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New Business and new skills – HP doesn’t have this right either
Competitive Winbacks
Some quick thoughts about HP. When they talked about 250 customers moving from mainframes to HP, they really didn’t say who they were. Why? Not really significant?
Yesterday, alert readers pointed me toward a new IBM press release. Over 5000 businesses moved to IBM servers from HP, Sun and EMC. Of that total, over 150 customers moved to IBM mainframes in less than a year since the IBM Migration Factory was establish for System z.
While that is cool, the best part was that real customer names were used, with Finanz Informatk being the most significant mainframer in the list. Real customers experiencing real value with real solutions from IBM. I guess using the new hype: Smart Customers.
Declining skills or Simplicity of acquiring skills?
So when you want to say something negative, you find a way to do it to cloud the real story. HP says that mainframe skills are retiring. Yes, that’s a fact. When you have a system that’s been around in a a consistent form for over 40 years, that is bound to happen. Personally, my dad was a computing pioneer and retired after 42 years in 1996 or so. So retirements happen.
What is really cool is how quickly “kids” can get on board the
mainframe. First there is zVM, presumably the oldest virtualization hypervisor in
the industry, circa 1967. And the most scalable and reliable to boot. That can
put a mainframe operating system on the desktop of every college student,
application architect and systems programmer that you can imagine. Hey, did you
get the memo? SYS1.PARMLIB is proprietary…oh my goodness, I’m so embarrassed
and afraid….NOT! Heck, you ever try to
use REGEDIT on a PC? That’s pretty complex, in fact, it’s unreadable on a
single screen. But again, all that is irrelevant. The biggest problem with
skills is that the mainframe has not been easily accessible to developers. Now
that zVM has risen like a
Phoenix
out of the ashes, more and more customers and academic institutions are making mainframe images, be they Linux, z/OS, zVSE or zTPF on desktops through virtualization. Add some Rational Developer for z tooling and you’ll find that the mainframe even looks like a PC server. The problem was never that it was hard. The problem is that because of operational change control risks, the mainframe just wasn’t made available to new communities.
With IBM’s Academic Initiative leading the way, there are more students coming out with knowledge than ever in history. More schools are adding mainframe skills to their curicullum. But as important, it’s not just a job, it’s fun….remember my mantra – Same code, different container, superior operations model. We have students tell us all the time that they found creative new ways to solve problems that they didn’t think were possible because their knowledge had been limited to “simple” scale out servers, capable of only doing one thing. So sad! But that’s the best the competition can do to teach them, I guess.
I mentor kids in high school. A couple of years ago, one of
those students was hired as a coop for a summer job. He liked it so much that he
told his friends and three of his peers were hired as coops the next year. I
now have a waiting list and this is from one rural high school in
New York
. That school only graduates 80 students a year...Nice win rate. They have fun, they learn the real world applicability and most important they realize that there are real jobs out there for them….It just doesn’t get any better than that.
This year, I’ve got two kids in 8th grade starting a mentorship. One of them wants to build a web server for his church. Somehow, someway, I’ll bet that web server ends up on Linux on z for at least a demo purpose…And then, it will migrate to the HTTPD on z/OS. And it will be a blast doing it…And the cool part? I don’t even have to see these students to make this work. It can all be done by instant message coaching…This is cut and paste simplicity. Yes indeed, the era of the new mainframe has arrived… So much fun for anyone that wants to give it a try.
And many of you reading this probably have teenagers at home
or are young yourselves. Always seems like the “younger generation” hates it
when someone tells you that you shouldn’t do something or that it’s bad for
you? My own experience tells me that my kids will do something anyways. So
message to HP…keep saying bad things about the mainframe, keep telling folks it’s
not worth doing. Keep sending out misleading information. And in turn, you’ll
just inspire that next generation of systems programmers and application
developers to find out what it is they are missing and in doing so, they’ll
have as much fun as the other folks that continue to thrive using the mainframe.
Thanks, HP…you are just making my job easier.
| by JimPorell | November 21, 2008 Permalink |
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Comments
It's funny to hear about all these new initiatives to get new people into the mainframe staffing pipeline when it is probably the case that all the fired well-trained mainframe people over 40 but substantially less than retirement age have still not been rehired.
Posted by: emes | Nov 21, 2008 10:08:55 AM
It's funny to hear about all these new initiatives to get new people into the mainframe staffing pipeline when it is probably the case that all the fired well-trained mainframe people over 40 but substantially less than retirement age have still not been rehired.
Posted by: emes | Nov 21, 2008 10:11:22 AM
