10 years at iTech-Ed Ltd

2014 is a bit of a special year here at iTech-Ed Ltd. It was our 10th anniversary on 1 February. I thought you might be interested in some of the changes that have taken place in that time.

Before we set up iTech-Ed Ltd, I had worked for Xephon for 18 years. Xephon ran briefings on mainframe topics, ran surveys on mainframe topics, and created user guides to things like databases. In 1986, they decided to try a small publication by CICS professionals for CICS professionals. They called it CICS Update. It sold very well – remember there was no Google or Internet in those days and it was difficult to easily get your hands on working bits of code and alternative solutions to common problems. VM Update followed in 1987, and then a whole range of mainframe-based publications. I was there at the very beginning and over the next 18 years edited most of them.

In 2004, Xephon sold the name and the publications to TCI publications. We set up iTech-Ed and we got the contract to edit around five or six of these Updates each month. My first activity, at one minute after midnight on 1 February 2004, was to upload the new issues to the Web site.

Over the next three and half years, iTech-Ed was responsible for encouraging technical people to write articles, editing and checking them to produce each edition every month, paying contributors, and sending the publications to the printers and putting them on the Web site. A small team of experts checked the text for punctuation and grammar as well as technical accuracy.

At the same time, iTech-Ed was carrying out consultancy work and producing technical documentation that was used in-house by a number of well-known companies. And we also started blogging at Mainframe Update using Blogger and Mainframe World on IT Toolbox

Towards the end of 2007, the Updates ceased publication, and the very first Virtual IMS user group meeting was held using Webex. The user group was immediately very popular and was sponsored by NEON Enterprise Software. That year also saw a growth in number of companies using our Web design and development services.

In 2008 the company took its first steps in offering advice on social media and how organizations could use it both to get their message out there and also to interact with customers in a positive way. It was a hard job back then. I also qualified as a Microsoft Office trainer – MOS MI – and ran a number of on-site training courses.

We picked up the Arcati Mainframe Yearbook – the de facto reference work for mainframers – and have worked with Arcati for many years producing this. The 2014 edition is now available from arcati.com/newyearbook14.

I was made an IBM Champion in 2009 and have been a champion every year since. As well as producing internal documentation for companies, I have had numerous articles published in a variety of Web-based and printed publications, such as Enterprise Tech Journal. In 2010 I attended Microsoft SharePoint Administrator and Developer training. And I started my regular blog on Destination z in July 2011, where I’ve written about Big Data , the Internet of Things, Deep Learning, and, of course, mainframes.

Also in 2011, Fundi Software took over as sponsor of the Virtual IMS user group and we then launched the Virtual CICS user group. Both of them enjoy regular meetings and newsletters and have around 400 members. I chair both of these user groups, and we use Citrix GoToMeeting to facilitate the webinars.

Over recent years, we’ve published guest blogs and I’ve ghost written blogs for many other blog sites. I’ve also contributed to IBM’s IOD blogs for the past couple of years. And I’ve created podcasts for a number of different companies.

So, here we are – 2014. 10 years in business and still very much in demand and looking forward to the future. If you want to get in contact with us, our Web site is itech-ed.com or you can e-mail trevor@itech-ed.com. You can Like us on Facebook at fb.com/itech-ed, follow me on Twitter at @t_eddolls, connect on LinkedIn at linkedin.com/in/teddolls, or follow us on Google+ at google.com/+TrevorEddolls.

End of an era - goodbye Lotus

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

300 blogs

This is my 300th blog. I thought it was a high enough number to deserve some sort of recognition. And I thought it would be an opportunity to look back on all the things that have happened since that very first blog back in June 2006.

In those days, I was doing a lot of work for Xephon – I was producing and editing the Update journals. You probably remember MVS (later z/OS) Update, CICS Update (the very first one), DB2 Update, SNA (later TCP/SNA) Update, RACF Update, and WebSphereMQ Update. My very first blog on the Mainframe Weekly blog site and was called “What’s going on with CICS?”. The first paragraph read:

What do I mean, what’s going on with CICS? Well, CICS used to be the dynamic heart of so many companies – it was the subsystem that allowed the company to make money – and as such there were lots of third parties selling add-ons to CICS to make it work better for individual organizations.

And over the months that followed, I talked about AJAX, Web 2.0, Project ECLipz, Aglets (DB2 agent applets), social networking, back-ups and archives, new versions of CICS, DB2, and IMS, and significant birthdays for software. I blogged about mash-ups using IMS, I gave a number of CSS tips, I wrote about BPEL, I even discussed PST files and the arrival of the Chrome browser. And back in November 2008 I first looked at cloud computing.

In 2009 I talked about CICS Explorer, Twitter, cloud computing, specialty processors, zPrime, mainframe apprentices, that year’s GSE conference, IBM’s London Analytics Solution Centre,  more anniversaries and software updates, and much more.

2010 saw more blogs about the recession, IBM versus Oracle, social media, Linux, clouds, performance, the zEnterprise, some thoughts about SharePoint, Android, and connecting to your mainframe from a phone, SyslogD, GSE Conference, and lots of other thoughts on the events of the year.

2011 had a lot of blogs about cloud computing and virtual user groups, as well as more about SharePoint. The SharePoint blogs were also published on the Medium Sized Business Blog part of TechNet Blogs (http://blogs.technet.com/b/mediumbusiness/). I also had a serious look at tablets. And wrote the “What’s a mainframe, Daddy?” blog. I had a look at IMS costs, mainframe maintenance, and Web 3.0 and Facebook (with the use of OpenGraph). I also examined gamification and augmented reality and what they meant for the future of software.

So far in 2012 I’ve mentioned IBM Docs, how to create an e-book, BYOD (Bring Your Own Device), operating systems on a memory stick, cloud wars, and using the Dojo Toolkit to make the end user experience of CICS nicer, and more friendly (of course).

Over the years there have been frequent blogs about the Arcati Mainframe Yearbook, and in particular its user survey results.

I’ve also written guest blogs for other people, and I’ve published guest blogs by others. You can find a number of blogs I’ve written on the Destination z Web site at http://destinationz.org/. I’ve even written a fair few blogs (for a fee) that have been published and attributed to other people!

Are the blogs any good? Should you be reading them? Well, I have an IT Toolbox gold award for blogging – for over 100 blogs. Perhaps more importantly, I was a finalist in the Individual IT Professional Male category of the Computer Weekly IT blog awards in 2009. I was a finalist in the IT Professional (male) category in 2010. And last year I was ‘shortlisted’ in the Computer Weekly IT Professional blogger category. As well as being shortlisted for awards, these blogs are regularly referred to by other bloggers and journalists.

You can read my blogs at mainframeupdate.blogspot.com, it.toolbox.com/blogs/mainframe-world/, and www.mainframecobol.info/. You can follow on Twitter at twitter.com/t_eddolls, or on Facebook at fb.com/iTechEd.

What about the future? The blogs continue – I’ll mainly be following what’s happening with the mainframe industry, but I’ll also take a wider view and keep abreast of new technologies and ideas as they happen and try to put them in context and give my evaluation of them.

If you have read all 300 – thank you. If this is the first one you’ve read, then hopefully you’ll be back again next week for more!

Trevor Eddolls
IBM Champion

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!

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