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zNextGen: Not About "Your Father's Mainframe"

Jim Michael, Treasurer of SHARE, Talks About the Progress of SHARE's zNextGen Program

5 Minute Briefing: The zNextGen program will soon go into its second year. How's it going?

Michael: It's going well, and we're seeing good progress. The program was launched at an event in Boston in August 2005. We put together a group to talk about how to proceed, and in December 2006, we identified folks to lead that effort from within the zNextGen community. Specifically, there will now be an actual SHARE project, called zNextGen, led by Kristine Harper from NEON Enterprise Software on the user side. The energy's been great. They just signed on their 200th member.

5 Minute Briefing: Who are the members - students and young people just starting their careers?

Michael: It's primarily younger folks, but also folks like me involved as mentors. But not all are in their twenties. Some of the zNextGen folks are in their 40s, and are new to the z - they're making a career shift, coming back to an IT career after a career in another area. We have folks that are new to enterprise IBM technologies, but not necessarily chronologically as young.

5 Minute Briefing: Are you still working closely with IBM on this project?

Michael: There's a tie-in with the IBM Academic Initiative. IBM is working with universities and professors to help provide content, to help provide computing resources that help to facilitate those universities offering curriculum that helps prepare students to work on the z platform and other IBM technology platforms. About 150 to 200 schools are involved with that program now. SHARE is working with IBM to foster communication with university professors and their students to make them aware of SHARE. We want to help make sure that the next generation of IBM enterprise systems professionals are prepared for careers in this industry, that they get the resources they need to prepare for those careers, that they're aware of SHARE as a resource once they enter the workplace.

In Tampa, zNextGen will be hosting a session with a professor who teaches about the z platform, who will be talking about the IBM Academic Initiative, and its relevance to the industry.

5 Minute Briefing: It's interesting to see so much interest on the part of younger professionals and students, especially since conventional wisdom would dictate that they see mainframes as "dinosaurs."

Michael: The press said 10 years ago that "the mainframe was dead." The zNextGen folks would look at a story like that and ask, "Man, what were they thinking?" The zNextGen folks are really fired up about this stuff. They see the mainframe and the zSeries platform as "cool." They're excited about it, and they're doing things with it that I wasn't doing when I was their age. They run things like Java and virtual Linux systems. They've got their own excitement around the zSeries.

5 Minute Briefing: So today's System z is, as they say, "not your father's Oldsmobile."

Michael: To their perspective, "there were mainframes that my dad used, and there was an Oldsmobile that my dad drove. But this isn't that machine, and it's not being used the way my dad used his machine. It's different." In fact, what's really fun is that some of the folks involved in the project actually have parents that worked on the zSeries. So they know. I even heard a conversation between one zNextGen member and her dad, talking zSeries stuff. They bring two different perspectives to it. But they both see it as relevant, interesting, and worth talking about.

For information on SHARE's zNextGen initiative, click here.

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Software Drives Latest IBM Revenues; System z Up Six Percent

IBM announced its fourth-quarter earnings for the end of 2006, the results of which showed growth in many of Big Blue's products and services, including the System z platform. In total, IBM reported revenues of $26.3 billion for the quarter, up seven percent from the same period at the end of 2005. Its strongest growth area was services, with services signings totaling $17.8 billion during the quarter - a 55 percent increase from the year before. Samuel J. Palmisano, IBM chairman, president and CEO, called the quarterly results "terrific" and said 2006 was "a good year" for the vendor.

System z led IBM's earnings on the platform and hardware side. Revenues from the Systems and Technology Group (S&TG) segment totaled $7.1 billion for the quarter, up three percent over the previous year. This consisted of a five percent increase in System z server, and six percent growth in total delivery of System z computing power measured in MIPS (millions of instructions per second). Revenues from the System p Unix server products increased four percent, System x server revenues grew by seven percent, and System i server revenue declined by 10 percent.

