- This event has passed.
Open Mainframe Summit
September 11, 2023 - September 14, 2023
This year, the 4th annual Open Mainframe Summit will be co-located with two industry conferences – IBM TechXchange Conference 2023, hosted in Las Vegas on September 11 at the MGM Grand Hotel; and Open Source in Finance Forum, hosted in New York City on November 1 at the Marriott Marquis.
Open Mainframe Summit – Las Vegas
IBM TechXchange Conference offers technical breakout sessions, hands-on experiences, product demonstrations, instructor-led labs, and certifications tailored to your interests and learning style. Open Mainframe Summit will be featured as part of the TechXchange Community Day on September 11. Community Day unites diverse IBM user groups and technical communities to foster collaboration, networking and learning. Experience engaging on-site programs, connect with like-minded professionals, be inspired by IBM Champions, and contribute to tech-for-good projects. This is a celebration of unity, diversity, and innovation where user groups come together to create lasting connections and drive meaningful change.
To attend Open Mainframe Summit Las Vegas at the MGM Grand Hotel, register for IBM TechXchange. One registration will give attendees access to all the events for Community Day.
Registration costs $1599 but Open Mainframe Summit attendees will receive an exclusive discount until August 30 at 5 PM ET. The discount of $300 USD*, will require you to pre-register. Please submit this form to reserve your discounted pass. When your pre-registration submission has been successfully processed, you will be invited to register for the event.
**Timing and titles of sessions, speakers and room assignments are subject to change as needed. Please see the schedule on-site for the latest updates.
September 11 Schedule:
| 7:00 AM | 8:30 AM | Breakfast | |
| 8:30 AM | 9:30 AM | IBM Keynote | |
| 10:00 AM | 10:10 AM | Keynote: Welcome – John Mertic, Open Mainframe Project Executive Director | |
| 10:10 AM | 10:30 AM | Keynote: Customer success stories using Zowe – Joe Winchester, Senior Technical Staff Member at IBMThis talk will cover the scenarios and use cases where customers are achieving success with The Open Mainframe Project’s Zowe tooling, showcasing examples spanning from DevOps, education, scripting, Db2 automation, custom web dashboards exploiting Zowe SDKs and more. | |
| 10:30 AM | 11:00 AM | Keynote Panel: Diversity in the Mainframe Community – Louisa Seers, Product Manager at IBM; Sudharsana Srinivasan, Advocacy Manager at IBM; Len Santalucia, CTO at Vicom Infinity; and Donna Hudi, CMO at Phoenix Software InternationalCome walk a mile in our shoes. Join a range of female Mainframe practitioners who will share their experiences being professional women in the industry. Hear about not only the highs and lows, but the utterly comical and absurd. This panel will investigate all different perspectives from business problems to more technical discussions. | |
| 11:00 AM | 11:20 AM | Keynote: Illuminating Pathways for Our Future Innovators – Elizabeth Joseph, Global Head, Open Source Program Office for IBM Z & LinuxONE at IBMProjects in The Open Mainframe Project are eligible to participate in the LFX Mentorship Program. The Software Discovery Tool has participated for 3 years, and in that time the project has gained valuable new core contributors and provided opportunities to several students who had not previously been involved with the mainframe community. This talk will briefly summarize the program, but more importantly, will explain why providing an opportunity through a program like this is so important for future innovators in our community and serve as a call to action for more projects to participate. | |
| 11:30 AM | 1:00 PM | Lunch – Open House | |
| Room 1 | Room 2 | ||
| 1:00 PM | 1:20 PM | Easy and Modern – Learn COBOL today! – Sudharsana Srinivasan, Advocacy Manager at IBMThe Open Mainframe Project COBOL Programming Course was built with one purpose – make it easy for learners around the globe to easily learn COBOL. How did we achieve this goal? and 3 yrs later what are the results? Join this Lightning Talk to learn all about COBOL, the course and how you can get started today!
