times during the two days to give newcomers and those unfamiliar with parts of the mainframe infrastructure a basic understanding of the that mainframe technology and how it works.
You can find out more details about the conference at www.gse.org.uk/tyc/.
If you’re still debating whether to go, let me recommend it to you. The quality of presentations is always excellent. And the networking opportunities are brilliant. If you are going, I look forward to seeing you there.
Sponsors this year include IBM, Computacenter, PKWARE, CA Technologies, Attachmate Suse, Vanguard, Compuware, GT Software, RSM Partners, Blenheim Software, Sett, and Red Hat. And there will be over 30 vendors in the associated exhibition.
There’s the usual amazing range of streams – and, to be honest, there are a number of occasions when I would like to be in two or more places at once over the two days. The streams are: CICS, IMS, DB2, Enterprise Security, Large Systems Working Group, Network Management Working Group, zLinux, Storage Management, TWS (Tivoli Workload Schedular), Automation, New Technologies, Software Asset Management, MQ, Application Development, and Assembler Training.
There are also keynotes from Mark Anzani, VP and CTO for System z at IBM. And there’s the not-to-be-missed “Dealing with difficult people” session from Resli Costabell.
That means that at this year’s conference there will be well over 140 hours of education covering most aspects of mainframe technology – more than last year. This year, there will be 14 streams of ten sessions over the two days, plus Assembler Training, plus four keynotes.
There is still time to register, and the organizers are expecting the daily total of delegates to exceed 300 – as it did last year.
A number of the streams have 101 sessions at different times during the two days to give newcomers and those unfamiliar with parts of the mainframe infrastructure a basic understanding of the that mainframe technology and how it works.
You can find out more details about the conference at www.gse.org.uk/tyc/.
If you’re still debating whether to go, let me recommend it to you. The quality of presentations is always excellent. And the networking opportunities are brilliant. If you are going, I look forward to seeing you there.
Saturday, 19 May 2012
Making it look nice for CICS users
Let’s look at an archetypal MVS site. Kenny wrote most of the original Assembler and quite a bit of the COBOL code that drove the business all those years ago. He was a big man and a real hippie. He even came to work in his sandals and decorated his office with album covers. He thought that writing comments in code was just a waste of time. Doug, who took over from Kenny was an absolute troglodyte. Whereas Kenny was fun to go for a drink with – and boy could he drink – Doug was forever under the floor connecting high speed back-up technology that no-one else really understood. He was great because he’d help everyone with code problems, but he seldom turned up to meetings or understood the concept of budgets. But everything worked like a dream and the company made money.
Nowadays we’ve got Ross heading up software on our z/OS CICS system. He does attend meetings – lots of them. He’s on the committee at a local user group and he’s given presentations at SHARE. He’s even got a wife and children! The problem is that much of the code that Ross looks after is quite old and doesn’t have many comments. There was an effort in 1999 to document everything, but it’s now out-of-date since the SOA (Services-Oriented Architecture) project.
The trouble at many sites is that their Ross is kept very busy at the mainframe end of his CICS system and thinks that the bit of AJAX on the Web browser front-end is enough to keep the end users happy. The truth is, end users are never happy! So what if someone at a conference told Ross there was an easy way (well, perhaps not easy, but fairly straightforward certainly) to make the end user experience of his CICS applications look like it was written in 2012 and not 1912!?!? Do you think Ross would be interested?
Before we look at what this amazing solution might be, let’s briefly look at Web design. Back in 1999, a Web site was pretty much made up of static pages. Someone wrote the pages in HTML and, over time, people updated the information on those pages. Then we had PHP and MySQL. This provided a database that users could update as necessary, and the PHP pages pulled out the latest information. They still looked like static pages, but they were easier to update. Then, we had JavaScript that gave us programming capabilities and all the flexibility that goes with that. Then we had JQuery, which was JavaScript with all the hard work already done for us. You’ve seen Web sites with JQuery-like effects – the ability to click on a thumbnail image and see it large in the middle of the page while much of the rest of the screen is covered with a semi-transparent layer. An example would be clicking on a photo in Facebook.
So let’s tell Ross about the Dojo Toolkit from the Dojo Foundation. Now at Version 1.7, the Web site at http://dojotoolkit.org/ says: “Dojo saves you time and scales with your development process, using web standards as its platform. It’s the toolkit experienced developers turn to for building high quality desktop and mobile web applications.” Now, suppose there was some way to plug that into CICS. So while Ross was looking after the CICS applications, Dojo was making sure that the end users had a good experience.
The Virtual CICS user group (www.fundi.com/virtualcics/) heard from Stephen Mitchell, Managing Director of Matter of Fact Software Limited, earlier this month. He gave a talk entitled: “Utilizing the Dojo Toolkit for Web browser-driven applications from CICS”, which really got to grips with how CICS and the Dojo Toolkit could be integrated. The base functionality of the Dojo Toolkit is made available to a Web page by including a link to dojo.js. This includes plenty of features like CSS-based queries, event handling, animations, AJAX, class-based programming, and a package system that makes getting access to the rest of Dojo very easy.
There are additional stable (but optional) components for advanced animations, I/O, data, drag-and-drop, and much more with Dojo Core. Dijit is Dojo’s theme-able, accessible, easy-to-customize UI library. Dijit requires Dojo Base and various Dojo Core modules to use. It allows for the creation of widgets. For the more adventurous, there’s DojoX, which contains a number of sub-projects based on the Dojo Base. Each project has a varying states of maturity – from very stable and robust to alpha.
Stephen’s company recognized a need to control the Dojo Toolkit that was being used by their PlexSpy application status monitor product. And they decided that if it was an issue for them, it was most likely an issue for others. So they created a generic server solution that could be used by anyone with CICS on z/OS. As a consequence, the Dojo Toolkit has been taken into the mainframe environment and is served from CICS out of PDSs. This brings the strengths of the mainframe to sites using the Dojo Toolkit – providing the control over it that those sites needed.
Ross can now put his feet up at home with his family knowing that his end users are happy with their working environment. And the code Kenny and Doug wrote is still doing its job for another generation.
Nowadays we’ve got Ross heading up software on our z/OS CICS system. He does attend meetings – lots of them. He’s on the committee at a local user group and he’s given presentations at SHARE. He’s even got a wife and children! The problem is that much of the code that Ross looks after is quite old and doesn’t have many comments. There was an effort in 1999 to document everything, but it’s now out-of-date since the SOA (Services-Oriented Architecture) project.
The trouble at many sites is that their Ross is kept very busy at the mainframe end of his CICS system and thinks that the bit of AJAX on the Web browser front-end is enough to keep the end users happy. The truth is, end users are never happy! So what if someone at a conference told Ross there was an easy way (well, perhaps not easy, but fairly straightforward certainly) to make the end user experience of his CICS applications look like it was written in 2012 and not 1912!?!? Do you think Ross would be interested?
