Mainframerz: 50th edition

In this edition

GSE UK 2023 ?? IBM Champions nominations ?? SQL Data Insights ?? Mainframerz Team ?? IBM z Day recap ?? Two year anniversary ?? Martin Goetz ?? Just For Fun - various stories ??

Intro

The Mainframerz newsletter has now reached it's 50th edition, to honour this milestone I thought it would be nice to introduce a new logo.

A big thank you to everyone who has subscribed and shared the newsletter, it's great that over a 1,000+ people have subscribed.

Mainframerz: Passionate about the mainframe (follows)

Guide Share Europe UK 2023

Event recap

GSE UK has just ended and it was great to meet so many of the Guide Share Europe team, members of the Mainframerz team, IBM Champions, Trevor Eddolls {great guy} who publishes the Arcati Mainframe Yearbook which was a real honour and lastly to meet Amanda Hendley part of the team behind another mainframe publication Planet Mainframe it was great to meet so many different people in person.

Last year I came down with Covid just before the event, and I was pleased to be able to go this year and I thoroughly enjoyed the event and recommend it to anyone if you have never been before.

In the top left you can see the IBM Champions visiting the star of the show the F1 car supplied by Williams & Broadcom Software .

Bottom left is the lesser seen touch the 'Lego' mainframe as seen from the rear of the mainframe.

On the right you can see an interview with GSE event team, where it looks like I have sent him to sleep (sorry GSE team). Even Eule my owl is looking ready to drop off, I thought it was a good interview!!!

My company had a booth at GSE UK it was great to meet so many people at my booth, and to be 3 steps from the coffee station and only 4 steps away from TSG Software Ltd which had the best beer which was also free.

Presentations

GSE UK had a record number of presentations and a big shout out from me goes to Dana Boudreau who did an amazing job of helping explain everything.

Also Erik Weyler did a great job showing how you can use many modern technologies to make working with the mainframe a pleasure.

If you haven't been before the GSE UK team are incredibly helpful and I would like to shout out James Harper CISSP CISA , Anji Stephens and Mark Wilson and thank them for all their help and the other members of the team.

Wait: Just to add as well as meeting potential new customers, my existing customers it was also great to meet some of my old connections as well and share a quick couple of stories.

IBM Champions

Reminder: Applications close for submission on 27th November

Just a quick reminder that applications to become the next IBM Champion is approaching will end on the 27th November 2023, so don't miss out on your chance.

One of the IBM Champions Team is Shari Chiara I was lucky enough to finally meet her in person at GSE UK.

?? You can find out more about applying to become an IBM Champion via the landing page here:

"Unraveling patterns and relationships in your Db2 for z/OS data: A simple example for getting started with SQL Data Insights"

Marcus Mello Mainframe Consulting LDA has posted about how you can use SQL Data Insights (SQL DI), it was available as a stream on Monday at GSE UK but if you missed it and would like to know more I have a quick extract and then a link to the post from Marcus.

"SQL Data Insights (SQL DI) is a new feature that is built into the Db2 for z/OS engine. The feature combines deep learning in artificial intelligence (AI) with advanced IBM Z technologies to infuse the Db2 engine with SQL-based semantic queries on user tables and views.

To put it simply, SQL DI uses a database embedding technique to train a neural network model on a Db2 table or view and then deploys the model natively to discover patterns and relationships that are otherwise hidden in the columns and rows."

?? Read the post here

Mainframerz Team

A number of my fellow Mainframerz were at GSE UK, I met Rob Gould first this year which was great. If any of you see a rogue photo of me posing as Superman then I blame Beth from the Mainframerz team for suggesting this.

A big thank you to Stuart Ashby from the Mainframerz team / GSE team as I had one of the later presentations at the event and Stuart was incredibly helpful in helping to set up the room for my presentation for me and my customer {SEB bank} Erik Weyler who did an amazing job and if you haven't seen him present before I thoroughly recommend his presentations.

In addition it was great to also meet Angelika H. in person from the team who is always very helpful and friendly and the same could be said for Marcus Davage us & Alan Black , at this point I will mention the event did have alcohol available 3 steps from my booth, at dinner and in the bar afterwards so I apologise if I have missed any of the team.

IBM z Day

Recap

As well as GSE UK, we have also recently had another big free IBM z Day event which took place and I thought it would be good to share some of the news I have seen about the event.

Here are some additional IBM Z Day highlights:

• Worldwide unique live views for the event reached 26,624, a new record set for an IBM Community 1-Day Virtual Conference
• 92% of registrants were non-IBM spanning 135 Countries - a new record set for IBM Z Day
• 96% of our sessions had global, non-IBM community thought leaders as speakers
• IBM Z Day post-event survey results showcased that the average viewer score was of 9 out of 10, with an event Net Promoter Score (NPS) of 64, which is outstanding for the industry

We’ve seen a surge in post-event views! Be sure to catch what you missed on the event day on the IBM Z Day conference platform.

Two year anniversary

(IBM = IBM & Kyndryl)

Time flies, it is now two years on November 4th 2021 that Kyndryl were announced as a spin off from IBM. It might be me but it didn't feel like this happened two years ago.

I remember when Kyndryl launched and asking people if they knew how they chose the name.

Kyndryl is the world's largest provider of IT infrastructure services serving thousands of enterprise customers in more than 60 countries. As a focused, independent company, we're building on our foundation of excellence by bringing in the right partners, investing in our business, and working side-by-side with our customers to unlock their potential.

Did you know: The name Kyndryl is inspired by "Kyn" referencing "kinship" and "Dryl" referencing "tendril".

Martin Goetz Dies at 93: Father of Third-Party Software Passes Away

Awarded the first software patent in the US and was known as the ‘father of third-party software’

In what took just over 3 year dispute with the US Patent Office, Martin Goetz was eventually awarded the first US patent for software.

In 1968 and a decade after forming Applied Data Research, he eventually received his patent for Mainframe software designed to help with data-sorting.

In addition Martin Goetz has been inducted into the "Mainframe Hall of Fame".

?? Read more about Martin Goetz here

?? Visit the Mainframe Hall of Fame here

?? Just for fun {mainframe & non-mainframe}

Mainframe and the Moon

In a previous edition I featured the role of the mainframe helping India to reach the moon. The feedback from this post was very positive and a number of people reached out to me about this.

I have another post which I want to share that goes into more details about the role of the mainframe in helping "Man" get to the moon.

?? You can read the article by abhishek kumar: ???? IBM’s Role in Moon Missions: The Tech Behind the Space Race ???? here

How financial services companies can prepare for the EU’s DORA regulations

Dora is the EU’s Digital Operational Resilience Act is a new framework aimed at Financial organisations to encourage cyber resilience. If you are curious what this may mean I have found a link to a free webinar that may be of interest.

DORA is a new piece of legislation that will mandate financial services organisations to improve their resilience to operations disruptions, such as cyberattacks, by placing much more emphasis on resilience and recovery as opposed to traditional detect-and-protect approaches.

?? Read more from Tech monitor and access a free online webinar recording here

1password

I always like to mention any issues that I think should be known about as security breaches away from the mainframe can often be the first step to gaining access to your mainframe data.

1Password says it has contained a "security incident" which has hit its password management platform.

The issue stems from a fresh breach of Okta's digital identity management service which is deployed by 1Password and many other organisations to check user credentials.

?? Read the post here

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