|
Zowe CLI modernizes mainframe development – Gene Johnston, Principal Software Engineer at BroadcomMost mainframe organizations are looking to modernize how they develop and deliver products. They want to leverage the knowledge of new-hires familiar with off-platform tools, and incorporate concepts of continuous integration into their development processes. Zowe CLI and its SDK provide the means to make significant leaps forward on these challenges with a low barrier to entry. Join this session to learn how to get started, to hear the possibilities available to you, and discuss best practices to help you achieve those goals. |
| 1:25 PM | 1:45 PM | Shift Left and Beyond with COBOL Check ! – Joe Winchester, Senior Technical Staff Member at IBMThe Open Mainframe Project COBOL Check allows shift left testing to go all the way up to unit testing of COBOL procedures, making the language development benefit from early checking of code and building of reliable regression test pipelines. This talk will show the technology, its Visual Studio Code integration, and its importance in driving DevOps modernization at mainframe COBOL shops.
|
Demystified: Put Your Web App on the Zowe Desktop in a Flash – UPDATED – Robert Blum, Senior Software Developer at Phoenix Software InternationalAre you a web developer with a great web app? Do you want to deploy it to the Zowe Desktop? Are you new to open source, or to Zowe? The Zowe Application Framework provides a quick solution: Plug your web app into a modified sample iframe app. It’s that simple. It’s possible to stand up your app on the desktop within an hour, then take advantage of features like persistence and app to app communications. The presenter will discuss what he learned, providing you the minimum necessary steps to insert your web app into the sample iframe app, and deploy the result. Included will be tips and tricks demystifying how to communicate with the iframe sandbox where your app lives, how to install and debug, and how to use the iframe zoweZlux API to provide enhanced Zowe interoperability. |
| 1:50 PM | 2:10 PM | Wowee it’s Zowe!!!! 5 years old, what worked, what didn’t work, and what is to be learned. – Tim Willging, Fellow – Z Systems Architecture & Technology at RocketZowe is five years old since its beginnings, this talk will cover the goals of the project as its beginning to help customers make the mainframe open, simple and familiar, as well as bring forward both new and old communities. We’ll look at the metrics, the key milestones, what worked and didn’t work, which components are successful and why, and talk about lessons learned to move forward.
|
Togetherness of Linux Distributions on the Whole Open Source Software Development Life Cycle – Sarah Julia Kriesch, Senior Consultant at Accenture & Elizabeth Joseph, Global Head, Open Source Program Office for IBM Z & LinuxONE at IBMAre Linux distributions really collaborating in development? They sure are! Our Linux Distributions Working Group at the Open Mainframe Project is a great example of collaboration on Linux projects together by sharing common issues and bugs, along with recommendations on how to tackle specific pain points. In this session, you will receive an overview about the latest efforts to collaborate in development, testing and maintenance from over a half dozen Linux distributions that regularly participate. This is including upstream projects and the required infrastructure for development, from the implementation of openQA tests by several distributions to the LinuxONE (OSS) Community Cloud. |
| 2:15 PM | 2:35 PM | Feilong: the open source API for z/VM automation – Mike Friesenegger, Solutions Architect at SUSEFeilong is an Open Mainframe project. Come learn about the project as well as be introduced to the technical components. A demonstration will show the API in action driving z/VM functionality.
|
Productionizing z/OS Open Tools for Sysprogs and Developers – Steven Perva, Senior Mainframe Innovation Engineer at EnsonoOpen Source Tooling is gaining ground in z/OS environments. A critical component to adoption of Open Source in enterprise environments is laying a foundation for making tooling available, maintainable, and accessible. Learn my strategy for productionizing the z/OS Open Tools on our internal production systems! |
| 2:40 PM | 3:00 PM | Galasa 101 – Louisa Seers, Product Manager at IBMDiscover Galasa—an open-source test framework that ensures the integrity of your applications. With Galasa, you can confidently verify that the latest maintenance hasn’t caused issues and that recent changes haven’t affected existing functionality. Seamlessly align the delivery of your hybrid Z applications with your enterprise’s code delivery process. Join for an informative presentation on Galasa’s powerful features and cost-effective benefits.