Before we look at what this amazing solution might be, let’s briefly look at Web design. Back in 1999, a Web site was pretty much made up of static pages. Someone wrote the pages in HTML and, over time, people updated the information on those pages. Then we had PHP and MySQL. This provided a database that users could update as necessary, and the PHP pages pulled out the latest information. They still looked like static pages, but they were easier to update. Then, we had JavaScript that gave us programming capabilities and all the flexibility that goes with that. Then we had JQuery, which was JavaScript with all the hard work already done for us. You’ve seen Web sites with JQuery-like effects – the ability to click on a thumbnail image and see it large in the middle of the page while much of the rest of the screen is covered with a semi-transparent layer. An example would be clicking on a photo in Facebook.
So let’s tell Ross about the Dojo Toolkit from the Dojo Foundation. Now at Version 1.7, the Web site at http://dojotoolkit.org/ says: “Dojo saves you time and scales with your development process, using web standards as its platform. It’s the toolkit experienced developers turn to for building high quality desktop and mobile web applications.” Now, suppose there was some way to plug that into CICS. So while Ross was looking after the CICS applications, Dojo was making sure that the end users had a good experience.
The Virtual CICS user group (www.fundi.com/virtualcics/) heard from Stephen Mitchell, Managing Director of Matter of Fact Software Limited, earlier this month. He gave a talk entitled: “Utilizing the Dojo Toolkit for Web browser-driven applications from CICS”, which really got to grips with how CICS and the Dojo Toolkit could be integrated. The base functionality of the Dojo Toolkit is made available to a Web page by including a link to dojo.js. This includes plenty of features like CSS-based queries, event handling, animations, AJAX, class-based programming, and a package system that makes getting access to the rest of Dojo very easy.
There are additional stable (but optional) components for advanced animations, I/O, data, drag-and-drop, and much more with Dojo Core. Dijit is Dojo’s theme-able, accessible, easy-to-customize UI library. Dijit requires Dojo Base and various Dojo Core modules to use. It allows for the creation of widgets. For the more adventurous, there’s DojoX, which contains a number of sub-projects based on the Dojo Base. Each project has a varying states of maturity – from very stable and robust to alpha.
Stephen’s company recognized a need to control the Dojo Toolkit that was being used by their PlexSpy application status monitor product. And they decided that if it was an issue for them, it was most likely an issue for others. So they created a generic server solution that could be used by anyone with CICS on z/OS. As a consequence, the Dojo Toolkit has been taken into the mainframe environment and is served from CICS out of PDSs. This brings the strengths of the mainframe to sites using the Dojo Toolkit – providing the control over it that those sites needed.
Ross can now put his feet up at home with his family knowing that his end users are happy with their working environment. And the code Kenny and Doug wrote is still doing its job for another generation.
Sunday, 22 April 2012
Cloud wars
There was a time when mainframers simply claimed that they’d been using the cloud computing paradigm all along. Then IBM came up with SmartCloud, its vision for cloud computing, offering SmartCloud services and SmartCloud solutions. Last week saw the announcement of the PureSystems private cloud packages. But for non-mainframe users or non-IBM technology users, the clouds are getting darker!
Now, I’ve been using a Pogoplug as cloud resource for a couple of years now. Next to my router, I have a small Pogoplug box. And attached to that box are a number of big memory sticks with files that I want available wherever I am. I can upload and download the files to any computer and I have the app on my phone and tablet – it’s all very convenient.
But for people who don’t have a Pogoplug, there’s been Microsoft’s Skydrive offering online storage space to (originally) people with an MSN account. It’s handy to keep a copy of your files in the cloud and then access them when you go somewhere else. It also allows file sharing. But you may get irritated by the need to download Silverlight.
And that’s the area where Dropbox is such a success. It allows users to share folders with other people and those folders can contain very large documents. Dropbox, in many ways ,became the de facto standard – everyone had heard of Dropbox. And now, BitTorrent lhas aunched Share, which is its equivalent – and is perhaps aimed at younger people who might be more familiar with using BitTorrent offerings.
The problem with Dropbox and the other similar providers is that any self-respecting IT department is going to have to stop its staff using them. Now sharing a photo of my new grandson is one thing, sharing a business-sensitive policy document on the cloud is something else. Who knows what organizations at some time in the future may have access to those cloud-based files? Internal IT security can no more allow staff to use cloud solutions for sharing files than it can allow staff to carry around unencrypted memory sticks.
There are some sites where you can upload your files anonymously, although you get a slow connection. You can open a free account, which gets you a slightly faster connection, or there’s the paid for service with the fastest connection. Once a file is uploaded, you get a URL that you can share, and then people can download your file. Examples include FileDropper (up to 5GB), FileFactory (upload up to 50 2GB files), FileServe (up to 500GB with an account), and HotFile (you pay when your files are downloaded).
Some organizations have limits on the size of files that can be sent as attachments or received as attachments. That’s why some of these other Web cloud hosts have sprung up. People like: Bigupload (up to 50MB), Box.net (1GB of storage, but the maximum file size is 25MB), Crocko (up to 1GB), DriveHQ (1GB ), Humyo (10GB), Kontainer file storage (50MB), MediaFire (up to 100MB, MegaSWF (Flash SWF files up to 10MB), RapidShare (up to 200MB), ShareBase (up to 200MB), Sigmirror (5GB of free storage), TzFiles (2GB), and uploaded.to (250MB file size maximum).
And there are many other hosting sites that I haven’t mentioned. And many that charge varying amounts for storage.
Up to now, Google, has offered Google Docs as a cloud solution. You could create your Word files and, assuming you had the Google Docs plug-in, store a copy in the cloud. Or you could just create documents using Google Docs and share them.
But now, it appears that Google is going to launch Google Drive – 5GB of free storage available to all users. Users will get a Google Drive icon on their desktop and use it as a virtual drive. And 5GB is quite a lot of storage – although arch-rival Amazon’s Cloud Drive offers exactly the same free.
Bitcasa, which is still in beta, is offering free storage while it’s in beta and paid for unlimited storage afterwards.
With the growth in cloud storage, more IT departments will have to get involved in making sure that there is some way that business-related data can be kept secure in the cloud. And with Google joining the growing cloud space race, end users are going expect cloud storage to be available to them.
Now, I’ve been using a Pogoplug as cloud resource for a couple of years now. Next to my router, I have a small Pogoplug box. And attached to that box are a number of big memory sticks with files that I want available wherever I am. I can upload and download the files to any computer and I have the app on my phone and tablet – it’s all very convenient.
But for people who don’t have a Pogoplug, there’s been Microsoft’s Skydrive offering online storage space to (originally) people with an MSN account. It’s handy to keep a copy of your files in the cloud and then access them when you go somewhere else. It also allows file sharing. But you may get irritated by the need to download Silverlight.
And that’s the area where Dropbox is such a success. It allows users to share folders with other people and those folders can contain very large documents. Dropbox, in many ways ,became the de facto standard – everyone had heard of Dropbox. And now, BitTorrent lhas aunched Share, which is its equivalent – and is perhaps aimed at younger people who might be more familiar with using BitTorrent offerings.
