New role! From Software to Hardware

Its been 3 years since I first joined the Z IT Service Management organization and its been a fantastic journey. Over that time we've seen rapid adoption of the IBM Service Management Suite for z/OS along with our Service Management Unite dashboard integration technology, delivered new monitoring offerings with OMEGAMON JVM and recently IBM Z APM Connect, enhancements in our CICS & IMS Tools portfolio and of course the growth of our IT Operations Analytics solutions. Its also been really exciting to drive new collaboration within our eco-system, with partnerships announces with Splunk, AppDynamics, Rocket Software and DataKinetics to name just a few... and this is something we're only going to increase in the future as integrate Z data wherever clients need it. But as they say, all good things must come to an end and its time for a new challenge...

On the Move / Full Stack Offering Management

I'm extremely excited to have taken on a new role as Offering Lead for the next generation of our IBM Z hardware... yes that's right, the actual box! Through my career at IBM I've worked on software development tools, application run-times, IT Service Management products most recently, and even industry specific solutions in marketing and commerce, but this will be the first role I've taken on with a hardware flavour. The mainframe really is a platform sport, so getting alignment right the way across not just IBM's offerings, but also within our eco-system is key to the success of our clients, so I'm looking forward to bringing the experience I've gained in software along to this new role in hardware... although clearly a massive amount new to learn, and thankfully I have a fantastic team to help me there.

3 In-a-box

Fortunately I'm not going to be alone in this new role and I'm pleased to be joined on this adventure by Miao Zhang-Cohen and Kirsten Brunner McDonald who have taken up responsibilities for Development Program Lead and Design Lead respectively for our next Z offering. The transition to Design Thinking and Offering Management has been key to recent successes across the Z portfolio and so having all 3 of us announced and in place at the same time is great news as we're able to hit the ground running quickly... and even better than that we were able to kick off the process with a Design Workshop last week to bring together our stack strategy and our key items for Z... more on that to follow.

Its been a real pleasure to work with so many great people in Z ITSM team over the last 3 years, but I'm thrilled to be taking on this new challenge and am looking forward to getting your insight on what we can do to build on the success of z14 in the future. So whether you're a client, business partner, IBMer or anyone else I'd love to hear your feedback and ideas, so do please get in touch!