At its Boston conference on Thursday, the mainframe user group announced the election of its new President – Janet Sun.  Sun has been a Share volunteer for 26 years and served as Treasurer and Secretary of Share prior to coming on as President.  Sun is also Product Manager at Rocket Mainstar.  According to the announcement, Sun’s goals as President include not only expanding Share’s name throughout the IT community, but also supporting the next generation of IT professionals.  This latter goal echoes what I heard at the zEnterprise keynote in Boston on Monday, as Karl Fruend of IBM indicated that there were professors on hand from several universities at the Share conference as part of a program to train “new” mainframers on zEnterprise and other technologies.  Sun will certainly have her work cut out for her — the “green screen” generation is becoming more sparse with each new day.

Are older mainframe programmers actually paying attention to the “new” technologies like cloud computing and virtualization? Are IT admins “cloudy” or weary on cloud computing in general and how their mainframes factor into the equation?

End users may not even know they are using a mainframe.  Programmers on the mainframe are typically using Java or other web-focused languages to deliver applications as web services. So to them, there may not be a difference between programming for the mainframe and programming for a different server platform.  We have lots of sessions at Share in Boston about these topics, and many of them will also be webcast on the Share Online from Boston site.  We also have a complete series of sessions, our Architecture Summit, which will be webcast live on Share Online from Boston.  Cloud can be a confusing topic.  Technology-wise, you will hear people saying that we have had that technology since 1980 (or before).  The cloud paradigm is not really about technology – it’s about a new service delivery paradigm. It’s about delivering virtualized servers on demand, as needed, for example.  There will be over 20 sessions on the cloud at Share in Boston.

Can you talk a little bit about the survey to Share members, and what some of the major findings were?

It was administered by Share for its members who also tend to be IBM customers.  Of the 20 choices offered, the top five concerns were:

1. Cost management: Reduction and/or avoidance

2. Virtualization: Of those ranking virtualization as a top issue, the server is their primary focus in this area, followed by storage and networks

3. Improving value of IT to the business and/or deriving competitive advantage from IT

4. Enterprise security

5. Aging/demographics of current IT staff

Share identifies “managing and deriving a competitive advantage from social media” as one of the issues mentioned on the survey – from a marketing standpoint this makes sense, but why should IT admins/professionals be interested in Twitter or Facebook?

Actually, that key topic did not score highly.  It came in 18^th out of 20 choices.  So maybe they don’t care – yet.

Is the mainframe fading away based on the results? Do you see IBM’s new mainframe adding a boost to the market?

I do not think the mainframe is fading away.  That was supposed to happen in the early 1990s, but still hasn’t.

What will be the emerging trend coming out of the Boston Share conference that mainframe programmers should be looking at?

As you can see from the survey results, the heat is on for managing IT cost and for making sure that IT is relevant to our home business.  IT/the bottom line is one of the two main themes of Share in Boston.  The other is enterprise virtualization/cloud computing.  The point of IT/the bottom line is that IT is not about technology.  It’s about delivering services that are relevant to the business strategy of your employer.  If you fail to do that, you are merely an overhead expense to your employer.  This isn’t just a mainframe issue – it really applies to all IT service providers, or employees.

Join the conversation with IBM, SHARE board members, and fellow mainframers.