The problem with Dropbox and the other similar providers is that any self-respecting IT department is going to have to stop its staff using them. Now sharing a photo of my new grandson is one thing, sharing a business-sensitive policy document on the cloud is something else. Who knows what organizations at some time in the future may have access to those cloud-based files? Internal IT security can no more allow staff to use cloud solutions for sharing files than it can allow staff to carry around unencrypted memory sticks.
There are some sites where you can upload your files anonymously, although you get a slow connection. You can open a free account, which gets you a slightly faster connection, or there’s the paid for service with the fastest connection. Once a file is uploaded, you get a URL that you can share, and then people can download your file. Examples include FileDropper (up to 5GB), FileFactory (upload up to 50 2GB files), FileServe (up to 500GB with an account), and HotFile (you pay when your files are downloaded).
Some organizations have limits on the size of files that can be sent as attachments or received as attachments. That’s why some of these other Web cloud hosts have sprung up. People like: Bigupload (up to 50MB), Box.net (1GB of storage, but the maximum file size is 25MB), Crocko (up to 1GB), DriveHQ (1GB ), Humyo (10GB), Kontainer file storage (50MB), MediaFire (up to 100MB, MegaSWF (Flash SWF files up to 10MB), RapidShare (up to 200MB), ShareBase (up to 200MB), Sigmirror (5GB of free storage), TzFiles (2GB), and uploaded.to (250MB file size maximum).
And there are many other hosting sites that I haven’t mentioned. And many that charge varying amounts for storage.
Up to now, Google, has offered Google Docs as a cloud solution. You could create your Word files and, assuming you had the Google Docs plug-in, store a copy in the cloud. Or you could just create documents using Google Docs and share them.
But now, it appears that Google is going to launch Google Drive – 5GB of free storage available to all users. Users will get a Google Drive icon on their desktop and use it as a virtual drive. And 5GB is quite a lot of storage – although arch-rival Amazon’s Cloud Drive offers exactly the same free.
Bitcasa, which is still in beta, is offering free storage while it’s in beta and paid for unlimited storage afterwards.
With the growth in cloud storage, more IT departments will have to get involved in making sure that there is some way that business-related data can be kept secure in the cloud. And with Google joining the growing cloud space race, end users are going expect cloud storage to be available to them.
Monday, 26 March 2012
IBM takes the QI approach!
The BBC in the UK produces a wonderful programme called QI – IQ reversed, but officially standing for Quite Interesting. The point of the show, which is a humorous quiz show, is to not only illustrate how little we know, but also highlight the things we think we know that are actually wrong! So, for example, the teams might be asked to name an animal that buries its head in the sand. A contestant saying ostrich will have points deducted because no-one has ever seen an ostrich bury its head in the sand. And yet the myth dates back to Pliny the Elder. You get the idea of the show.
In a presentation at the Share user conference last Wednesday entitled “Hex, Lies and Videoblogs”, IBM’s chief architect for cloud computing, Frank DeGilio set about (in the style of QI) debunking some of those mainframe myths that we all come up against time after time.
For many years, the much-missed Xephon organization published the Dinosaur Myth, which crunched the figures for small, medium, and mainframe installations, looking at hardware, software, maintenance, and running costs. And every time it did the sums, it found that mainframes cost less overall. Similarly, DeGilio pointed out that most people ignored any figures apart from the basic hardware and software ones. He argued that, particularly for large-scale infrastructures, management complexity and personnel costs are often critically important parts of a system's final price tag. As Xephon’s publication identified, an expanding infrastructure requires more people if it’s distributed than if it is a mainframe.
There’s also the general ignorance that mainframes are your dad’s technology, and if the code isn’t written in Latin or Ancient Greek, then it’s the digital equivalent. While it’s perfectly true that mainframes run a lot of COBOL and Assembler programs, they have embraced modern trends as they have occurred over the past 50 years. This means, as Frank DeGilio pointed out, that J2EE, Linux and other modern open standards are all widely supported. Perhaps more importantly, Frank asserted that there's nothing outdated about the way mainframes handle workload management. In fact, their ability to fine-tune resource allocation based on application need is far more granular and sophisticated than that of most distributed systems.
Old iron tends to break rather than bend. But that’s not the case with mainframes, which are highly flexible and well able to balance workloads. As DeGilio says, “the very concept of capacity upgrade on demand was ‘pioneered’ by the mainframe”.
It doesn’t matter whether a computer doing nothing is a Raspberry Pi or the fastest supercomputer in the world – it’s still doing nothing! What really counts is how the box handles real-life mixed workloads. Various figures are produced suggesting that specific hardware and software combinations can set specific benchmarking records, but what’s needed is something that can handle everyday workloads as speedily as possible. DeGilio argued that the mainframe’s flexibility means that its speed in handling multiple real-world tasks is greater than what might be indicated by testing a box to perform a single activity.
Like Stephen Fry, who chairs QI, it’s really the job of mainframe professionals to go out there and debunk these myths. There’s a clear need to highlight incorrect thinking and identify ways that the mainframe could be a better answer to IT problems. QI isn’t dull – so you don’t have to be the most boring person in the world just because you want people to change their thinking and see the bigger picture!
And finally (from the QI stock of knowledge), where do Panama hats come from?
The answer is Ecuador!
In a presentation at the Share user conference last Wednesday entitled “Hex, Lies and Videoblogs”, IBM’s chief architect for cloud computing, Frank DeGilio set about (in the style of QI) debunking some of those mainframe myths that we all come up against time after time.
For many years, the much-missed Xephon organization published the Dinosaur Myth, which crunched the figures for small, medium, and mainframe installations, looking at hardware, software, maintenance, and running costs. And every time it did the sums, it found that mainframes cost less overall. Similarly, DeGilio pointed out that most people ignored any figures apart from the basic hardware and software ones. He argued that, particularly for large-scale infrastructures, management complexity and personnel costs are often critically important parts of a system's final price tag. As Xephon’s publication identified, an expanding infrastructure requires more people if it’s distributed than if it is a mainframe.
There’s also the general ignorance that mainframes are your dad’s technology, and if the code isn’t written in Latin or Ancient Greek, then it’s the digital equivalent. While it’s perfectly true that mainframes run a lot of COBOL and Assembler programs, they have embraced modern trends as they have occurred over the past 50 years. This means, as Frank DeGilio pointed out, that J2EE, Linux and other modern open standards are all widely supported. Perhaps more importantly, Frank asserted that there's nothing outdated about the way mainframes handle workload management. In fact, their ability to fine-tune resource allocation based on application need is far more granular and sophisticated than that of most distributed systems.
Old iron tends to break rather than bend. But that’s not the case with mainframes, which are highly flexible and well able to balance workloads. As DeGilio says, “the very concept of capacity upgrade on demand was ‘pioneered’ by the mainframe”.
