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Guests: John Mertic (LinkedIn) | Elizabeth K. Joseph (LinkedIn)
Project: Open Mainframe Project (Twitter)
Show: Mainframe Matters

Open Mainframe Summits have largely focussed around the open mainframe community, bringing different projects together.  However, there was a growing demand by attendees to bring this event closer to the direct, actual beneficiaries of these great open source technologies. As a result, this year we will have not one but two Open Mainframe Summits aimed at two different audiences. 

In this episode of TFiR: Mainframe Matters, Open Mainframe Project Executive Director John Mertic and Global Head of Open Source Program Office (OSPO) for IBM Z Elizabeth K. Joseph talk about the details of these upcoming mainframe summits.

Open Mainframe Summit in Las Vegas on September 11-14

  • Partner event: IBM TechXchange Conference 2023
  • Audience: IBM customers, users, and partners who want to discuss the technologies and the work that’s currently happening. Mainframers who are looking at various IBM products and services.
  • The Open Mainframe Project will be part of the Community Day, which is the day-zero of the conference.
  • Mainframers are familiar with the concept of open-source community. In fact, the major conference within the mainframe community is called SHARE where they’ve been sharing technology, programs, tips and tricks for decades now. However, the term “open source” is new. The Open Mainframe Project is trying to bridge the gap between what mainframers know and have been doing for a long time and what the current industry standard is with open-source software. That’s why they’re bringing these events to a broader technical audience.
  • Woven throughout the rest of the conference will be talks on IBM z/LinuxONE general mainframe topics, along with the portfolio of technologies in which IBM has invested.
  • It’s going to be an opportunity for participants to get the “open” part of the mainframe and then ease into some more general topics. The talks are not all from IBM or all in the main event either.
  • Focus: Education, driving awareness around the technologies, helping people understand open source as relates to mainframe, and how it benefits them. Also, many of these customers are vendors that are building technologies that do a lot of the same things as the Open Mainframe Projects so the focus is how to get them to work in these communities to build those technologies stronger, so that they can work at a higher level.

Open Mainframe Summit in New York City on November 1

  • Partner event: The Open Source in Finance Forum hosted by the Fintech Open Source Foundation (FINOS).  
  • Audience: Big financial institutions. People that may have some familiarity with the mainframe, maybe worked on it in the past, maybe they know it is the box that sits on the other side of their company. People who may not necessarily know what’s going on with open source in the mainframe, but they know they want to try to leverage and bring this computing power within their organization.
  • It will showcase the mainframe as part of the larger financial services story. In financial services companies, there is usually a disconnect between the mainframe side and the rest of the company.
  • Focus: Talk about the technologies, the customers that are doing it successfully, and the stories to help others go on their own journey. There are pioneering customers out there that are at the forefront of driving forward with these technologies. Showcasing them so that the people in attendance can see they already have the mainframes but they’re not taking advantage of them very well. So, these are the technologies to help them get there.

Call for Papers: 

They are looking for trailblazers, i.e., practitioners and folks who are already using the tools so they can be an example to others, because no one wants to be the first to use these tools. A lot of the organizations want to see proven examples that are already out there in the industry. So, they are looking for those stories, or at least the building blocks, on how to get there. 

In both events, the goal is to explain to participants that:

  • open source software does work on the mainframe.
  • a lot of the tooling that is already being used by your organization can be used on the mainframe.
  • projects like Zowe can interact in that story.

This summary was written by Camille Gregory.

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