Dear fellow mainframer,
Some people travel to Rome, while others go to Mecca. My pilgrimage is to Poughkeepsie, home of the mainframe. I had high expectations before the trip, but the history, present, and future of this mighty platform exceeded them all, leaving me truly impressed.
The Mighty Mainframe Conference is just around the corner, and we’re excited to announce that Emma Skovgård will unveil a new free and open-source software project at the event. After months of experimenting with RACF and security utilities in Python, she’s developed something exciting using the RACFU API. Attendees will get an exclusive first look at the project and get limited edition pins as a celebration to this new software reveal.
zStudy Tour 2025 – future-proofing the mighty platform
Last week, I attended zStudy Tour, a 3-day briefing for mainframe customers and business partners from the Nordics, Benelux, and Central Europe. The event took place at the IBM Innovation Center in Poughkeepsie and the new IBM flagship office at One Madison Avenue in New York City.
Ross Mauri, General Manager of IBM Z and LinuxONE, delivered the opening keynote session. He was reassuring and calm, like an athlete entering the Olympic arena, confident in winning a gold medal after a years of dedicated training. While I can’t discuss the new zNext server publicly, it’s truly impressive to see how IBM continues to maintain a high tempo of innovations with each new generation of hardware.
AI is now the new powerhouse in town, and the mainframe is fully equipped to harness its potential! With the new Spyre AI Accelerator, you can run multiple models and predictive AI simultaneously on the mainframe platform. I believe there’s a consensus among enterprise architects that this is the way to go with AI in enterprise IT, and IBM has taken an excellent pole position before the race. Cyber resilience is another sphere of excellence for the mainframe. Combined with old favorites like reliability, scalability, and security, the mainframe is truly a future-proof platform.
Mainframe modernization and the skills gap are definitely the main open issues in the mainframe community nowadays. IBM is betting on watsonX AI assistants to help developers and sysprogs close the gap. Joanie Gines, VP of Z DevOps & WCA4Z, explained the latest updates to the tools, and I find them incredibly impressive! We are not there yet, but we’re getting close.
The highlight of the tour was the visit to the Z Test Center. After the tour, nobody had any doubts left about why the mainframe is the most robust platform and how beautiful real hardware engineering is. I had always wondered about the origin of the fascination with mainframe hardware, but after the visit to Test Center I have joined the club.
I love NYC! Some people think it’s crazy, but I find it fascinating every time. I enjoyed cycling around Manhattan and Brooklyn—felt almost like David Byrne. Since my last visit, the bike lanes have improved big time, and Citibikes are robust and cool.
Power of the Mainframe System Automation
Ensuring IT systems stay reliable and efficient has never been simple, and as environments grow more complex, the pressure on IT teams only increases. That’s why automation and real-time collaboration aren’t just helpful, they’re game-changers. IBM System Automation, SMU, and IBM Z ChatOps take a lot of the manual work off operators’ plates, making it easier to detect issues, resolve incidents faster, and keep teams connected through Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Mattermost.
Instead of scrambling to diagnose problems, IT teams get instant insights and suggested recovery steps, all in one place. It’s a shift from reacting to problems to staying ahead of them. If this sounds like something your team could use, Marko Jurman’s latest blog, dives deeper into how it all works. Definitely worth checking out!
Industry insights
The mainframe community is buzzing with excitement for the upcoming announcement of zNext during IBM Z Day 2025 Special Edition. This event will unveil a new AI accelerator and much more. We’ve organized a watch party at the CROZ office in Zagreb, Croatia on April 8th, starting at 15:00 CET, where customers, IBMers, and mainframe enthusiasts can gather to share some great mainframe vibes!
Click here to join the party!
Falls Sie Fragen haben, sind wir nur einen Klick entfernt.