It doesn’t matter whether a computer doing nothing is a Raspberry Pi or the fastest supercomputer in the world – it’s still doing nothing! What really counts is how the box handles real-life mixed workloads. Various figures are produced suggesting that specific hardware and software combinations can set specific benchmarking records, but what’s needed is something that can handle everyday workloads as speedily as possible. DeGilio argued that the mainframe’s flexibility means that its speed in handling multiple real-world tasks is greater than what might be indicated by testing a box to perform a single activity.
Like Stephen Fry, who chairs QI, it’s really the job of mainframe professionals to go out there and debunk these myths. There’s a clear need to highlight incorrect thinking and identify ways that the mainframe could be a better answer to IT problems. QI isn’t dull – so you don’t have to be the most boring person in the world just because you want people to change their thinking and see the bigger picture!
And finally (from the QI stock of knowledge), where do Panama hats come from?
The answer is Ecuador!
BTW: if you get a chance, can you ‘Like’ iTech-Ed Ltd on Facebook. You can find it here. Thanks.
Saturday, 5 November 2011
Guide Share Europe – an impression
I could only make Day 1 of this year’s Guide Share Europe conference on the 1st and 2nd of November – which was a huge disappointment. For those of you who weren’t there, I thought I’d give you a flavour of my experience.
Firstly, it was at Whittlebury Hall again – which is a magnificent location just over the border from Buckinghamshire into Northamptonshire. The location is stunning and the facilities are excellent. It is in the countryside, so if you’re travelling by train, there’s a long taxi ride to get there. If you travel by car, there’s a huge car park.
The exhibition hall is big, but not so big you get lost in it. By having lunch and coffee in the hall, there were plenty of opportunities to engage with vendors and chat to other attendees. I always find it’s a great opportunity to catch up with old colleagues and make new friends. The quality of the coffee and food was good – which translates as excellent when compared to some venues!
But the point of GSE is not the food, it’s the presentations. I chair the Virtual IMS user group and the Virtual CICS user group, so I was torn between the CICS and IMS streams. In the end, I split my time between them. I watched Circle’s Ezriel Gross present on Using CICS to Deploy Microsoft .Net Winforms with Smart Client Technology – which was really fascinating. I’m sure we’re going to see more sites integrating their Windows technology with the power of mainframe subsystems. Ezriel made quite a complicated integration seem straightforward and obvious.
Next I watched IBM’s Alison Coughtrie talk about IMS 12 Overview. Another knowledgeable speaker with a lot of information to get over in the time. I certainly think I have a clearer idea of what’s new, and perhaps a small insight into where IBM is taking the product.
After lunch it was Neil Price, who works for TNT Express and chairs the IMS group for GSE, with a presentation entitled Memoirs of a HALDBA. I was so impressed with Neil’s real-life descriptions that I’ve asked him to speak to the Virtual IMS user group. Neil could have gone on for much longer than the time allowed. And I could happily have gone on listening.
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 The Why and How of CSL. A real bits and bytes expert, who could have talked much longer.
I felt it was time to sit in on the CICS stream and the session I chose was IBM’s Ian Burnett talking about CICS Scalability. Yet again, a fact-filled presentation that would be hard to criticize. I felt my knowledge about CICS (and I used to edit CICS Update) making more sense and falling more into place.
But all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy – as they say. And the evening presentation was How To Cope With Pressure & Panics Without Going Into Headless Chicken Mode from Resli Costabell. A mixture of psychology, NLP, and audience participation made this a memorable session. If you get a chance to see her anywhere – don’t miss it!
After that there were drinks in the exhibition hall sponsored by Attachmate/Suse and Computacenter, followed by dinner sponsored by EMC and Computacenter. Both were very enjoyable in their own way, and they were an opportunity to chat more informally with vendors and real mainframe users. Obviously, I was telling vendors about sponsorship opportunities with the Arcati Mainframe Yearbook, and asking users to complete the user survey.
In conversation, I asked a few of the vendors how business was going. No-one admitted that double-dip recession was taking them out of business, but most suggested that they were keeping their heads above water and business generally was flat – but there was some business being done.
An IBMer suggested that over 30 z196s had been sold in the UK and eight of the new z114s. So, that’s good news for them.
My overall impression of the conference was that it was excellent. I bumped into Mark Wilson (the GSE technical coordinator) during the day as he rushed around making sure everything was going smoothly. And that’s why the conference works so well, because people like Mark work so hard to ensure it does.
Well done everyone who organized it and spoke at it. And if you missed it, go next year.
Firstly, it was at Whittlebury Hall again – which is a magnificent location just over the border from Buckinghamshire into Northamptonshire. The location is stunning and the facilities are excellent. It is in the countryside, so if you’re travelling by train, there’s a long taxi ride to get there. If you travel by car, there’s a huge car park.
The exhibition hall is big, but not so big you get lost in it. By having lunch and coffee in the hall, there were plenty of opportunities to engage with vendors and chat to other attendees. I always find it’s a great opportunity to catch up with old colleagues and make new friends. The quality of the coffee and food was good – which translates as excellent when compared to some venues!
But the point of GSE is not the food, it’s the presentations. I chair the Virtual IMS user group and the Virtual CICS user group, so I was torn between the CICS and IMS streams. In the end, I split my time between them. I watched Circle’s Ezriel Gross present on Using CICS to Deploy Microsoft .Net Winforms with Smart Client Technology – which was really fascinating. I’m sure we’re going to see more sites integrating their Windows technology with the power of mainframe subsystems. Ezriel made quite a complicated integration seem straightforward and obvious.
Next I watched IBM’s Alison Coughtrie talk about IMS 12 Overview. Another knowledgeable speaker with a lot of information to get over in the time. I certainly think I have a clearer idea of what’s new, and perhaps a small insight into where IBM is taking the product.
After lunch it was Neil Price, who works for TNT Express and chairs the IMS group for GSE, with a presentation entitled Memoirs of a HALDBA. I was so impressed with Neil’s real-life descriptions that I’ve asked him to speak to the Virtual IMS user group. Neil could have gone on for much longer than the time allowed. And I could happily have gone on listening.
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 The Why and How of CSL. A real bits and bytes expert, who could have talked much longer.
I felt it was time to sit in on the CICS stream and the session I chose was IBM’s Ian Burnett talking about CICS Scalability. Yet again, a fact-filled presentation that would be hard to criticize. I felt my knowledge about CICS (and I used to edit CICS Update) making more sense and falling more into place.
But all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy – as they say. And the evening presentation was How To Cope With Pressure & Panics Without Going Into Headless Chicken Mode from Resli Costabell. A mixture of psychology, NLP, and audience participation made this a memorable session. If you get a chance to see her anywhere – don’t miss it!
After that there were drinks in the exhibition hall sponsored by Attachmate/Suse and Computacenter, followed by dinner sponsored by EMC and Computacenter. Both were very enjoyable in their own way, and they were an opportunity to chat more informally with vendors and real mainframe users. Obviously, I was telling vendors about sponsorship opportunities with the Arcati Mainframe Yearbook, and asking users to complete the user survey.
In conversation, I asked a few of the vendors how business was going. No-one admitted that double-dip recession was taking them out of business, but most suggested that they were keeping their heads above water and business generally was flat – but there was some business being done.