Revenues from the Software segment were $5.6 billion, an increase of 14 percent over the fourth quarter of 2005. Revenues increased 22 percent for the WebSphere family of software products, and 28 percent for Information Management software. Revenues from Tivoli infrastructure software increased 25 percent, and revenues for Lotus software increased 30 percent year over year. Revenues from Rational software, integrated tools to improve the processes of software development, increased 12 percent compared with the year-ago quarter. Operating systems revenues decreased two percent to $642 million compared with the prior-year quarter.

Segment revenues from Global Technology Services increased seven percent to $8.6 billion, and segment revenues from Global Business Services increased six percent to $4.2. IBM also reported that it ended the full year with an estimated services backlog of $116 billion, an increase of $5 billion from the prior-year period. For more information, visit the IBM Web site.

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Compuware Launches Application Auditing Solution for Risk Management

Compuware Corp. has introduced the company's Application Auditing solution, which uses Compuware Hiperstation to address mainframe data and application security issues with internal, authorized users.

With Compuware's solution for Application Auditing, organizations can capture the activity between authorized users and applications. This information provides an audit trail that can be used to investigate details of a security breach and to pinpoint those customers affected, thereby minimizing the problem. Compuware says its approach to application auditing is unique because Hiperstation is directly connected to the mainframe operating system, meaning that it can handle the production-type load necessary for an effective application auditing solution.

Driving the demand for Compuware's Application Auditing solution is the increased publicity about data breaches, and the fact that customers are demanding more security for their data, Mark Schettenhelm, product manager, Compuware, told 5 Minute Briefing. "The other things are the notification laws, specifically the one in California, and I think that is going to spread," he added. If, for example, a company with a million customers has a breach, but can't pinpoint exactly who was affected, it would have to notify all one million customers, Schettenhelm explained. This could potentially result in lost customers, as well as significant costs in mailing notifications to customers that might not have actually been affected. But if the people affected by the breach can be identified, Schettenhelm observed, that is a "huge savings in the cost of notification."

Compuware Hiperstation has been in existence for over 20 years, said Schettenhelm. "In working with our customers, we found that while primarily this was a testing product and still is, users found that they could use it to address their security concerns." Up until now, explained Schettenhelm, "The recording part worked fine to go and put things in the repository; what we lacked was a way to really specifically go in and search those results - not to the level that would really be useful for an auditor. They would sometimes come up with ways to extract from the repository to produce their own report." User interest has increased significantly in the past year in using Hiperstation for security, said Schettenhelm. "Once we saw that trend, that's when we realized we really had to do more to support them." For more information, go here.

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XenSource Virtualization Solution Achieves IBM "ServerProven" Status

XenSource, a provider of infrastructure virtualization solutions based on the open source Xen hypervisor, announced "IBM ServerProven certification" for its product line. The ServerProven certification designates XenSource products as having been enabled for IBM systems and successfully deployed in a real-world production environment.

In December, XenSource released its XenServer product family, which includes XenEnterprise, an enterprise-grade commercially packaged Xen virtualization solution supporting both Microsoft Windows and Linux guests. New additions include XenServer, for Windows standard server environments; and XenExpress, a free, production-ready product.

Solutions that are ServerProven represent applications that have been enabled for IBM Systems and have been verified through a customer experience to be installed and running in a customer location. To earn the IBM ServerProven certification, XenSource verified that XenEnterprise could run on one or more IBM Systems in a real-world customer environment. IBM ServerProven certification is intended for IBM customers to be able to easily identify compatible, reliable solutions for their business-critical needs. XenSource products deliver bare-metal performance on a broad-range of IBM servers, including IBM BladeCenter and IBM System x, running on Windows or Linux.

"XenEnterprise is virtualization software that instantiates multiple virtual servers on a single physical server at the same time, which provides customers dramatically easier management, total cost of ownership savings in terms of power and cooling and reduced operational costs as well," Tony Tyson, senior director of business development, Xen, told 5 Minute Briefing. The IBM certification proves to potential customers "that our systems have previously been used by joint IBM-XenSource customers in a production environment so it should give them the comfort that it is a proven solution in real-world environments," said Tyson. For more information, go here.

