If you are attending the SHARE conference this week, we hope you have enjoyed it and that our blog posts have been a little help in finding interesting and relevant sessions. It is hard to believe that we are already discussing the sessions for the last day of the conference, but we hope our selections below will help you finish the week on a high note.
The Thursday sessions I think might be particularly interesting to our readers are as follows:
- Thursday, 07:30, PSP: Leveraging Generative AI as a System Programmer or Developer, by Brenno Fernandes, Sowmya Kameswaran, and Eduardo Rocha. More AI. Am I ready to hand over the keys of my car to AI now? Let me know when AI sets it beady I eye on something a little more challenging than being right most of the time and we can have a chat then. However, I’m married for 40 years now, so I have ample experience with admitting that I am wrong, so I’m very interested to hear about the experiences of these folks from Kyndryl.
- Thursday, 08:45, BYOD Lab: Discover the Value of IBM Z Anomaly Analytics for Improving IT Resiliency, by Yuk Chan and Lin Wang. It seems to me that spotting patterns, and by extension, anomalies, is a strength of AI that should be able to deliver real value to a z/OS environment. A customer recently told me that they had over 40 million lines of syslog for a single day – can you imagine trying to decide what is normal and what is an anomaly when faced with such a huge number of messages? So, I would love to be able to attend this session – unfortunately Mark Wilson and I will be presenting our zRoadshow session at the same time. If you get to attend this lab, I would love to hear your impressions.
- Thursday, 08:45, Planet Mainframe zRoadshow Winter 2025, by Frank Kyne and Mark Wilson. I will have the honor of co-presenting this session with the new editor for Cheryl Watson’s Tuning Letter, Mark Wilson. So, a fresh new face and a slightly different name, but this zRoadshow session will bring you the same reliable selection of interesting customer experiences, New Function and HIPER APARs, hints and tips, and a few little nuggets of vital information that you have come to expect. If you have any experiences that you would like to share with your fellow attendees, let us know – nominations close at 8:43 on Thursday 😉.
- Thursday, 10:00, How z/OS Leverages General Purpose and Assist Processors, and the Realities of COBOL-to-Java Conversion, by Dave Hutton and Roger Bales. Any opportunity to hear Dave present is something that you can’t turn down. Combine Dave’s vast hardware performance knowledge with some insights into application migrations to Java, and this is a can’t-miss session. I’ll see you there.
- Thursday, 10:00, WSC System Programmer Hot Topics 2025 Washington D.C Edition, by Meral Temal. The IBM WSC team have a unique combination of tight connections to IBM’s development labs and exposure to countless customer questions and experiences. If you want to impress your managers and colleagues with a load of useful tips and insights that you picked up at SHARE, this session should be on your must-see list.
- Thursday 11:15, LNL: z Next Preview : A Fast Start to Deployment and Capturing Value From the New Chipset, by Faezeh Gholami. If you would like some insights into what might be coming on the next generation of IBM mainframe, you will want to catch this session. Much has already been written about the new Telum II chip and Spyre card, but it is always nice to hear it in person. You might even pick up a few tidbits to input into your decision about whether to add capacity to your current CPC, or wait to upgrade to the latest and greatest.
- Thursday 12:30, What a z/OS Guy Learned About AWS in 10 Years, by Scott Chapman. We hear so much hype about The Cloud, mostly from people that know nothing about the mainframe, I’m very eager about what an experienced and very level-headed and objective person like Scott will have to say about it. I’m sure he will have positive and negative experiences, but the most important thing is that he can do a fair, knowledge-based, comparison to Z.
- Thursday 13:45, DB2 and WLM: Understanding DB2 Usage and Measurements of Enclaves, by Peter Enrico. As Peter correctly points out in his abstract, enclaves have been around a long time now, but they are still widely misunderstood – I certainly don’t understand them as well as I would like to. In this session, Peter discusses Db2’s use of enclaves, the relationship between Db2 and WLM, and how to extract meaningful information about your Db2 workloads from WLM. This is most likely the fastest-growing part of your z/OS-based workloads, and Peter’s experience and knowledge can help you ensure it is properly managed and provisioned.
- Thursday 15:00, Bit Bucket x’45’, by Ed Jaffe, Luis Julian, and Moises Muratalla. What visit to SHARE would be complete without taking in the legendary Bit Bucket session? As usual, this session closes the conference, and there is no more fitting way to ending your week at SHARE than to attend this session where mainframers share their experiences.
And that wraps up our list of suggestions for this SHARE. We hope you will join us for the next SHARE conference in Cleveland, Ohio, in August. Have a safe trip home, and as always, please let us know if you have any comments or suggestions – we are always looking for ways to deliver more interest to our readers and followers.
Frank and the entire Planet Mainframe team
Frank describes himself as a ‘true Mid-Atlanicer’ — he was born in New York, spent half his life in Ireland, and the other half in the Northeast of the US, resulting in an average of half-way across the Atlantic Ocean.
His first IT job was as an operator in an insurance company in Ireland. Over the subsequent 20 years he became a VM system programmer, then joined IBM Ireland as an MVS system programmer, and then worked in IBM’s fledgling Services organization before moving to IBM’s Redbooks group in Poughkeepsie as a project leader for sysplex Redbooks.