IBM Joins with Harley-Davidson for LiveWire

I should have written this piece 40 years ago as a young man fresh out of grad school. Then I was dying for a 1200cc Harley Davidson motorcycle. My mother was dead set against it—she wouldn’t even allow me to play tackle football and has since been vindicated (You win on that, mom.). My father, too, was opposed and wouldn’t help pay for it. I had to settle for a puny little motor scooter that offered zero excitement.

In the decades since I graduated, Harley’s fortunes have plummeted as the HOG (Harley Owners Group) community aged out and few youngsters have picked up the slack. The 1200cc bike I once lusted after probably is now too heavy for me to handle. So, what is Harley to do? Redefine its classic American brand with an electric model, LiveWire.

Courtesy: Harley Davidson, IBM

With LiveWire, Harley expects to remake the motorcycle as a cloud-connected machine and promises to deliver new products for fresh motorcycle segments, broaden engagement with the brand, and strengthen the H-D dealer network. It also boldly proclaimed that Harley-Davidson will lead the electrification of motorcycling.

According to the company, Harley’s LiveWire will leverage H-D Connect, a service (available in select markets), built on thIBM AI, analytics, and IoTe IBM Cloud. This will enable it to deliver new mobility and concierge services today and leverage an expanding use of IBM AI, analytics, and IoT to enhance and evolve the rider’s experience. In order to capture this next generation of bikers, Harley is working with IBM to transform the everyday experience of riding through the latest technologies and features IBM can deliver via the cloud.

Would DancingDinosaur, an aging Harley enthusiast, plunk down the thousands it would take to buy one of these? Since I rarely use my smartphone to do anything more than check email and news, I am probably not a likely prospect for LiveWire.

Will LiveWire save Harley? Maybe; it depends on what the promised services will actually deliver. Already, I can access a wide variety of services through my car but, other than Waze, I rarely use any of those.

According to the joint IBM-Harley announcement, a fully cellular-connected electric motorcycle needed a partner that could deliver mobility solutions that would meet riders’ changing expectations, as well as enhance security. With IBM, Harley hopes to strike a balance between using data to create both intelligent and personal experiences while maintaining privacy and security, said Marc McAllister, Harley-Davidson VP Product Planning and Portfolio in the announcement.

So, based on this description, are you ready to jump to LiveWire? You probably need more details. So far, IBM and Harley have identified only three:

1. Powering The Ride: LiveWire riders will be able to check bike vitals at any time and from any location. Information available includes features such as range, battery health, and charge level. Motorcycle status features will also support the needs of the electric bike, such as the location of charging stations. Also riders can see their motorcycle’s current map location.  Identifying charging stations could be useful.
2. Powering Security: An alert will be sent to the owner’s phone if the motorcycle has been bumped, tampered, or moved. GPS-enabled stolen-vehicle assistance will provide peace of mind that the motorcycle’s location can be tracked. (Requires law enforcement assistance. Available in select markets).
3. Powering Convenience: Reminders about upcoming motorcycle service requirements and other care notifications will be provided. In addition, riders will receive automated service reminders as well as safety or recall notifications.

“The next generation of Harley-Davidson riders will demand a more engaged and personalized customer experience,” said Venkatesh Iyer, Vice President, North America IoT and Connected Solutions, Global Business Services, IBM. Introducing enhanced capabilities, he continues, via the IBM Cloud will not only enable new services immediately, but will also provide a roadmap for the journey ahead. (Huh?)

As much as DancingDinosaur aches for Harley to come roaring back with a story that will win the hearts of the HOG users who haven’t already drifted away Harley will need more than the usual buzzwords, trivial apps, and cloud hype.

DancingDinosaur is Alan Radding, a veteran information technology analyst, writer, and ghost-writer. Follow DancingDinosaur on Twitter, @mainframeblog, and see more of his work at technologywriter.com.

12 Ingredients for App Modernization

It is no surprise that IBM has become so enamored with the hybrid cloud. The worldwide public cloud services market is projected to grow 21.4 percent in 2018 to total $186.4 billion, up from $153.5 billion in 2017, according to Gartner.

The fastest-growing segment of the market is cloud system infrastructure services (IaaS), which is forecast to grow 35.9 percent in 2018 to reach $40.8 billion. Gartner expects the top 10 providers, often referred to as hyperscalers, to account for nearly 70 percent of the IaaS market by 2021, up from 50 percent in 2016.

