Reconsidering the Importance of the Mainframe, a Tech Field Day Extra at SHARE Delegate Roundtable

Event: Tech Field Day Extra at SHARE Kansas City 2024

Appearance: Tech Field Day Delegate Roundtable at SHARE KC 2024

Company: The Futurum Group

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Personnel: Stephen Foskett

In this Tech Field Day Delegate Roundtable discussion led by Stephen Foskett at SHARE Kansas City 2024, the delegates explored the enduring relevance of mainframes in modern IT. Foskett initiated the conversation by questioning the necessity and continued importance of mainframes. The delegates highlighted that mainframes remain crucial for certain applications due to their unique qualities such as high security, performance, and reliability, which are essential for specific business needs like those of airlines and financial institutions. The discussion underscored that while mainframes are not suitable for all workloads, they are indispensable for tasks requiring millisecond response times and high transaction rates. The delegates also emphasized the importance of making decisions based on business requirements rather than technological trends, criticizing the industry’s tendency to adopt new technologies like Kubernetes or cloud solutions without fully considering their appropriateness. They pointed out that procurement decisions often prioritize cost over technical suitability, leading to suboptimal outcomes. The conversation also touched on the risks of centralization and the need for better alignment between technical and business teams to ensure the right platform is chosen for each application.


Addressing the Mainframe Skills Gap, a Tech Field Day Extra at SHARE Delegate Roundtable

Event: Tech Field Day Extra at SHARE Kansas City 2024

Appearance: Tech Field Day Delegate Roundtable at SHARE KC 2024

Company: The Futurum Group

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Personnel: Stephen Foskett

This Tech Field Day Delegate Roundtable discussion at SHARE Kansas City 2024, led by Stephen Foskett, focused on addressing the mainframe skills gap. The conversation highlighted the varying perspectives on whether a skills gap truly exists, with some organizations successfully implementing apprenticeship and training programs, while others lag behind. The discussion emphasized that the skills issue is not unique to mainframes but is a broader IT problem. Delegates discussed the importance of creating safe learning environments and the need for hands-on experience with mainframe systems. They also noted the challenges of integrating mainframe training into modern educational curricula due to time constraints and the complexity of the material. The conversation suggested that while larger organizations with substantial resources can address the skills gap more effectively, smaller entities and government agencies often struggle. The panel concluded that the mainframe’s longevity and critical role in modern IT infrastructure necessitate sustained investment in training and development to ensure a steady pipeline of skilled professionals.


Broadcom WatchTower Open Telemetry Capability

Event: Tech Field Day Extra at SHARE Kansas City 2024

Appearance: Broadcom Presents at Tech Field Day Extra at SHARE KC 2024

Company: Broadcom

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Personnel: Angelika Heinrich

In this session, Angelika Heinrich will present and demo WatchTower’s real-time streaming capability, which uses the OpenTelemetry framework to seamlessly integrate performance data from mainframe applications into enterprise observability tools to enable end-to-end transaction workflow monitoring and performance management in real-time.

Presented by Angelika Heinrich, Product Manager


Broadcom WatchTower Application Profiling Capability

Event: Tech Field Day Extra at SHARE Kansas City 2024

Appearance: Broadcom Presents at Tech Field Day Extra at SHARE KC 2024

Company: Broadcom

Video Links:

Personnel: Michael Kiehl

In this session, Mike Kiehl will present and demo WatchTower’s application profiling capability, which discovers applications as they flow across the mainframe and produces valuable insights that enhance the visibility of application assets, enabling IT to optimize performance and de-risk modernization efforts.

Presented by Michael Kiehl, Senior Manager, Product Management


Broadcom WatchTower Topology Capability

Event: Tech Field Day Extra at SHARE Kansas City 2024

Appearance: Broadcom Presents at Tech Field Day Extra at SHARE KC 2024

Company: Broadcom

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Personnel: Matheus Milani

Matheus continues his exploration of WatchTower capabilities, in this session delivering a presentation and demo on WatchTower’s ability to automatically discover the topology of z/OS-based mainframe systems and use modern visualization technology to present intuitive views of the structure and interaction between mainframe components.

