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 3rd) 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!
