The Next Generation of Mainframers

With seemingly every young person with any technology inclinations aiming to become the next WhatsApp and walk away with some of Facebook’s millions it is fair to wonder: Where is the next generation of mainframers going to come from and who are they going to be?

The answer: IBM is lining them up now. As the mainframe turns 50 you’ll have a chance to meet some of these up and coming mainframers as part of IBM’s 50^th Mainframe Anniversary celebration in New York, April 8, when IBM announces winners of the World Championship round of its popular Master of the Mainframe competition.

According to IBM, the Championship is designed to assemble the best university students from around the globe who have demonstrated superior technical skills through participation in their regional IBM Master the Mainframe Contests. Out of the 20,000 students who have engaged in country-level Master the Mainframe Contests over the last three years, the top 44 students from 22 countries have been invited to participate in the inaugural IBM Master the Mainframe World Championship.

These students will spend the month of March working through the Systems of Engagement concept, an expansion of the traditional Systems of Record—core transaction systems—that have been the primary workload of mainframe computing. The students will deploy Systems of Record mainframe business applications written with Java and COBOL using DB2 for z/OS API’s to demonstrate how the Systems of Engagement concept takes full advantage of the mainframe’s advanced capabilities. In short, the mainframe is designed to support tomorrow’s most demanded complex workloads  Big Data, Cloud, and Mobile computing workloads and do them all with the most effective enterprise-class security. The students will showcase their applications on April 7, 2014 in New York City where judges will determine which student earns the distinction of “Master the Mainframe World Champion.”

Representing the United States are Mugdha Kadam from the University of Florida, Elton Cheng from the University of California San Diego, and Rudolfs Dambis from the University of Nevada Las Vegas. You can follow the progress of the competitors here.  After March 17 the site will include a leaderboard so you can follow your favorites. No rumors of betting pools being formed yet but it wouldn’t surprise DancingDinosaur.  Win or not, each competitor should be a prime candidate if your organization needs mainframe talent.

This is part of IBM’s longstanding System z Academic Initiative, which has been expanding worldwide and now encompasses over 64,000 students at more than 1000 schools across 67 countries.  And now high school students are participating in the Master the Mainframe competition. Over 360 companies are actively recruiting from these students, including Baldor, Dillards, JB Hunt, Wal-mart, Cigna, Compuware, EMC, Fidelity, JP Morgan Chase, and more.

Said Jeff Gill, at VISA: “Discovering IBM’s Academic Initiative has been a critical success factor in building a lifeline to our future—a new base of Systems Engineers and Applications Developers who will continue to evolve our mainframe applications into flexible open enterprise solutions while maintaining high volume / high availability demands. Without the IBM Academic Initiative, perhaps we could have found students with aptitude – but participation in the Academic Initiative demonstrates a student’s interest in mainframe technology which, to us, translates to a wise long-term investment.“ Gill is one of the judges of the Masters the Mainframe World Championship.

Added Martin Kennedy of Citigroup: “IBM’s Master the Mainframe Contest offers a great resource to secure candidates and helps the company get critical skills as quickly as possible.”

The Master of the Mainframe Championship and even the entire 50^th Anniversary celebration that will continue all year are not really IBM’s primary mainframe thrust this year.  IBM’s real focus is on emphasizing the forward-moving direction of the mainframe. As IBM puts in: “By continually adapting to trends and evolving IT, we’re driving new approaches to cloud, analytics, security and mobile computing to help tackle challenges never before thought possible.  The pioneering innovations of the mainframe all serve one mission—deliver game-changing technology that makes the extraordinary possible and improves the way the world works.

DancingDinosaur covers the mainframe and other enterprise-class technology. Watch this blog for more news on the mainframe and other enterprise systems including Power, enterprise storage, and enterprise-scale cloud computing.

With that noted, please plan to attend Edge 2014, May 19-23 in Las Vegas. Being billed as an infrastructure and storage technology conference, it promises to be an excellent follow-on to last year’s Edge conference.  DancingDinosaur will be there, no doubt hanging out in the blogger’s lounge where everyone is welcome. Watch this blog for upcoming details on the most interesting sessions.

And follow DancingDinosaur on Twitter, @mainframeblog

Tags: Big Data, Citigroup, Cloud, COBOL, DB2, Edge 2014, IBM, IBM System z Academic Initiative, Java, mainframe, Master of the Mainframe, mobile, System of Engagement, System of Record, System z, technology, Visa, World Champion Master of the Mainframe, z/OS API's, zEnterprise