Published: September 15 2008, 10:08 AM | no comments
by Reg Harbeck

I'm writing this blog, sitting here in Heathrow airport in London, on my way to Johannesburg to meet with more mainframers.

I've just had the pleasure last week of meeting with fellow mainframers from a number of large organizations in Leicester in the UK, Dublin in Ireland, and CA's Slough European headquarters office in the UK. In each of these cases, I was one of the presenters at what we call "CA Days".

And what a great experience! Of course, the first thing I find each time I attend one of these events is, no matter where you go, mainframers are mainframers: hard-working, able, experienced people concerned about doing what is best for their organizations and platform. (They also enjoy many of the same mainframe jokes!)

I also find that everyone responds to a discussion of the importance of preparing the mainframe for a new generation to inherit it: clean up loose ends, offer more intuitive interfaces, and take advantage of the features that already exist in current releases of their mainframe software (including CA's) rather than continue to use and maintain (or not if the source is lost) stop-gap solutions that may have been cobbled together in-house, decades ago.

But one thing I can never predict is the nature of the conversations I have between and after the presentations. Because, of course, while we all have so much in common, including the mainframe, each of us and our organizations are also unique in what we do, which solutions we use, how we use them, and what new things we wish to do with them.

So, for example, in Dublin I had a great discussion about our storage products, including our CA Vtape, which is so hardware-independent it's even capable of running on zIIP processors, essentially eliminating CP MIPS charges related to it. That lead to a quick email exchange with some CA colleagues with the ability to drill down to the technical details, and a reply within a day.

It sure feels great to connect with fellow mainframers and bring them new information, value and answers like that!

Next, I'm going to Johannesburg and Cape Town in South Africa for CA Days. There, we'll be talking about CA's strategy, how we extend the value of the mainframe, what we do to enable SOA, how we support complex enterprise-workloads and our performance and automation solutions. In addition, there will be an IBM presentation. And, of course, I look forward to meeting and learning from more fellow-mainframers.

Have you had a CA Day near you yet? If not, there may be one coming soon - check with your local CA team. Take advantage of it - it's a great opportunity for us to get to know you better, which leads to a better partnership and greater value for everyone involved.

I hope to meet you at one of these. Or, maybe at CA world, where you can learn about these topics and many more, and meet many of your mainframe colleagues, including those of us from CA.

See you there!

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