Presented by Matheus Milani, Product Manager, Broadcom


Broadcom WatchTower Alert Insights and Machine Learning Capabilities

Event: Tech Field Day Extra at SHARE Kansas City 2024

Appearance: Broadcom Presents at Tech Field Day Extra at SHARE KC 2024

Company: Broadcom

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Personnel: Matheus Milani

In this session, Matheus Milani will present and demo two of WatchTower’s core capabilities:
– Centralized mainframe alert insights, which streamlines IT workflows so that IT staff can accelerate problem identification, investigation, and incident resolution.
– ML Insights, which uses machine learning to proactively detect when systems are behaving abnormally and provide anomaly alerts to expedite root-cause analysis for problem resolution.

Presented by Matheus Milani, Product Manager, Broadcom


The Broadcom WatchTower Platform for Mainframe Observability

Event: Tech Field Day Extra at SHARE Kansas City 2024

Appearance: Broadcom Presents at Tech Field Day Extra at SHARE KC 2024

Company: Broadcom

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Personnel: Nicole Fagen

Broadcom invests in the most strategic and business-critical technologies for our customer base. Our business model is based on an investment strategy where we maximize re-investment into technological leadership. We lead the industry in investing our profits back into R&D and will always continue to invest in and fund that innovation. We aim to lead in each of our target technology segments. Infrastructure software is a great example of this strategy. Broadcom’s Mainframe Software Division was formed with the 2018 with the acquisition of CA Technologies. In this session, Nicole introduces WatchTower, a mainframe observability platform that offers a unified and user-friendly experience catering to various skill levels.

Presented by Nicole Fagen, Director, AIOps and Automation, Broadcom Mainframe Software Division


Simplify Mainframe Management with AI and Cloud using the BMC AMI Platform

Event: Tech Field Day Extra at SHARE Kansas City 2024

Appearance: BMC Software Presents at Tech Field Day Extra at SHARE KC 2024

Company: BMC Software

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Personnel: Anthony DiStauro

Anthony DiStauro presents the BMC AMI Platform initiative, designed to simplify mainframe management by integrating AI and cloud technologies. The initiative addresses the challenge of an evolving workforce, where experienced professionals are retiring and new entrants, proficient in modern programming languages and cloud concepts, are joining the industry. DiStauro emphasizes the importance of leveraging AI to capture the expertise of seasoned professionals before they exit the workforce. The BMC AMI Platform aims to provide a unified, modernized entry point for mainframe management, incorporating generative AI to enhance user experience. The platform will support various deployment options, including on-premises and cloud environments, and will feature multi-LLM support to tailor AI experiences to specific needs. Additionally, it will allow organizations to infuse their own tribal knowledge into the AI system. DiStauro showcases the platform’s capabilities, including a single sign-on feature, an AI assistant for generating reports and scheduling tasks, and the ability to actively manage and respond to system events. The platform also incorporates explainability features to help new users understand complex system analyses.


Measuring What Matters with BMC AMI zAdviser DORA Metrics Dashboards

Event: Tech Field Day Extra at SHARE Kansas City 2024

Appearance: BMC Software Presents at Tech Field Day Extra at SHARE KC 2024

Company: BMC Software

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Personnel: Anthony Anter

In this presentation, Anthony Anter, a DevOps Architect and Evangelist for BMC Software, discusses the importance of measurement in mainframe transformation and the value of BMC’s zAdviser tool. He emphasizes that organizations often invest heavily in new tools and processes but struggle to quantify the value of these investments. Anter highlights the reluctance of many organizations to measure their performance due to fear of revealing inefficiencies. He introduces the DORA (DevOps Research and Assessment) metrics as critical indicators for assessing DevOps performance, focusing on deployment frequency, lead time for changes, mean time to recovery, and change failure rate. These metrics provide a comprehensive view of an organization’s efficiency and quality in software delivery. Anter explains how BMC’s zAdviser leverages data from BMC tools and some third-party tools, using machine learning to analyze and generate actionable insights. The tool helps organizations understand their performance, identify trends, and make informed decisions to improve their DevOps processes. The presentation also touches on the integration of zAdviser with existing systems and the potential for custom reports to benchmark performance against industry standards.


