Since I am Dutch, I have the right to tell you how you can save money. Terms like "Going Dutch", "Dutch Treat", "Dutch Date" and "Double Dutch" are all used to economic ways of dining.... But I realize that next to our Scottish friends, we have a reputation. I think our Calvinistic background has something to do with it, but I will leave that to the historians. Espcially in economic difficult times, we are sometimes surprised to see how much others, with approximately the same income, can do with their money. being Dutch, the phenomenae intrigues me. It starts in the supermarket already and ends with the type of cars we drive, the type of holidays we book and the clothes we wear. Life often is not more...
Of course it’s fun to attend a virtual conference. Wearing your own comfortable earphones, (maybe even the ones with noise cancellation), sitting behind your own comfortable desk, sipping coffee (or whatever alternative you choose) from your own faithful mug while you listen to specialists, experts, fellow users and others talking about your favorite topic: Mainframe… But what are the BUSINESS benefits of doing so? After all, in the worst case, you are listening instead of working during working hours! Well, in all honesty, there are plenty. In a previous blog ( http://community.ca.com/blogs/mainframe-voice/archive/2012/04/25/May-Mainframe-madness-2012.aspx ) I already explained why the presentations by Dr. Howard Rubin are a must if you are...
It will soon be May again. And because of the hard work of many colleagues at CA Technologies, May Mainframe Madness is filled with many interesting sessions. One of the most interesting, I think, will be a session led by mr. Howard Rubin. Let me explain why. Like you, I am often asked to explain why the mainframe is such a solid, efficient and great platform. Or, in other words, I am asked to "defend" the mainframe. No matter how good you are, you'll often end up in comparing apples and pears. There is no simple way to explain why a mainframe is better than x 1000 servers to a non believer. Mr Rubin has taken a different approach; he has compared the efficiency of companies with- and without a mainframe. And he reduced it down...
Starting with the current school year, German elementary schools will not teach cursive writing to first graders anymore. Only print, upper and lower case. I had to process this thought for a while. What does it mean for our children? What does it mean for us? I am a big fan of e-books and can hardly pick up a paper book without feeling I am in a time machine, but THIS?? This caught me completely unprepared…. A couple of years back I watched a persentation by Peter Hinssen presentations titled ‘Are We There yet?’. His view was that we are half way there to a fully IT driven/controlled world. The big leap forward to the interconnected and highly technology driven world we live in now started in the early ’90. We went from the client/server model...
I recently had a conversation that went like this; Me:” Anything new in the world of mainframe here? ” Answer: “ There are a lot of projects going on to see if we can optimize, reduce cost and run more efficiently .” Me: “ So, Is this an general IT initiative? ” Answer: “ I don’t know, I just deal with mainframe..” Me: “Is Linux on System z something worth looking at?” Answer: “ Naaahhh, we looked at that 4 years ago already, and it was not really good enough…” There are two things wrong with this conversation. The first one is obvious; any initiative to make IT more cost effective should focus on everything IT, and not on separate silo’s. The second one was the remark “we tried it already 4 years ago..”. The world has changed dramatically in...
A long time ago, I worked as a programmer. I just started, was young and eager and wrote applications in Cobol (Batch) and a language called CPG (CICS). It worked, programs performed well, but I got frustrated by the speed at which I could develop new applications. I was asked by my manager to look for alternatives and found them. One was Easytrieve (Plus) and the other was Gener/OL, a 4GL for CICS. They came at the right time, I liked the advantages these languages offered and they helped me build my career. Up to this day, I get agitated when someone says something negative about one of these products, and especially about Easytrieve. Strange, because I have not used it professionally for over a decade. So when I hear people talk about some...
A few years ago, when budgets were abundant, performance was something people cared about. It was seen as important, something that could help you save money, something that could set you apart from the competition. These days, most people only seem interested in the latest benchmarks of Firefox vs Internet Explorer vs Chrome. Did you know that a Composite Cached Page Load time of IE is 982 ms versus 1047 ms with Firefox? ( Browser performance ). Please check them out both before you decide to launch your new tablet app that touches multiple point in your IT Infrastructure. These 60 ms may mean the difference between life and death… Or do they??? Did you know that the blink of an eye actually takes 150 ms ?.... So, you may ask yourself, WHY...
It’s two days now since our world wide Virtual Luminaries event took place. Very interesting and if you want to find out more (and to get a feel for what May Madness will look like this year…) go here: http://vshow.on24.com/vshow/ca3?l=en_UK #, all sessions can be viewed all materials can be downloaded for a few more weeks… One of the discussions was about, “Harnessing the waves of change in IT”, and I was one of the presenters. I made a point that it is important for CIO’s to make sure their existing environment is well managed and agile enough to make it easy to adopt new technologies… During the Q&A after the session I was contacted by one of the attendees about this and we chatted about legacy applications (remember this…) and what you...
It was me who said this almost 3 years ago. I simply could not imagine people voluntarily listening to some remote person to try and learn something. Boy, was I wrong… After the first time we tried it for mainframe ( May Madness) I was hooked, and many customers with me. The Internet has changed a lot for many people. When you want to figure out what people think about the new Tablet you want to buy, you can find a review probably within 15 seconds. But with more complex things, it’s not so easy to find out how other people feel about them. Take something simple like Business Software (the stuff that keeps companies going day after day). Whether it’s Project & Portfolio Management Software that helps you control 100’s of millions worth of...
IBM’s DB2 relational database is probably one of the most complex IT components a company can use. Not just because of the architecture, but also because of the sheer amount of data and the importance of the data that is stored in DB2. A DB2 database that is not well maintained, does not receive enough TLC (Tender, Love & Care) and is basically left on its own for too long will almost act like a human; it will become grumpy, ask for attention at times when you don’t want it and will constantly ask for more (memory, disk space etc..). In the past years, this was not always recognized by IT staff. Somehow, we felt that it was ok to ignore the experience from the past decades. Because we knew all too well that DB2 can turn into a monster suffering...
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