Cloud computing is poised to become a “turbocharged engine powering digital transformation around the world,” states a recent Forrester report, Predictions 2019: Cloud Computing. Overall, the global cloud computing market, including cloud platforms, business services, and SaaS, will exceed $200 billion this year, expanding at more than 20%, the research firm predicts

Venkats’ recipe for app modernization; courtesy of IBM

Hybrid clouds, which include two or more cloud providers or platforms, are emerging as the preferred approach for enterprises.  Notes IBM: The digital economy is forcing organizations to a multi-cloud environment. Three of every four enterprises have already implemented more than one cloud. The growth of cloud portfolios in enterprises demands an agnostic cloud management platform — one that not only provides automation, provisioning and orchestration, but also monitors trends and usage to prevent outages. No surprise here; IBM just happens to offer hybrid cloud management.

By the start of 2019, the top seven cloud providers are AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, IBM Cloud, VMWare Cloud on AWS, Oracle Cloud, and Alibaba Cloud. These top players have been shifting positions around in 2018 and expect more shifting to continue this year and probably for years to come.

Clients, notes Venkat, are discovering that the real value of Cloud comes in a hybrid, multi-cloud world. In this model, legacy applications are modernized with a real microservices architecture and with AI embedded in the application. He does not fully explain where the AI comes from and how it is embedded. Maybe I missed something.

Driving this interest for the next couple of years, at least, is interest in application modernization. Companies are discovering that the real value comes through a hybrid multicloud. Here legacy applications are modernized through a real microservices architecture enhanced with AI embedded in the application, says Meenagi Venkat, Vice President of Technical Sales & Solutioning, at IBM Cloud. Venkat wrote what he calls a 12-ingredient recipe for application modernization here. Dancing Dinosaur will highlight a couple of the ingredients below. Click the proceeding link to see them all.

To begin, when you modernize a large portfolio of several thousand applications in a large enterprise, you need some common approaches. At the same time, the effort must allow teams to evolve to a microservices-based organization where each microservice is designed and delivered with great independence.

Start by fostering a startup culture. Fostering a startup culture that allows for fast failure is one of the most critical ingredients when approaching a large modernization program. The modernization will involve sunsetting some applications, breaking some down, and using partner services in others. A startup culture based on methods such as IBM Garage Method and Design Thinking will help bring the how-to of the culture shift.

Then, innovate via product design Venkat continues. A team heavy with developers and no product folks is likely to focus on the technical coolness rather than product innovation. Hence, these teams should be led by the product specialists who deliver the business case for new services or client experience

And don’t neglect security. Secure DevOps will require embedding security skills in the scrum teams with a product owner leading the team. The focus on the product and on designing security (and compliance) to various regimes at the start will allow the scaling of microservices and engender trust in the data and AI layers. Venkat put this after design and the startup culture. In truth, this should be a key part of the startup culture.

DancingDinosaur is Alan Radding, a veteran information technology analyst, writer, and ghost-writer. Follow DancingDinosaur on Twitter, @mainframeblog, and see more of his work at technologywriter.com.

Factsheets for AI

Depending on when you check in on the IBM website the primary technology trend for 2019 is quantum computing or hybrid clouds or blockchain, or artificial intelligence or any of a handful of others. Maybe IBM does have enough talented people, resources, and time to do it all well now. But somehow DancingDinosuar is dubious.

There is an old tech industry saying: you can have it right, fast, cheap—pick 2. When it comes to AI depending on your choices or patience you could win an attractive share of the projected $83 billion AI industry by 2021 or a share of the estimated $200 billion AI market by 2025, according to venturebeat.

IBM sees the technology industry at a pivotal moment in the path to mass adoption of artificial intelligence (AI). Google subsidiary DeepMind is leveraging AI to determine how to refer optometry patients. Haven Life is using AI to extend life insurance policies to people who wouldn’t traditionally be eligible, such as people with chronic illnesses and non-U.S. citizens. And Google self-driving car spinoff Waymo is tapping it to provide mobility to elderly and disabled people.

But despite the good AI is clearly capable of doing, doubts abound over its safety, transparency, and bias. IBM believes part of the problem is a lack of standard practices.

As a result, there’s no consistent, agreed-upon way AI services should be created, tested, trained, deployed, and evaluated, observes Aleksandra Mojsilovic, head of AI foundations at IBM Research and co-director of the AI Science for Social Good program. To clear up the ambiguity surrounding AI, Mojsilovic and colleagues propose voluntary factsheets or as more formally called Supplier’s Declaration of Conformity (DoC). The goal: increasing the transparency of particular AI services and engendering trust in them.

