The European version of the IBM zUniversity took place in Munich on June 13-17 this year and it was a first time for me and the rest of Insoft-Infotel team to attend such event. In all there were two Planet Mainframe members to attend this event, both having our exhibitor booth right next to each other. Let’s have a look at what went on during those five days.
The aims of zUniversity for its European participants is to sharpen expertise with hundreds of sessions led by IBM product and industry experts, to experience the latest z technology via hands-on labs, and gain new skills levels with demos and workshops. Furthermore, it was an opportunity for us to meet and greet our partners but also to gain new contacts and to exchange information. The audience was composed of IT Executives and business Managers, Data Center specialists, technical support and project managers, hardware- and capacity planners, performance analysts and systems, database and storage admins.
Highlights
The highlights of the agenda were: z –Business analytics, z Systems latest news for Cloud and Mobile, as well as performance and capacity planning, and tuning.
Those topics perfectly matched what our partnership has to offer and we were proud to represent Planet Mainframe alliance at this event by offering our combined experience and expertise through our complete range of solutions. Our products presented for this event answer Business Analytics needs; z-customer needs for cost and capacity planning and SQL quality development needs to enhance zDB2 performance. It turned out that we had more visits from visitors and IBM experts than we did in the previous IDUG events! We received overwhelmingly positive feedback on our solutions from IBM and partners experts, and how our contribution keeps the z/OS interest up.
Another center of interest for us were the IBM’s presentations e.g., on how to set mobile workload in CICS, the latest on workload pricing, user cases, such as the one from Barclays Bank, which gave us useful background information. We believe that we should focus more on this audience, considering the interest we generated.
Summary
In all, was it worth it to attend to such event? Definitively yes. It was a great opportunity for us to network with other IBM partners and contribute to in-depth discussions about the future of z/OS and the mainframe, and it permitted us to discover new products and innovation, giving us a clearer view on how the future of the mainframe market will look like, and how we can contribute to it. It was a very positive experience and we highly recommend this event.