Z Application Platform Talks

Today I am very happy to have Kevin Stoodley with me and talk a bit about the history of Java and how it became such an important technology for IBM. He was part of the Team that ported it and later designed our very own version of it, the IBM J9. Join us for a little memory tour and listen to Kevins journey to become an IBM Fellow - or more important why he now works with IBM zSystems.

Today we meet Matt Whitbourne who is our now our Produktmanager for Operating Systems and Virtualisation on the zSystems Platform and we have a chat on his way to IBM zSystems as well as why he always came back after a little tour around other platforms. He also talks a bit about the technology we can look forward to and gives us some inside on why he thinks sustainability makes the mainframe ready for primetime once again.

Isabel, Nick and Tobi shared quite some time at IBM, today she works in the Crypto Center in Copenhagen and she tells us a bit about keys, certificates and why IBM sometimes have more than one solution. She also gives us some Ideas about the challenges in the crypto space and how she helps to make the cloud more secure also using the mainframe.

Is COBOL still relevant in 2022? Is it still further developed? Lets meet Captain COBOL and discover why COBOL is still relevant and what are the advantages of COBOL compared to other languages. COBOL is still extended every day and besides improvements in the areas of performance, new functionalities are added every day.

How does one become a Director for an important system like CICS? Today Steve Wallin joins us and explains how he ended up being the CICS director and what the glue was, that always made him come back to CICS. And when we have the CICS Director on our virtual couch, we of course have a look at the future of CICS. 

Today we meet Lewis James, who started straight in CICS. We had a chat about being a new starter in a well established Product like CICS and what the things are, one needed to know. Learning Assembler or PLX was never a problem for James and he could still bring in all the experience he has with modern technology. Although it was complex in Corona times, he often speaks at conferences. Meet a good example, that new talent is not an issue on IBM zSystems.

Steve did start in IT in 1967 and he developed for Mainframes since they exist, so his career pretty much matches the success story of IBM zSystems. Today he is working in the CICS Development Team and shares some of his memories with us and we have a very good discussion on our engineering profession in general.

Today we welcome Mark Cocker, he has been with IBM quite a while now and he has been within the CICS Lab Organisation most of that Time. Now he is responsible as a Product Manager for new CICS Releases. Join us for a little talk about what we do with the next release but also a little sneak peak on what is coming next!

Today we welcome Catherine Moxey to talk to us about her work in integrating the new functionality in z16 with the subsystems running on the platform and the applications that are build for IBM zSystems. We learned that most models can make use of the technical enhancements we included into the new processor without having to develop it ourselves. So the development experience is focused on usability while hiding technical complexity.

Christian Jacobi lead the development of the most recent IBM Telum Chip and tells us about the details and how the new facilities can be used by developers. This new Chip will offer the next generation of IBM Z AI acceleration directly available to each processor core and a new caching mechanism that again improves the performance of these high end machines. Also christian told us he already works on the next and the generation after that one. 

Today Will Yates visits us and we talked about his career in Testing and how he learned to like IBM Z and CICS. He and his Team also invented and open sourced a Framework named Galasa that provides users with many years of experience that has been build up by the CICS Team in Hursley. 

In todays session we have Joe Winchester with us, who originally wanted to do microbiology, stuff but somehow ended up in IT. Here he is very busy making the IBM Z platform more accessible and open. Join us for a journey on open source development and CLIs, APIs and all the fun stuff Joe did and still does in his career.

Listen to Tony share some stories about the journey he’s been on with IBM Z, the changes he’s seen and how he became the Technical Strategy Lead for Integration on the platform. We’ll be talking to him about how z/OS Connect EE has evolved to be the market leading API enablement solution for Z, what trends he’s seeing and what might be coming next in the integration space.

Did you know IMS is not just a Database, it is a Transaction Server as well and even it has been around since the 60s, it learns new tricks every day. Learn with us from Haley and Deepak out of the IMS Development Team what to expect from IMS next and how customers add new technologies to their most critical applications and administration of IMS itself.

In this episode we have Phil Wakelin with us who works with Java on Z Customers all over the world. He shares his insights on why customers use Java and how customers adopt it on IBM Z. Especially the provided Frameworks allow customers to really move forward quickly. Join our little journey and understand also how customers can stepwise move to newer programming languages like Java.

In this session on the virtual couch, we invited Stew Francis to discuss how our Runtimes have evolved to be easier to use by people that have never met IBM Z before. Stew has quite a history in that area as he also worked a lot on the CICS Explorer and now works on technology and function that help Developers to interact with IBM Z, like Maven and Gradle, whilst also helping system Programmers to automate and script their interaction with Z using Ansible.

Modern Application Architectures for Application Platforms on IBM Z

Description: Ian Mitchell worked for a long time in CICS and now helps customers on modernising their systems. In this first session about future application architectures, we discussed how the architecture will shape the application as such and help to make it more maintainable and future proof. We really got into the topic and plan to have another talk to follow up on many of the points we ran out of time to cover that we wanted to discuss! But we do have some good reads for you in the meantime:

- Eric Evans - Domain Driven Design 

https://www.domainlanguage.com/ddd

-Sam Newmann - Monolith to Microservices

https://samnewman.io/books/monolith-to-microservices

In this Episode, we invited Fraser Bohm, the chief architect for CICS and AI Ops, onto our virtual couch. he explains to us how the trends in Development change what Runtimes need to provide and what new things will come up next.  He also gave us some history around why IBM CICS is actually implemented in a micro-service fashion. Even he did not have his crystal ball with him, but he still took time to share some new trends and what he thinks will come next in this space.

In this Episode, we will explain why we thought we need to have a podcast that explains what trends and directions are implemented in the IBM Z Runtimes and Application Platforms and the Runtimes. In the future Episodes, we will go into a lot of topics and invite interesting Guests to understand what are the important things now and what will come next!