Such factsheets alone could enable a competitive advantage to AI offers in the marketplace. Such factsheets could provide explain-ability around susceptibility to adversarial attacks—issues that must be addressed in order for AI services to be trusted along with fairness and robustness, Mojsilovic continued. Factsheets take away the black box perception of AI and render the AI system understandable by both researchers and developers.

Several core pillars form the basis for trust in AI systems: fairness, robustness, and explain-ability, the first 3 pillars.  Late in her piece, Mojsilovic introduces a fourth pillar — lineage — which concerns AI systems’ history. Factsheets would answer questions ranging from system operation and training data to underlying algorithms, test setups and results, performance benchmarks, fairness and robustness checks, intended uses, maintenance, and retraining. More granular topics might include governance strategies used to track the AI service’s data workflow, the methodologies used in testing, and bias mitigations performed on the dataset. But in Mojsilovic’s view, documents detailing the ins and outs of systems would go a long way to maintaining the public’s faith in AI.

For natural language processing algorithms specifically, the researchers propose data statements that would show how an algorithm might be generalized, how it might be deployed, and what biases it might contain.

Natural language processing systems aren’t as fraught with controversy as, say, facial recognition, but they’ve come under fire for their susceptibility to bias.  IBM, Microsoft, Accenture, Facebook, and others are actively working on automated tools that detect and minimize bias, and companies like Speechmatics and Nuance have developed solutions specifically aimed at minimizing the so-called accent gap — the tendency of voice recognition models to skew toward speakers from certain regions. But in Mojsilovic’s view, documents detailing the ins and outs of systems—factsheets–would go a long way to restoring the public’s faith in AI.

Fairness, safety, reliability, explain-ability, robustness, accountability — all agree that they are critical. Yet, to achieve trust in AI, making progress on these issues alone will not be enough; it must be accompanied with the ability to measure and communicate the performance levels of a system on each of these dimensions, she wrote. Understanding and evaluating AI systems is an issue of utmost importance for the AI community, an issue IBM believes the industry, academia, and AI practitioners should be working on together.

DancingDinosaur is Alan Radding, a veteran information technology analyst, writer, and ghost-writer. Follow DancingDinosaur on Twitter, @mainframeblog, and see more of his work at technologywriter.com.

IBM’s Multicloud Manager for 2nd Gen Hybrid Clouds

A sign that IBM is serious about hybrid cloud is its mid-October announcement of its new Multicloud Manager, which promises an operations console for companies as they increasingly incorporate public and private cloud capabilities with existing on-premises business systems. Meanwhile, research from Ovum suggests that 80 percent of mission-critical workloads and sensitive data are still running on business systems located on-premises.

$1 Trillion or more hybrid cloud market by 2020

Still, the potential of the hybrid cloud market is huge, $1 trillion or more within just a few years IBM projects. If IBM found itself crowded out by the big hyperscalers—AWS, Google, Microsoft—in the initial rush to the cloud, it is hoping to leapfrog into the top ranks with the next generation of cloud, hybrid clouds.

And this exactly what Red Hat and IBM hope to gain together.  Both believe they will be well positioned to accelerate hybrid multi-cloud adoption by tapping each company’s leadership in Linux, containers, Kubernetes, multi-cloud management, and automation as well as leveraging IBM’s core of large enterprise customers by bringing them into the hybrid cloud.

The result should be a mixture of on premises, off prem, and hybrid clouds. It also promises to be based on open standards, flexible modern security, and solid hybrid management across anything.

The company’s new Multicloud Manager runs on its IBM Cloud Private platform, which is based on Kubernetes container orchestration technology, described as an open-source approach for ‘wrapping’ apps in containers, and thereby making them easier and cheaper to manage across different cloud environments – from on-premises systems to the public cloud. With Multicloud Manager, IBM is extending those capabilities to interconnect various clouds, even from different providers, creating unified systems designed for increased consistency, automation, and predictability. At the heart of the new solution is a first-of-a-kind dashboard interface for effectively managing thousands of Kubernetes applications and spanning huge volumes of data regardless of where in the organization they are located.

Adds Arvind Krishna, Senior Vice President, IBM Hybrid Cloud: “With its open source approach to managing data and apps across multiple clouds” an enterprise can move beyond the productivity economics of renting computing power to fully leveraging the cloud to invent new business processes and enter new markets.