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NetManage Selected by Infinitous for Legacy-Based SOA Initiatives

NetManage, a legacy-to-SOA vendor, announced that it has signed a preferred distribution agreement with Infinitous Global Services, a provider of storage, network, operations and risk consulting services, to resell the entire NetManage suite of software on a nationwide basis. Infinitous serves a customer base in the government, financial, healthcare, telecom and technology sectors, which requires access to a significant amount of data stored in legacy and mainframe applications. NetManage's server-based integration product OnWeb will allow Infinitous customers to transform mainframe applications into Web-based solutions. For more information about Infinitous, go here. For more on NetManage, go here.

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Opalis Inks Deal With Western European Bank

Opalis Software, an IT automation solutions provider, announced it has signed an agreement with NIBC, a merchant bank focused on the mid-cap segment in Western Europe. The agreement calls for an enterprise-wide site license of Opalis' IT process automation software. According to Opalis, NIBC has had early success using Opalis' technology to automate a set of key processes, and now plans to expand these automation capabilities to additional business-critical processes across the entire Windows infrastructure, which supports NIBC's banking business. Opalis IT process automation software provides out-of- the-box support for automating dozens of IT workflows. The software enables customers to modify pre-defined workflows to fit their specific environment or create new workflows using a GUI-based process designer. For more information on Opalis, go here.

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VMware Confirms "100 Percent" Server Virtualization at Government Agency

VMware announced that the Defense Contract Management Agency (DCMA), an independent support agency within the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD), has virtualized nearly 100 percent of its server infrastructure using VMware Infrastructure. The DCMA also has used the software suite to lower data center capital and operating costs, achieve high server utilization and automate data center management, according to VMWare. DCMA currently is upgrading to VMware Infrastructure 3, VMware's latest generation of the infrastructure virtualization software, which includes VMware VMotion technology, VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler and VMware High Availability. For more information, go here.

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Only a Few Weeks Until SHARE in Tampa

Applying Technology to Solve Business Problems

SHARE User Events is the perfect location for IT professionals working with IBM technology to network with a diverse community of user experts, keep up-to-date on industry news, and gain access to peer-constructed resources that can be immediately applied to solve business problems.

Benefits of Registering for SHARE User Events Today:

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Lack of Budget Greatest Obstacle to IT Goals

The greatest obstacle in the way of IT departments achieving their goals for 2007 is simple - a lack of budget, according to a proprietary study conducted by Unisphere Research, our research group. In a survey of 248 data management professionals and executives, 39 percent of the respondents said that a lack of budget was the primary obstacle to their IT groups achieving their goals this year. A lack of time was the second greatest obstacle, mentioned by 29 percent of the respondents, followed by lack of skilled professionals, which was tabbed by 16 percent of those who participated in the survey. For more information on trends in the data center, be sure to subscribe to Database Trends and Applications magazine today here.

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New Choice and Flexibility

Improved server utilization, extended asset life, reduced risk, flexible repurposing of hardware resources to meet changing business needs. You work on these challenges in your data center every day, but when was the last time you had a breakthrough? Visit Platform Solutions, Inc. (PSI) at the Tampa SHARE event and learn how an Open Mainframe™ server can change the way you think about data center infrastructure.

Join our Session 2880 - PSI Open Mainframe Server, Customer Case Studies, on Tuesday February 13th, 11am, Ballroom C or stop by Booth 425 to meet the team behind the latest innovation in z/OS computing. For more information please click here.

Online Registration for SHARE in Tampa Closes in a Couple Weeks

Register for SHARE User Events, February 11-16 in Tampa, Florida before this Friday, January 26 and be entered into a drawing to win a VIP pass to use while at SHARE. Learn more by visiting tampa.share.org/vip.

In Tampa, SHARE will be offering focused sessions on two emerging business issues that establish its new direction in helping attendees learn how to apply technology to solve business problems.

You can preview the focused session listings by visiting tampa.share.org/issues.

Visit SHARE's Web site for the latest updates on SHARE in Tampa and to register.