An IBMer suggested that over 30 z196s had been sold in the UK and eight of the new z114s. So, that’s good news for them.
My overall impression of the conference was that it was excellent. I bumped into Mark Wilson (the GSE technical coordinator) during the day as he rushed around making sure everything was going smoothly. And that’s why the conference works so well, because people like Mark work so hard to ensure it does.
Well done everyone who organized it and spoke at it. And if you missed it, go next year.
Saturday, 22 October 2011
Guide Share Europe annual conference
The Guide Share Europe (GSE) UK Annual Conference is taking place on 1-2 November at Whittlebury Hall, Whittlebury, Near Towcester, Northamptonshire NN12 8QH, UK.Sponsors this year include IBM, Computacentre, EMC, Attachmate, Suse, CA, Novell, Compuware, Intellimagic, RSM Partners, Velocity Software, and Zephyr. And there will be 30 vendors in the associated exhibition.
There’s the usual amazing range of streams – and, to be honest, there are a number of occasions when I would like to be in two or more places at once over the two days. The streams are: CICS, IMS, DB2, Enterprise Security, Large Systems Working Group, Network Management Working Group, Software Asset Management, Tivoli User Group TWS, Tivoli User Group Automation, MQ, New Technologies, zLinux, and the single-session Training & Certification.
That means that at this year’s conference there will be 126 hours of education covering most aspects of mainframe technology. This is slightly less than last year because two of the Tivoli streams that were included last years have been dropped because they were so poorly attended. This year, there will be 12 streams of ten sessions over the two days, plus five keynotes and that one training & certification WG meeting. In all, there are going to be 85 speakers delivering this training.
There is still time to register, and the organisers are expecting the daily total of delegates to exceed 300 – as it did last year.
There are also 16 students attending this year, who are taking the mainframe course at UK universities. The majority of students are from the University of Western Scotland (UWS), but there will also be some from Liverpool John Moores University and possibly some more from other UK universities. The organisers have prepared a series of 101 sessions on mainframe architecture and infrastructure that will give these students as well as trainees and those unfamiliar with parts of the infrastructure a basic understanding of the mainframe and how it works.
Many GSE member companies are taking advantage of the five free places they get to send their staff to the conference. This would cost non-members £1000 in early-bird prices, and more than compensates member companies for the recent rise in the GSE membership fee to EUR 840.
You can find out more details about the conference at www.gse.org.uk/tyc/invite.html.
If you’re still debating whether to go, let me recommend it to you. The quality of presentations is always excellent. And the networking opportunities are brilliant. If you are going, I look forward to seeing you there.
Sunday, 14 August 2011
We’re all friends now
There used to be a time when selling software was a cut-throat game. A salesman would turn up saying how good their product was and quietly poison the prospective client’s mind against alternative products from other vendors – listing their weaknesses and down-playing their strengths. In fact, I’ve even been paid to write documents for sales teams to use doing exactly that!
But now there is a much more grown-up approach to business. It seems that nowadays sales people are working together to move products. And where their own product may be gappy in some way, they are recommending the software of an erstwhile competitor. The benefits of this cooperative approach means that the customer gets a better service from vendors and a better understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of the products. And it also means that those companies are able to sell more products – which, after all, is how you stay in business!
So what prompted these thoughts? At this week’s SHARE in Orlando, Florida CA Technologies started off by announcing a new release of the CA VM:Manager Suite for Linux on System z and a new capability for CA Solve Operations Automation. There have been lots of anecdotes appearing on the Internet of organisations benefitting hugely from virtualizing their Linux servers on System z and eliminating the server sprawl that preceded it. And, clearly, Linux continues (after its slow start) to be one of the fastest growing segments of the mainframe market. So anything that helps to make zLinux users’ lives easier has got to be a good thing.
According to CA’s press release: “The new release of the CA VM:Manager Suite includes enhancements across product areas, which extend integrated management capabilities designed to control costs, improve performance, increase user productivity, and more efficiently manage and secure z/VM systems that support Linux on System z.. It also adds tape management capabilities for Linux on System z, along with improvements that help CA Technologies customers install, deploy, and service their CA z/VM products quickly and more effectively.”
The new capability in CA Solve Operations Automation means Linux applications can be managed as if they were System z applications, which reduces the need for mainframe Linux operations expertise.
The synergy comes with the announcement of a partnerships between CA and INNOVATION Data Processing and Velocity Software, which, they claim, are designed to help customers increase cost savings by optimizing Linux management. CA will distribute INNOVATION Data Processing’s UPSTREAM for Linux on Z and UPSTREAM for UNIX on Z, and Velocity Software’s zVPS Performance Suite.
UPSTREAM for Linux on Z is, they say, an intuitive, easy-to-use, data protection solution for what was once distributed data that is now the foundation for Linux applications being consolidated on the mainframe. UPSTREAM for Linux on Z can help reduce backup, restore, and disaster recovery costs, while increasing business resiliency by enabling customers to leverage the use of existing mainframe resources to meet their enterprise data protection needs. The UPSTREAM for Linux on Z solution is designed so that users can easily schedule timely backups and still meet the need for immediate reliable recovery; of a file, disk volume, or an entire data centre with confidence.
zVPS offers, again according to their press release, easy-to-use graphical and Web-based tools to help analyse capacity requirements, establish operational alerts, and determine chargeback usage. Its detailed information helps IT staff optimize performance and effectively manage the cost of their Linux on System z environment. By gathering data from Linux on System z and distributed environments, such as VMWare, Microsoft, Linux, and Unix servers, zVPS supports server consolidation projects and facilitates decisions on the most cost-effective placement of workloads.
Cynical observers, who are slightly longer in the tooth, will remember a time when Computer Associates would have bought the company (in that Victor Kiam, Remington Rand sort of way!). Clearly, CA Technologies is now all about ‘working with’ other vendors.
But now there is a much more grown-up approach to business. It seems that nowadays sales people are working together to move products. And where their own product may be gappy in some way, they are recommending the software of an erstwhile competitor. The benefits of this cooperative approach means that the customer gets a better service from vendors and a better understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of the products. And it also means that those companies are able to sell more products – which, after all, is how you stay in business!
So what prompted these thoughts? At this week’s SHARE in Orlando, Florida CA Technologies started off by announcing a new release of the CA VM:Manager Suite for Linux on System z and a new capability for CA Solve Operations Automation. There have been lots of anecdotes appearing on the Internet of organisations benefitting hugely from virtualizing their Linux servers on System z and eliminating the server sprawl that preceded it. And, clearly, Linux continues (after its slow start) to be one of the fastest growing segments of the mainframe market. So anything that helps to make zLinux users’ lives easier has got to be a good thing.
According to CA’s press release: “The new release of the CA VM:Manager Suite includes enhancements across product areas, which extend integrated management capabilities designed to control costs, improve performance, increase user productivity, and more efficiently manage and secure z/VM systems that support Linux on System z.. It also adds tape management capabilities for Linux on System z, along with improvements that help CA Technologies customers install, deploy, and service their CA z/VM products quickly and more effectively.”