|
Hybrid Orchestration with IBM Z – Dong Ma, Software Engineer at IBM, Cheng Cheng Dong, & Hao Jue WangThere are multiple workloads running on x86, Power or Z, and even for Z workloads there are multiple technical implementations like z/VM, KVM, PR/SM(Processor Resource/System Manager) or even zCX (z/OS container extension) or event native z/OS. Challenges comes when you have to manage all those workload all together, especially those core systems are building across different technical stacks, how to unify and simplify the management for all those different infrastructure stacks, specifically some of those workloads(like z/OS workload and zCX workload) can decrease network latency and therefore, improve IO performance while running under certain co-location rules. With this talk we will present how to manage different hypervisor resources like z/VM guest, KVM guest or zCX (z/OS container extension) guest so that all those infrastructure can be integrated with cloud management tools to provision and orchestrate along with the cloud workloads |
| 3:05 PM | 3:25 PM | Accelerate Your Mainframe Modernization using Zowe-Conformant REST APIs – Elliot Jalley, Product Manager at BroadcomMainframe modernization is being driven by a number of factors, not least the requirement to move fast while retaining the absolute focus on security. Embracing open-first technology is key. Opening the platform to ensure the mainframe remains vibrant into the future. This session focuses on the growing number of mainframe infrastructure REST APIs that provide standardized, programmatic access to mainframe resources. Join me to learn how Zowe-conformant APIs play a vital role in a risk-managed, in-place modernization strategy that leads to faster delivery, higher quality and increased efficiency, all without compromising on security and compliance. | Positioning legacy ISPF tools for tomorrow – Michael Fontanetta, Distinguished Technologist, Senior Director zSystems Product Innovation Engineering at EnsonoAs we hand over the reins of z/OS environments to the next generation, a wealth of tools exists in ISPF that could prove useful to the tasks of tomorrow. We’ll explore how to transition ISPF panel-driven applications to consumable APIs that will fit into tomorrow’s paradigms and be ready for consumption by next-gen interfaces like z/OSMF and Zowe.
|
| 3:30 PM | 3:50 PM | Deploying Zowe CLI configuration throughout your organization – Gene Johnston, Principal Software Engineer at BroadcomMost companies try new technology, like Zowe CLI, in a pilot program. Once you are convinced of the value of Zowe CLI, you are challenged with deploying that technology throughout your organization. In this session you will hear how Zowe CLI team configuration was designed to improve sharing your configuration with everyone on your team. We will identify different approaches that are available to address different deployment situations. We will describe techniques for creating the most flexible and effective configurations. We will discuss best practices. And, we will show useful techniques to diagnose problems that you may inadvertently place into your configuration. | The z/OS Open Tools Initiative – Mike Fulton, Distinguished Engineer, IBM Z Application Foundation at IBMIn this session, we will discuss open-source tooling on z/OS, with focus on the z/OS Open Tools initiative and how it can help organizations to improve their efficiency, security, and innovation. We will provide examples of tools such as Git, Bash, GNU Make, Vim, CMake, Ninja, JQ and Curl that are available under z/OS Open Tools and how they can be integrated into existing workloads. We will also cover the z/OS Open Tools porting process and how you can get involved. For more information on z/OS Open Tools, see https://zosopentools.github.io/meta/.
|
| 3:55 PM | 4:15 PM | Mapping the Face of the Modern Mainframe Workforce: Roles, Skills and Resources – John Lovett, Head of Education and Customer Engagement, Mainframe Division at Broadcom & Paul Newton, Consulting IT Specialist at IBMWhat roles are out there right now for Mainframe professionals? What skills are needed for those roles and what resources are available to develop them? If you think you know the answers you may be surprised at how much the Mainframe workforce has evolved. Mainframe modernization and the accompanying call for agile business strategies have changed the face of traditional job roles. Share your own insights by joining Mainframe Open Education project leaders JJ Lovett and Paul Newton for an interactive discussion of these topics.
