What's hot for mainframe lovers at Interconnect 2016

As you might know, CROZ covers pretty much everything of IBM technologies. That fact put me in big trouble here @Interconnect, trying to choose the right sessions. But, than I decided to stick with my old love and focused on mainframe topics.

Here’s my personal top-list from Las Vegas:

1. DevOps has become commonplace.

Everybody is trying to shift to higher speed. No doubt, mainframe customers have plenty of choices. rDZ/RTC, continuous integrating/testing, UrbanCode… It’s relatively easy to build DevOps from technology side, but don’t forget that it requires substantial organizational changes too. My colleague Krešimir Musa held a session how to mange organizational changes during implementation of DevOps.

2. API management

No doubt, mainframe is here to stay. In the meantime, whole new world of new microservices (web and mobile applications) are emerging. We need efficient and robust interconnection. The answer is API management, there has been overwhelming acceptance of new paradigm among IT vendors and community. From mainframe perspective, there has been number of integration/gateway products and technologies over last 10-15 years, but introduction of z/OS Connect Enterprise Edition is giant step forward. Mobile developers are amazed when they discover there’s easy way to use well known technologies like REST API, JSON when connecting to mainframe. Mainframe guys have single, consistent and non-invasive way to connect to CICS, IMS, DB2, MQ… IBM announced innovative and very reasonable pricing scheme.  It’s clear win-win for everybody.

Ps. I loved new z13 in glass rack. It is really beautiful beast.