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EXEC I/O
July 2008 - Posts
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It's Almost Time!
Some important things are about to happen, and I'm hoping you're getting ready for them.
Of course, as you'll recall from previous blogs I've written, I'm a big fan of SHARE, which happens twice a year. And, the next SHARE is coming up in the second week of August - I'll be there, and I hope to see you there too.
There's something else that's even bigger for me coming up in November, however.
Every 18 months (or sesquiannually if you prefer), CA puts on the biggest mainframe ISV user conference in the world: CA World! Of course, it's about more than just mainframe - it's about everything we do, and while over half of our revenue still comes from the mainframe, we have some outstanding distributed offerings, too. (Incidentally, over half of our distributed revenue comes from mainframe customers - namely, the biggest and most important organizations on earth!)
None of which changes the fact that the presence of the mainframe at this CA World is going to be the biggest, best and most visible part of the conference!
Not only will there be a multitude of mainframe sessions, including free pre-conference mainframe education. Not only will there be many of CA's top mainframe technologists available to talk shop with you, tell you about where our products are at and going next, and listen to your input about how to make them even better. Not only will we be the first thing you see when you enter the Exhibition Center and the most prevalent presence throughout the show. Not only will we have events and articles in such places as the CA World Today newsletter. Best of all, I'll get to be there and have a chance to meet with everyone that I normally only connect with electronically, including customers, colleagues, coworkers, and hopefully yourself as well.
To find out more, and register for CA World '08 (which is being held at the Venetian Congress and Sands Expo in Las Vegas from November 16-20, 2008 with the free pre-conference education on the 15th and 16th), go to http://caworld.com/.
Hope to see you there!
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TLA
Today I feel like an abbreviated rant. About ambiguity for the sake of brevity.
What do SMS, SMP and TSO have in common? They're all ambiguous mainframe TLA's!
What's a TLA? Why a Three-Letter Acronym of course! That is, unless you wish to point out that it's not an acronym if it doesn't form a word, in which case it's a Three-Letter Abbreviation. In other words, even TLA itself has a somewhat ambiguous meaning.
Then there are ETLA's - Extended TLA's, or Four-Letter Acronyms/Abbreviations.
I blame JFK, LBJ and the lot of them for the initial steps down this path. But whether or not it's really their faults, the fact is that we've discovered a real affinity for these brief referents (heck, even my parents chose my initials - RWH - before choosing my first and middle names).
So, what's the problem? Ambiguity.
Take SMS, for example - System-Managed Storage on the mainframe, Short Message Service on your cell phone.
Or SMP - aka SMP/E on the mainframe, the primary way we install and maintain software. In the distributed world, it stands for Symmetric Multi-Processing. To make it even weirder, I recently heard Parallel Sysplexes being referred to as SMP environments... referring to the second of these meanings!
Even CA isn't immune to this - we have an internal Technical Sales Organization which is called TSO. I've recommended we call the mainframe portion of it "TSO/E".
So, what are we going to do about it? IDK (LOL) I guess I'm just going to rant and then put up with it... RU2?
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