This new solution should become a driver for modernizing businesses. As IBM explains: if a car rental company uses one cloud for its AI services, another for its bookings system, and continues to run its financial processes using on-premises computers at offices around the world, IBM Multicloud Manager can span the company’s multiple computing infrastructures enabling customers to book a car more easily and faster by using the company’s mobile app.

Notes IDC’s Stephen Elliot, Program Vice President:  “The old idea that everything would move to the public cloud never happened.” Instead, you need multicloud capabilities that reduce the risks and deliver more automation throughout these cloud journeys.

Just last month IBM announced a number of companies are starting down the hybrid cloud path by adopting IBM Cloud Private. These include:

New Zealand Police, NZP, is exploring how IBM Cloud Private and Kubernetes containers can help to modernize its existing systems as well as quickly launch new services.

Aflac Insurance is adopting IBM Cloud Private to enhance the efficiency of its operations and speed up the development of new products and services.

Kredi Kayıt Bürosu (KKB) provides the national cloud infrastructure for Turkey’s finance industry. Using IBM Cloud Private KKB expects to drive innovation across its financial services ecosystem.

Operating in a multi-cloud environment is becoming the new reality to most organizations while vendors rush to sell multi-cloud tools. Not just IBM’s Multicloud Manager but HPE OneSphere, Right Scale Multi-Cloud platform, Data Dog Cloud Monitoring, Ormuco Stack, and more.

DancingDinosaur is Alan Radding, a veteran information technology analyst, writer, and ghost-writer. Follow DancingDinosaur on Twitter, @mainframeblog, and see more of his work at technologywriter.com.

GAO Blames Z for Government Inefficiency

Check out the GAO report from May 2016 here.  The Feds spent more than 75 percent of the total amount budgeted for information technology (IT) for fiscal year 2015 on operations and maintenance (O&M). In a related report, the IRS reported it used assembly language code and COBOL, both developed in the 1950s, for IMF and IDRS. Unfortunately, the GAO conflates the word “mainframe” to refer to outdated UNISYS mainframes with the modern, supported, and actively developed IBM Z mainframes, notes Ross Mauri, IBM general manager, Z systems.

Mainframes-mobile in the cloud courtesy of Compuware

The GAO repeatedly used “mainframe” to refer to outdated UNISYS mainframes alongside the latest advanced IBM Z mainframes.  COBOL, too, maintains active skills and training programs at many institutions and receives investment across many industries. In addition to COBOL, the IBM z14 also runs Java, Swift, Go, Python and other open languages to enable modern application enhancement and development. Does the GAO know that?

The GAO uses the word “mainframe” to refer to outdated UNISYS mainframes as well as modern, supported, and actively developed IBM Z mainframes. In a recent report, the GAO recommends moving to supported modern hardware. IBM agrees. The Z, however, does not expose mainframe investments to a rise in procurement and operating costs, nor to skilled staff issues, Mauri continued.

Three investments the GAO reviewed in the operations and maintenance clearly appear as legacy investments facing significant risks due to their reliance on obsolete programming languages, outdated hardware, and a shortage of staff with critical skills. For example, IRS reported that it used assembly language code and COBOL (both developed in the 1950s) for IMF and IDRS. What are these bureaucrats smoking?

The GAO also seems confused over the Z and the cloud. IBM Cloud Private is designed to run on Linux-based Z systems to take full advantage of the cloud through open containers while retaining the inherent benefits of Z hardware—security, availability,  scalability, reliability; all the ities enterprises have long relied on the z for. The GAO seems unaware that the Z’s automatic pervasive encryption immediately encrypts everything at rest or in transit. Furthermore, the GAO routinely addresses COBOL as a deficiency while ISVs and other signatories of the Open Letter consider it a modern, optimized, and actively supported programming language.

The GAO apparently isn’t even aware of IBM Cloud Private. IBM Cloud Private is compatible with leading IT systems manufacturers and has been optimized for IBM Z. All that you need to get started with the cloud is the starter kit available for IBM OpenPOWER LC (Linux) servers, enterprise Power Systems, and Hyperconverged Systems powered by Nutanix. You don’t even need a Z; just buy a low cost OpenPOWER LC (Linux) server online and configure it as desired.