The new capability in CA Solve Operations Automation means Linux applications can be managed as if they were System z applications, which reduces the need for mainframe Linux operations expertise.
The synergy comes with the announcement of a partnerships between CA and INNOVATION Data Processing and Velocity Software, which, they claim, are designed to help customers increase cost savings by optimizing Linux management. CA will distribute INNOVATION Data Processing’s UPSTREAM for Linux on Z and UPSTREAM for UNIX on Z, and Velocity Software’s zVPS Performance Suite.
UPSTREAM for Linux on Z is, they say, an intuitive, easy-to-use, data protection solution for what was once distributed data that is now the foundation for Linux applications being consolidated on the mainframe. UPSTREAM for Linux on Z can help reduce backup, restore, and disaster recovery costs, while increasing business resiliency by enabling customers to leverage the use of existing mainframe resources to meet their enterprise data protection needs. The UPSTREAM for Linux on Z solution is designed so that users can easily schedule timely backups and still meet the need for immediate reliable recovery; of a file, disk volume, or an entire data centre with confidence.
zVPS offers, again according to their press release, easy-to-use graphical and Web-based tools to help analyse capacity requirements, establish operational alerts, and determine chargeback usage. Its detailed information helps IT staff optimize performance and effectively manage the cost of their Linux on System z environment. By gathering data from Linux on System z and distributed environments, such as VMWare, Microsoft, Linux, and Unix servers, zVPS supports server consolidation projects and facilitates decisions on the most cost-effective placement of workloads.
Cynical observers, who are slightly longer in the tooth, will remember a time when Computer Associates would have bought the company (in that Victor Kiam, Remington Rand sort of way!). Clearly, CA Technologies is now all about ‘working with’ other vendors.
Sunday, 27 February 2011
Blending mainframe technology with Apple, Blackberry, and Android – makes you think!
I don’t know whether you’re going to be at the SHARE conference in Anaheim (California) from 27 February to 4 March, but one of the interesting things to see is the William Data Systems stand (booth 211).
They are showing how their ZEN z/OS network management suite of product integrates with popular smart phone technology – Apple, Blackberry, and Android. What you’ll see is ZEN monitoring z/OS networks and then reporting the results to a mobile device. The user can then evaluate what’s happening on the mainframe and take appropriate action immediately. As a consequence, z/OS support staff can get on with their lives and be out and about, but still be able to monitor their mainframes and react to alerts.
The company say that this mobile technology extends ZEN’s whistle-blower ability to monitor SyslogD, filter the results by many criteria, launch automation commands or REXX procedures, and transmit the important alerts to mobile devices, all in real-time. I think this sounds pretty impressive and I was lucky enough to have a demonstration of the technology a few ago.
Originally the technology was restricted to iPhone and iPad users, but now it’s extended to the other ‘smart’ technologies that organizations use.
Their press release mentions SyslogD. In fact, this is probably the most useful resource that many IT departments ignore or only refer to long after they should. Having this kind of information on your phone seems almost futuristic.
Anyway, if you are at Anaheim, take a look.
On a completely different topic… I was pleased to receive the following e-mail during the week:
“On behalf of IBM, it is with great pleasure to recognize you as a 2011 IBM Information Champion. We would like to thank you for your leadership and contributions to the Data Management community. You continue to be among a very small group to be chosen for this recognition. Congratulations.”
This makes three years in a row.
If you’re interested, you can find out more about the Information Champion programme here (www-01.ibm.com/software/data/champion/)
They are showing how their ZEN z/OS network management suite of product integrates with popular smart phone technology – Apple, Blackberry, and Android. What you’ll see is ZEN monitoring z/OS networks and then reporting the results to a mobile device. The user can then evaluate what’s happening on the mainframe and take appropriate action immediately. As a consequence, z/OS support staff can get on with their lives and be out and about, but still be able to monitor their mainframes and react to alerts.
The company say that this mobile technology extends ZEN’s whistle-blower ability to monitor SyslogD, filter the results by many criteria, launch automation commands or REXX procedures, and transmit the important alerts to mobile devices, all in real-time. I think this sounds pretty impressive and I was lucky enough to have a demonstration of the technology a few ago.
Originally the technology was restricted to iPhone and iPad users, but now it’s extended to the other ‘smart’ technologies that organizations use.
Their press release mentions SyslogD. In fact, this is probably the most useful resource that many IT departments ignore or only refer to long after they should. Having this kind of information on your phone seems almost futuristic.
Anyway, if you are at Anaheim, take a look.
On a completely different topic… I was pleased to receive the following e-mail during the week:
“On behalf of IBM, it is with great pleasure to recognize you as a 2011 IBM Information Champion. We would like to thank you for your leadership and contributions to the Data Management community. You continue to be among a very small group to be chosen for this recognition. Congratulations.”
This makes three years in a row.
If you’re interested, you can find out more about the Information Champion programme here (www-01.ibm.com/software/data/champion/)
Sunday, 7 November 2010
2010 Guide Share Europe Conference success
This year’s Guide Share Europe Conference was again held at Whittlebury Hall in the beautiful countryside in the very south of Northamptonshire, near the Silverstone circuit and Towcester racecourse, and not too far away from Milton Keynes. It was held this week on Tuesday and Wednesday (2 and 3 November). And it was a great success.
To help stay connected, the conference centre offered free Wi-Fi in public areas, and the conference provided 14 streams of seminars with five sessions per day – a staggering 140 presentations over the two days. In addition to the CICS, IMS, DB2, Enterprise security, large systems working group, network management working group, and software asset management streams, there were four streams for Tivoli users, DB2 LUW, zLinux, and new technologies. So there was definitely something for everyone. Most of the presentations were available on the free memory stick given to delegates, and the rest will be downloadable from GSE’s Web site.
I sat in on a few of the IMS presentations and the birds-of-a-feather expert panel session. It was a real pleasure to witness the conversations after a presentation when younger members of the audience would be chatting to older members, who were all keen and able to answer the newcomers’ questions. There was a lot of sharing of information and learning going on in a completely supportive atmosphere.
It was also a pleasure to catch up with old friends. And, among the 400 people registered, there were plenty of old friends I did catch up with and plenty of new friends made. 321 people attended on the Tuesday and 315 people were there on the Wednesday. The conference dinner on the Tuesday evening was attended by 230 people.
In addition to the high-standard presentations, there were 29 vendors in the exhibition hall where coffees and lunch were served. The vendors were also a source of technical information, and included IBM, Verhoef, Rocket Software, ezLegacy, CA Technologies, BMC, Compute (Bridgend), Blenheim Software & Inspired Solutions, and many others. Their presence helps keep down the cost of attending.
The GSE is the European association of companies and individuals using IBM hardware, software, and solutions. GSE is a non-profit association run by its members for its members. You can find out more details from their Web site at www.gse.org.uk.
Towards the end of the Wednesday there were the prize draws as different vendors gave away prizes. Many happy conference-goers gratefully left with new Kindles or iPlayers or some other technotoy in their bags.
