A Short Report from SHARE in Pittsburgh

Today’s blog post will be a short review of SHARE posted directly from the conference floor in Pittsburgh!

What is SHARE

For those of you who are not aware of SHARE, it is an independent, volunteer run association providing enterprise technology professionals with continuous education and training, valuable professional networking and effective industry influence. SHARE has existed for almost 60 years. It was established in 1955 and is the oldest organization of computing professionals.

The group conducts two conferences every year. Earlier in 2014 the first event was held in Anaheim, and this week (the week of August 3^rd) the second annual event is being held in my original hometown, Pittsburgh, PA. Now I’ve been attending SHARE, more regularly in the past than lately, since the 1990’s. But with the event being held in Pittsburgh I just had to participate!

The keynote (or general) session today started up at 8:00 AM. It was titled “Beyond Silicon: Cognition and Much, Much More”  and it was delivered by Dr. Bernard S.Meyerson, IBM Fellow and VP, Innovation.  Meyerson delighted the crowd with his entertaining and educational session.

Next up was “Enterprise Computing: The Present and the Future”, an entertaining session that focused on what IBM believes are the four biggest driving trends in IT/computing: cloud, analytics, mobile, and social media. And, indeed, these trends are pervasive and interact with one another to create the infrastructure of most modern development efforts. Bryan Foley Program Director, System z Strategy at IBM delivered the presentation and unloaded a number of interesting stats on the audience, including:

• Mainframe is experiencing 31 percent growth
• Mainframes process 30 billion business transactions daily
• The mainframe is the ultimate virtualized system
• System z is the most heavily instrumented platform in the world
• The mainframe is an excellent platform for analytics because that’s where the data is

Clearly, if you are a mainframer, there is a lot to digest… and a lot to celebrate. Perhaps the most interesting tidbit shared by Foley is that “PC is the new legacy!” He backed this up with a stat claiming that mobile Internet users are projected to surpass PC Internet users in 2015. Interesting, no?

Now those of you that know me know that I am a DB2 guy, but I have not yet attended much DB2 stuff. I sat in on an intro to MQ and I’m currently prepping for my presentation this afternoon – “Ten Breakthroughs That Changed DB2 Forever.”

The presentation is based on a series of articles I wrote a couple years ago, but I am continually tweaking it to keep it up to date and relevant. So even if you’ve read the article, if you are at SHARE and a DB2 person, stop by Room 402 at 3:00PM… and if you’re not here, the articles will have to do!

That's all for now... gotta get back to reviewing my presentation... hope to see you at SHARE this week... or, if not, somewhere else out there in DB2-land!