Here is part of the letter that Compuware sent to the GAO, Federal CIOs, and members of Congress. It’s endorsed by several dozen members of the IT industry. The full letter is here:

In light of a June 2018 GAO report to the Internal Revenue Service suggesting the agency’s mainframe- and COBOL-based systems present significant risks to tax processing, we the mainframe IT community—developers, scholars, influencers and inventors—urge the IRS and other federal agencies to:

• Reinvest in and modernize the mainframe platform and the mission-critical applications which many have long relied upon.
• Prudently consider the financial risks and opportunity costs associated with rewriting and replacing proven, highly dependable mainframe applications, for which no “off-the-shelf” replacement exists.
• Understand the security and performance requirements of these mainframe applications and data and the risk of migrating to platforms that were never designed to meet such requirements.

The Compuware letter goes on to state: In 2018, the mainframe is still the world’s most reliable, performant and securable platform, providing the lowest cost high-transaction system of record. Regarding COBOL it notes that since 2017 IBM z14 supports COBOL V6.2, which is optimized bi-monthly.

Finally, about attracting new COBOL workers: COBOL is as easy to work with it as any other language. In fact, open source Zowe has demonstrated appeal to young techies, providing solutions for development and operations teams to securely manage, control, script, and develop on the mainframe like any other cloud platform. What don’t they get?

DancingDinosaur is Alan Radding, a veteran information technology analyst, writer, and ghost-writer. Follow DancingDinosaur on Twitter, @mainframeblog, and see more of his work at technologywriter.com.

Z Acceptance Grows in BMC 2018 Survey

Did Zowe, introduced publicly just a few weeks ago, arrive in the nick of time, like the cavalry rescuing the mainframe from an aging workforce? In the latest BMC annual mainframe survey released in mid September, 95% of millennials are positive about the mainframe’s long-term prospects for supporting new and legacy applications. And 63% of respondents were under the age of 50, up ten points from the previous year.

The mainframe veterans, those with 30 or even 40 years of experience, are finally moving out. DancingDinosaur itself has been writing about the mainframe for about 35 years. With two recently married daughters even a hint of a grandchild on the way will be the signal for me to stop. In the meantime, read on.

Quite interesting from the BMC survey was the very high measures among executives believing in the long-term viability of the mainframe. More interesting to DancingDinosaur, however, was the interest in and willingness to use new mainframe technology like Linux and Java, which are not exactly new arrivals to the mainframe world; as we know, change takes time.

For example 28% of respondents cited as a strength the availability of new technology on the mainframe and their high level of confidence in that new technology. And this was before word about Zowe and what it could do to expand mainframe development got out. A little over a quarter of the respondents also cited using legacy apps to create new apps. Organizations are finally waking up to leveraging mainframe assets.

Also interesting was that both executives and technical staff cite application modernization among the top priorities. No complaints there. Similarly, BMC notes executive perception of the mainframe as a long-term solution is the highest in three years, a six point increase over 2016! While cost still remains a concern, BMC continues, the relative merits of the Z outweigh the costs and this perception continues to shift positively year after year.

The mainframe regularly has been slammed over the years as too costly. Yet. IBM has steadily lowered the cost of the mainframe in term of price performance. Now IBM is talking about applying AI to boost the efficiency, management, and operation of the mainframe data center.

The past May Gartner published a report confirming the value gains of the latest z14 and LinuxONE machines: The z14 ZR1 delivers an approximately 13% total capacity improvement over the z13’s maximum capacity for traditional z/OS environments. This is due to an estimated 10% boost in processor performance, as well as system design enhancements that improve the multiprocessor ratio. In the same report Gartner recommends including IBM’s LinuxONE Rockhopper II in RFPs for highly scalable, highly secure, Linux-based server solutions.

Several broad trends are coming together to feed the growing positive feelings the mainframe has experienced in recent years as revealed in the latest survey responses. “Absolute security and 24×7 availability have never been more important than now,” observes BMC’s John McKenny, VP of Strategy for ZSolutions Optimization. Here the Z itself plays a big part with pervasive encryption and secure containers.

Other trends, particularly digitization and mobility are “placing incredible pressure on both IT and mainframes to manage a greater volume, variety, and velocity of transactions and data, with workloads becoming more volatile and unpredictable,” said Bill Miller, president of ZSolutions at BMC. The latest BMC mainframe survey confirms executive and IT concerns in that area and the mainframe as an increasingly preferred response.