Mastering the Fear of Change with BMC AMI DevX Code Insights

Event: Tech Field Day Extra at SHARE Kansas City 2024

Appearance: BMC Software Presents at Tech Field Day Extra at SHARE KC 2024

Company: BMC Software

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Personnel: Mark Schettenhelm

Mark Schettenhelm, Product Manager from BMC, addresses the pervasive fear of change within mainframe environments, particularly when dealing with COBOL applications. He argues that the issue is not COBOL itself, but rather the monolithic and complex nature of existing COBOL programs, which have become difficult to maintain and evolve. Schettenhelm highlights that modern developers are hesitant to work with these outdated systems due to a lack of appropriate tools, which forces them to work in inefficient ways reminiscent of the 1980s. To combat this, BMC has developed AMI DevX Code Insights, a tool designed to provide comprehensive understanding and management of COBOL programs. This tool offers features like structure charts, logic flow, data flow analysis, and code extraction to break down monolithic programs into manageable pieces. Additionally, it includes a runtime visualizer to map out program interactions and an ABEND history feature to inform developers about past errors. Recently, BMC has integrated AI capabilities to explain code sections in plain English, further aiding developers in understanding and maintaining legacy systems. Schettenhelm emphasizes that these tools are crucial for overcoming the fear of change, ensuring the vitality of COBOL applications, and facilitating the ongoing evolution of the mainframe.


PopUp Mainframe Deep Dive and Demo

Event: Tech Field Day Extra at SHARE Kansas City 2024

Appearance: Introducing PopUp Mainframe at Tech Field Day Extra at SHARE KC 2024

Company: PopUp Mainframe

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Personnel: Gary Thornhill

PopUp Mainframe enables organizations to spin up ephemeral z/OS instances in under 10 minutes running on-prem and in the cloud. PopUp comes with automation and DevOps tools preconfigured and ready to use. Using PopUp & Delphix, full z/OS environments can be bookmarked and rewound at the click of a button.

In this demo, Gary Thornhill, CEO and founder of PopUp, shows PopUp in action, from zero to a fully installed PopUp in 10 minutes, as well as the BMC tooling and Delphix mainframe time travel capability which comes out of the box.


Deliver Changes Faster, Cheaper and Better with PopUp Mainframe On-Demand z/OS Instances for DevTest

Event: Tech Field Day Extra at SHARE Kansas City 2024

Appearance: Introducing PopUp Mainframe at Tech Field Day Extra at SHARE KC 2024

Company: PopUp Mainframe

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Personnel: Gary Thornhill

PopUp Mainframe is a cutting-edge mainframe modernization product. PopUp Mainframe enables customers to create z/OS environments on-demand and deploy them anywhere, including in the cloud. PopUp Mainframe is a game changer for organizations which rely on mainframe as it removes the bottlenecks surrounding mainframe environments and finally allows mainframe projects to be fully agile! PopUp democratizes access to the mainframe, making it easy and safe for everyone to access the mainframe so productivity can soar.

In this session, CEO and founder, Gary Thornhill, introduces PopUp Mainframe – what it is, how it works, and how it can transform your organization’s development practices.


Networking Field Day Delegate Roundtable – Hardware or Software – Which is Driving Innovation?

Event: Networking Field Day 35

Appearance: Networking Field Day 35 Delegate Roundtable Discussion

Company: Tech Field Day

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Personnel: Tom Hollingsworth

The pace of innovation in networking is accelerating. New hardware modules like DPUs and IPUs are increasing performance and providing novel new solutions. However, the world of software has not gone away. New software constructs are battling hardware innovations in order to see which one is pushing the envelope further. Which of these two parts of the industry are driving development forward faster? In this delegate roundtable, listen to the opinions of a group of expert practitioners as they debate the details.