The conference was well organised by Mark Wilson – the Chairman Large Systems Working Group & UK Conference Manager – and his team, and well worth attending by delegates and vendors. All-in-all, there was something for everyone to benefit from.
Well done to everyone on the organizing team and the presenters. And, if you didn’t make it this year, you missed something very good. See you there next year, perhaps.
On a different note: there’s still time to vote for Mainframe Update as your favourite blog in the category, Individual IT Professional Male. The IT Blog Awards 2010 are being organized by Computer Weekly. Click here to vote.
And, there’s still time to complete the Arcati Mainframe Yearbook 2011 mainframe user survey. You can find this at www.arcati.com/usersurvey11. If you’re a vendor, then you can ensure your entry in the Yearbook is up-to-date by going to www.arcati.com/vendorentry.
To help stay connected, the conference centre offered free Wi-Fi in public areas, and the conference provided 14 streams of seminars with five sessions per day – a staggering 140 presentations over the two days. In addition to the CICS, IMS, DB2, Enterprise security, large systems working group, network management working group, and software asset management streams, there were four streams for Tivoli users, DB2 LUW, zLinux, and new technologies. So there was definitely something for everyone. Most of the presentations were available on the free memory stick given to delegates, and the rest will be downloadable from GSE’s Web site.
I sat in on a few of the IMS presentations and the birds-of-a-feather expert panel session. It was a real pleasure to witness the conversations after a presentation when younger members of the audience would be chatting to older members, who were all keen and able to answer the newcomers’ questions. There was a lot of sharing of information and learning going on in a completely supportive atmosphere.
It was also a pleasure to catch up with old friends. And, among the 400 people registered, there were plenty of old friends I did catch up with and plenty of new friends made. 321 people attended on the Tuesday and 315 people were there on the Wednesday. The conference dinner on the Tuesday evening was attended by 230 people.
In addition to the high-standard presentations, there were 29 vendors in the exhibition hall where coffees and lunch were served. The vendors were also a source of technical information, and included IBM, Verhoef, Rocket Software, ezLegacy, CA Technologies, BMC, Compute (Bridgend), Blenheim Software & Inspired Solutions, and many others. Their presence helps keep down the cost of attending.
The GSE is the European association of companies and individuals using IBM hardware, software, and solutions. GSE is a non-profit association run by its members for its members. You can find out more details from their Web site at www.gse.org.uk.
Towards the end of the Wednesday there were the prize draws as different vendors gave away prizes. Many happy conference-goers gratefully left with new Kindles or iPlayers or some other technotoy in their bags.
The conference was well organised by Mark Wilson – the Chairman Large Systems Working Group & UK Conference Manager – and his team, and well worth attending by delegates and vendors. All-in-all, there was something for everyone to benefit from.
Well done to everyone on the organizing team and the presenters. And, if you didn’t make it this year, you missed something very good. See you there next year, perhaps.
On a different note: there’s still time to vote for Mainframe Update as your favourite blog in the category, Individual IT Professional Male. The IT Blog Awards 2010 are being organized by Computer Weekly. Click here to vote.
And, there’s still time to complete the Arcati Mainframe Yearbook 2011 mainframe user survey. You can find this at www.arcati.com/usersurvey11. If you’re a vendor, then you can ensure your entry in the Yearbook is up-to-date by going to www.arcati.com/vendorentry.
Monday, 30 August 2010
Getting your money’s worth
If you’re looking for value for money, then you can’t do much better than attend the 9th annual UK 2010 Guide Share Europe Conference to be held on 2 and 3 November at Whittlebury Hall, Northamptonshire – if you’re using your sat nav, it’s NN12 8QH. This will be the largest UK GSE conference in their history and boasts 13 streams on the Tuesday and a whopping 14 streams on the Wednesday. You can get more information at www.gse.org.uk/tyc/Email01.html. Registration is now open.
Secondly, there’s now a Version 2.0 available of ZEN, the cost saving z/OS network management suite from William Data Systems. This new version includes enhancements that enable many more companies running z/OS to improve on and completely replace NetView or NetMaster. WDS claims that for some customers, managing networks with ZEN has reduced their annual cost of ownership by as much as 50%. ZEN customers pay for only the functionality they need, which reduces annual costs compared with users of other products who pay for functionality that they don’t use.
ZEN V2’s new Automation component includes a full REXX function pack. This provides facilities for users to totally automate their management of z/OS network environments and create customized ZEN displays and alerts.
ZEN provides a browser interface that is intuitive and customizable to individual user’s needs. ZEN also provides “green screens”, which more traditional users continue to benefit from. You can find out more at www.willdata.com.
And if you want something that’s absolutely free… you can find a summary of my recent interview with Stephen Ibaraki from the Canadian Information Processing Society (CIPS) at stephenibaraki.com/cips/v610/trevor_eddolls_2010.html. And if that whets your appetite, you can listen to the complete podcast at www.stephenibaraki.com/audio/Trevor_Eddolls_2010.mp3.
Secondly, there’s now a Version 2.0 available of ZEN, the cost saving z/OS network management suite from William Data Systems. This new version includes enhancements that enable many more companies running z/OS to improve on and completely replace NetView or NetMaster. WDS claims that for some customers, managing networks with ZEN has reduced their annual cost of ownership by as much as 50%. ZEN customers pay for only the functionality they need, which reduces annual costs compared with users of other products who pay for functionality that they don’t use.
ZEN V2’s new Automation component includes a full REXX function pack. This provides facilities for users to totally automate their management of z/OS network environments and create customized ZEN displays and alerts.
ZEN provides a browser interface that is intuitive and customizable to individual user’s needs. ZEN also provides “green screens”, which more traditional users continue to benefit from. You can find out more at www.willdata.com.
And if you want something that’s absolutely free… you can find a summary of my recent interview with Stephen Ibaraki from the Canadian Information Processing Society (CIPS) at stephenibaraki.com/cips/v610/trevor_eddolls_2010.html. And if that whets your appetite, you can listen to the complete podcast at www.stephenibaraki.com/audio/Trevor_Eddolls_2010.mp3.
Wednesday, 14 July 2010
Guide Share Europe letter to sponsors/exhibitors
This is the letter from Mark Wilson, Chairman Large Systems Working Group and UK Conference Manager. If you're interested, then contact Mark on mark.wilson@gse.org.uk, or phone +44(0) 7768 617006, or write to GUIDE Share Europe, 26 Gower Road, Halesowen B62 9BY, UK.
Dear Potential Sponsor/Exhibitor
I am very pleased to be able to invite you to take part in this year’s GSE Working Groups Conference, which will take place on the 2nd & 3rd November 2010. After the success of the 2009 conference, we will be returning to Whittlebury Hall. Whittlebury Hall is located in Whittlebury, Near Towcester, Northamptonshire, NN12 8QH. Further details of the hotel can be found at http://www.whittleburyhall.co.uk/Index.asp
In the next few pages you will find descriptions of the conference, vendor exhibition and sponsorship opportunities.