|
Synchronzing Mainframe Data with Zowe – Diego Rodriguez Bravo, Client Services Consultant at BroadcomUse case where a simple script embeding Zowe commands, enables PDS member synchronization between isolated environments and keep version control in a Git repository. Main applicability for source code deployment.
|
| 4:20 PM | 4:40 PM | IBM Z Advocacy – As easy as 1-2-3! – Sudharsana Srinivasan – Advocacy Manager at IBMDid you know that you have likely been advocating for the mainframe without even realizing it? When you are mentoring others, speaking at events, and creating content – that is Advocacy. It is all about sharing – a journey that helps you find your authentic voice, build your eminence, and grow your career. Have you ever wondered how to get started on your advocacy journey? Attend this session to learn how you can get started today – it’s as easy as 1-2-Z
|
ZEN – A New Era of Zowe Installation – Jan Prihoda, Product Owner at BroadcomZowe has already established its presence on mainframes. However, its installation and configuration can still be challenging. ZEN aims to facilitate the adoption of Zowe through a wizard-driven installation guide. Features such as variable value validation, real-time validation, assistance with certificate management, and configuration file schema validation are just a few of the capabilities offered by ZEN. And all of this from the comfort of your desktop! Come and see for yourself what ZEN can do for you! |
| 4:45 PM | 5:05 PM | The Art of Implementing Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform on an Air-gapped IBM zSystem – Vincent Terrone, Enterprise Architect at Vicom Infinity, & Len Santalucia, CTO at Vicom InfinityThere are clients that desire to implement Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform (OCP) on their IBM zSystems that are isolated from the internet for security reasons. However, this isolation poses a challenge since OCP normally requires a live internet connection during its installation. We will discuss how to overcome this challenge and how to continue to support such isolated air-gapped OCP environments. This is a session from which everyone will learn and benefit. | Software management automation using Zowe and Ansible – Jan Prihoda, Product Owner at BroadcomIf you manage more than two LPARs, you surely know that keeping all the software updated on all systems can be very demanding. Backup/recovery, HOLDDATA resolution, and different task levels/roles – all of these introduce complexity and the possibility of errors. And now, imagine that with the help of open-source tools like Zowe and Ansible, it is possible to not only eliminate but at least greatly simplify all these challenges. Want to know more? Come and see for yourself!
|
| 5:10 PM | 5:30 PM | Top Five Open Source Mainframe Powerups! – Joe Winchester, Senior Technical Staff Member at IBMIn this talk, I’ll show my favourite free open source tools that every mainframer should be using, if they aren’t already. With short demos and instructions we’ll look at ports of Bash and VIM, the amazing Zigi 3270 emulator, and other open source tools. This will be the best 20 minute open source presentation you’ll be glad you attended to learn new things you didn’t know before and change how you work with the mainframe going forward. | Zowe – Beyond the Typical Use Cases – Jan Prihoda, Product Owner at BroadcomZowe is often leveraged for popular use cases, including creating CI-CD pipelines to achieve mainframe DevOps, offering mainframe Developers & Administrators extensions for their VS Code workspace, and creating modern UIs for operational tasks. It can also be leveraged for innovations. In this session, we’ll share how we’ve used Zowe’s capabilities in various ways and in general, why we view Zowe as an enabler for innovations.
|
Registration costs $1599 but Open Mainframe Summit attendees will receive an exclusive discount until August 30 at 5 PM ET. The discount of $300 USD*, will require you to pre-register. Please submit this form to reserve your discounted pass. When your pre-registration submission has been successfully processed, you will be invited to register for the event. For questions about Open Mainframe Summit, email info@openmainframeproject.org.