Selector AI Alerting Discussion with Nitin Kumar

Event: Networking Field Day 35

Appearance: Selector AI Presents at Networking Field Day 35

Company: Selector AI

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Personnel: Nitin Kumar

Selector delivers consolidated, actionable alerts through your preferred collaboration platform, such as Slack or Teams. Alerts depend on Selector’s powerful event correlation fueled by advanced AI/ML techniques. Automations can be leveraged to generate service tickets that include detailed summaries, root cause analysis, and even suggested remediations.


Selector AI Demo: Part 2

Event: Networking Field Day 35

Appearance: Selector AI Presents at Networking Field Day 35

Company: Selector AI

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Personnel: John Heintz, Nitin Kumar

In this demo, a user leverages Selector’s Conversational AI, Selector Copilot, to investigate performance within their network infrastructure. The user first probes into the health of tenants located in a specific geographic region. Selector Copilot provides a visualization of the current state and summarization of the overall condition and afflicted tenants, along with probable root cause. The user then interacts with Selector Copilot to explore resource allocation, historical usage, and projected bandwidth. Each visualization provided by Selector Copilot can be copied and pasted onto a dedicated dashboard.


Selector AI and the Workings of an LLM

Event: Networking Field Day 35

Appearance: Selector AI Presents at Networking Field Day 35

Company: Selector AI

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Personnel: Nitin Kumar

An LLM differs from a function in that it takes output and imputes, or infers, a function and its arguments. We first consider how this process works within Selector for an English phrase converted to a query. We then step through the design of Selector’s LLM, which relies on a base LLM trained with English phrases and SQL translation, then fine-tuned, on-premises, with customer-specific entities. In this way, each of Selector’s deployments relies on an LLM tailored to the customer at hand.


Solving the Query Problem with Selector AI

Event: Networking Field Day 35

Appearance: Selector AI Presents at Networking Field Day 35

Company: Selector AI

Video Links:

Personnel: Nitin Kumar

Selector translates English phrases to SQL queries through the use of an LLM. Each SQL query includes the table, or data set to be searched, along with filters, or conditions which prune the search results. We walk through a number of SQL queries and sample search results, before considering the LLM-based translation of a sample English phrase processed by Selector.


Democratization of Data Access Using Network LLMs with Selector AI

Event: Networking Field Day 35

Appearance: Selector AI Presents at Networking Field Day 35

Company: Selector AI

Video Links:

Personnel: Nitin Kumar

In this brief demo of the Selector platform, a user interacts with Selector Copilot to explore behavior within their network infrastructure. They first look into the latency of their transit routers, revealing a regional issue. The user drills down into network topology information to further investigate the latency, where they access details about devices, interfaces, sites, and circuits. Selector Copilot is then leveraged to surface circuit errors. Notably, each visualization provided by Selector Copilot can be copied and pasted onto a dedicated dashboard.


Selector AI Introduction with Debashis Mohanty

Event: Networking Field Day 35

Appearance: Selector AI Presents at Networking Field Day 35

Company: Selector AI

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Personnel: Deba Mohanty

Selector’s customer base includes 50 deployments across service providers as well as large enterprises in retail, media distribution, colocation services, and multi-cloud networking services. These customers aim to correlate events across their network, applications, and infrastructure; eliminate the need for human intervention in RCS and remediation; and democratize access to insights using conversational natural language interfaces. Selector delivers on these outcomes, while accelerating incident remediation through smart, actionable alerting and a GenAI-based conversational interface.


Arrcus Demo: Egress Cost Control (ECC)

Event: Networking Field Day 35

Appearance: Arrcus Presents at Networking Field Day 35

Company: Arrcus

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Personnel: Ashish Swaroop, Sujay Gopinathan

In this section, Arrcus will demonstrate ECC to help reduce Cloud Egress charges, for accessing Al workloads across clouds. They will discuss how the platform can consolidate data and reduce communications to avoid incurring unnecessary charges as well as showcasing integration with cloud platforms to help optimize spending and usage patterns.


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