As you know, Whittlebury Hall is a wonderful setting and we intend to build on the growing success of last year’s conference. We aim to offer an attractive event that is great value for money. I hope you will agree and feel that you would like to be involved as an exhibitor or sponsor. In previous years a number of companies have expressed an interest in giving presentations. If you wish to do this then you should make contact with the chairman of the relevant working group(s), as the detail of the agenda is put together by the working groups and coordinated centrally. If you are unsure who to contact then let me know of the likely topic(s) and I will point you in the right direction.
In an effort to keep the attendance numbers as high as 2009 we will again be offering each GSE member company five free places at the conference.
I hope you will be interested in participating in this exciting event and I look forward to working with you to make it a great success for our members and your customers. If I can be of any assistance please contact me via e-mail, phone or letter as shown at the top of this letter.
THE CONFERENCE
Building upon the successful format used in recent years, we will once again have a number of parallel streams covering a large range of subjects, including:
Dear Potential Sponsor/Exhibitor
I am very pleased to be able to invite you to take part in this year’s GSE Working Groups Conference, which will take place on the 2nd & 3rd November 2010. After the success of the 2009 conference, we will be returning to Whittlebury Hall. Whittlebury Hall is located in Whittlebury, Near Towcester, Northamptonshire, NN12 8QH. Further details of the hotel can be found at http://www.whittleburyhall.co.uk/Index.asp
In the next few pages you will find descriptions of the conference, vendor exhibition and sponsorship opportunities.
As you know, Whittlebury Hall is a wonderful setting and we intend to build on the growing success of last year’s conference. We aim to offer an attractive event that is great value for money. I hope you will agree and feel that you would like to be involved as an exhibitor or sponsor. In previous years a number of companies have expressed an interest in giving presentations. If you wish to do this then you should make contact with the chairman of the relevant working group(s), as the detail of the agenda is put together by the working groups and coordinated centrally. If you are unsure who to contact then let me know of the likely topic(s) and I will point you in the right direction.
In an effort to keep the attendance numbers as high as 2009 we will again be offering each GSE member company five free places at the conference.
I hope you will be interested in participating in this exciting event and I look forward to working with you to make it a great success for our members and your customers. If I can be of any assistance please contact me via e-mail, phone or letter as shown at the top of this letter.
THE CONFERENCE
Building upon the successful format used in recent years, we will once again have a number of parallel streams covering a large range of subjects, including:
- CICS
- zOS (Large Systems)
- IMS
- Enterprise Security
- DB2
- Software Asset Management
- Networks
- zLinux and zVM
We have negotiated a deal with the hotel, which means we can offer overnight accommodation, including breakfast at £100.00 or £125.00 for double occupancy Including VAT. This can be reserved using your credit card.
As mentioned previously attendance at the conference for GSE member companies will be free. We are hoping to keep attendance costs for non-GSE members similar to last year, again in an effort to keep the attendance high.
For the latest information on the event and news on the agenda as it develops, please visit www.gse.org.uk/tyc.
Mark Anzani (IBM) will be joining us again for his very popular Birds of a Feather session. It is always surprising that so many people make it to the session. Once again bacon rolls and tea/coffee will be available to help start the day.
We are hoping to organise a plenary session with the ever popular Resli Costabell, to give us all something to talk about at the conference dinner or in the bar.
THE EXHIBITION
Last year’s exhibition was the most successful and popular yet and we are confident that this year’s will match that success.
The size for each stand will be an area of approximately 3 metres by 3 metres. Note that we will only be providing a power connection and a table; all other facilities will have to be arranged with the hotel directly. This would be the responsibility of the exhibitor; we would simply provide the introduction. The hotel has wireless access and I am hoping to secure that FOC for the duration of the conference.
The basic cost for a stand will be £1,000, which will include attendance at the conference for two people (to staff the stand), but not accommodation.
Larger or more complex stands may also be available, subject to negotiation. Please let us know your requirements and we will do our best to accommodate them.
A proposed stand layout will be available by the end of September. Stand locations will be allocated to sponsors first (see below) and then on a first come, first choice basis.
This year we plan to utilise the same large room as 2009, with some modifications to the layout. All coffee/tea and lunch breaks will be served from a central location within this room. We are hoping this will maximise your opportunities for networking with your current and future customers.
We are also proposing to serve Pre-Dinner drinks in the vendor area with each vendor stand having a variety of drinks to offer guests in an effort to facilitate greater interaction between the vendors & attendees. Please let me know if you have any issues with this.
SPONSORSHIP OPPORTUNITIES
We are offering the following sponsorship tiers;
- Platinum Sponsor - £4,000
- Gold Sponsor - £3,000
- Silver Sponsor - £2,000
All of the above options would offer the privileges of
- A free stand in the exhibition area
- Free delegate entry for two people on each day
- Free attendance for two people at the conference dinner/social event
- Billing as a sponsor (with company logo) in the conference materials higher tiers given higher prominence. Conference materials will include the web site, conference pack, exhibition guide and conference signage
- Choice of stand location (higher tiers first and first come first choice within tier)
In addition, Platinum and Gold Sponsors will receive the right to have their own promotional displays, subject to prior agreement of the organising committee, in the common areas of the conference.
Platinum Sponsorship includes sponsorship of the conference dinner on a sole or joint basis.
Each of these will give the sponsor(s) some control over the format of the event (in conjunction with the organising committee) and the right to sole (or joint, as appropriate) billing and promotional opportunities at that event.
In addition to the above, we have several other sponsorship opportunities as follows (and we are more than happy to discuss your own ideas for sponsorship - just give us a call);
- Provision of Conference USB Sticks (1 available). Over the last two years we have provided all conference material on a USB sticks for the delegates. There is an opportunity to provide 300 USB sticks with your company logo and marketing material
- Sponsored Pre Conference Dinner/Social Drinks event (1 Available)
- Cost of £1,500, offers the opportunity to display promotional materials, posters etc. during the break concerned and billing in the conference brochure
- Sponsored Lunch (2 available)
- Cost £250, offers the opportunity to display promotional materials, posters etc. during the lunch concerned
- Sponsored Refreshment Break (3 available)
- Cost £150, offers the opportunity to display promotional materials, posters etc. during the break concerned
- Sponsorship of the Daily Delegate Feedback Form (2 available). The prize will most likely be some form of gadget: iPod Touch; SatNav; etc. We would agree a form of recognition for your company in the form of a card insert or letter with your company name & logo for a cost of £150 each or the gadget itself
- Sponsorship of the Conference Feedback Form. This would take the form of a draw at the end of the conference for all completed forms (1 available). The prize will most likely be some form of gadget: iPod Touch; SatNav; etc. We would agree a form of recognition for your company in the form of a card insert or letter with your company name & logo for a cost of £150 each or the gadget itself
- Sponsorship of the speaker gifts. Each speaker is presented with either a bottle of wine, wine glasses or Amazon vouchers. If you were interested in this please contact me so that we can discuss the costs.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)