Bottom line: expect the mainframe to hang around for another decade or two at least. Long before then, DancingDinosaur will be a dithering grandfather playing with grandchildren and unable to get myself off the floor.

DancingDinosaur is Alan Radding, a veteran information technology analyst, writer, and ghost-writer. Follow DancingDinosaur on Twitter, @mainframeblog. See more of his work at technologywriter.com.

Attract Young Techies to the Z

A decade ago DancingDinosaur was at a major IBM mainframe event and looked around at the analysts milling about and noticed all the gray hair and balding heads and very few women, and, worse, few appeared to be under 40, not exactly a crowd that would excite young male computer geeks. At the IBM introduction of the Z it had become even worse; more gray or balding heads, mine included, and none of the few Z professional female analysts that I knew under 40 were there at all.

millions of young eager to join the workforce (Image by © Reuters/CORBIS)

An IBM analyst relations person agreed, noting that she was under pressure from IBM to get some young techies at Z events.  Sounded like Mission Impossible to me. But my thinking has changed in the last couple of weeks. A couple of discussions with 20-something techies suggested that Zowe has the potential to be a game changer as far as young techies are concerned.

DancingDinosaur covered Zowe two weeks ago here. It represents the first open source framework for z/OS. As such it provides solutions for development and operations teams to securely manage, control, script, and develop on the mainframe like any other cloud platform.

Or, to put it another way, with Zowe IBM and partners CA Technologies and Rocket Software are enabling users to access z/OS using a new open-source framework. Zowe, more than anything before, brings together generations of systems that were not designed to handle global networks of sensors and devices. Now, decades since IBM brought Linux to the mainframe IBM, CA, and Rocket Software are introducing Zowe, as a new open-source software framework that bridges the divide between modern challenges like IoT and the mainframe.

Says Sean Grady, a young (under 30) software engineer at Rocket Software: Zowe to me is really cool, the first time I could have a sustained mainframe conversation with my peers. Their first reactions were really cynical, he recalls. Zowe changed that. “My peers know Linux tools really well,” he notes.

The mainframe is perceived as separate thing, something my peers couldn’t touch, he added. But Linux is something his peers know really well so through Zowe it has tools they know and like. Suddenly, the mainframe is no longer a separate, alien world but a familiar place. They can do the kind of work they like to do, in a way they like to do it by using familiar tools.

And they are well paid, much better than they can get coding here-and-gone mobile apps for some startup. Grady reports his starting offers ran up to $85k, not bad for a guy just out of college. And with a few years of experience now you can bet he’s doing a lot better than that.

The point of Zowe is to enable any developer, but especially new developers who don’t know or care about the mainframe, to manage, control, script, and develop on the mainframe like any other cloud platform. Additionally, Zowe allows teams to use the same familiar, industry-standard, open-source tools they already know to access mainframe resources and services.

The mainframe is older than many of the programmers IBM hopes Zowe will attract. But it opens new possibilities for next generation applications for mainframe shops desperately needing new mission-critical applications for which customers are clamoring. Already it appears ready to radically reduce the learning curve for the next generation.

Initial open source Zowe modules will include an extensible z/OS framework that provides new APIs and z/OS REST services to transform enterprise tools and DevOps processes that can incorporate new technology, languages, and workflows. It also will include a unifying workspace providing a browser-based desktop app container that can host both traditional and modern user experiences and is extensible via the latest web toolkits. The framework will also incorporate an interactive and scriptable command-line interface that enables new ways to integrate z/OS in cloud and distributed environments.

These modules represent just the start. More will be developed over time, enabling development teams to manage and develop on the mainframe like any other cloud platform. Additionally, the modules reduce risk and cost by allowing teams to use familiar, industry-standard, open source tools that can accelerate mainframe integration into their enterprise DevOps initiatives. Just use Zowe to entice new mainframe talent.

DancingDinosaur is Alan Radding, a veteran information technology analyst, writer, and ghost-writer. Follow DancingDinosaur on Twitter, @mainframeblog. See more of his work at technologywriter.com.

Can Zowe Bring Young Developers to the Z

Are you ever frustrated by the Z? As powerful as it gets mainframes remain a difficult nut to crack, particularly for newcomers who have grown up with easier technologies. Even Linux on Z is not as simple or straightforward as on other platforms. This poses a problem for Z-based shops that are scrambling to replace retiring mainframers.

IBM – Jon Simon/Feature Photo Service

Shopping via smartphone

Certainly other organizations, mainly mainframe ISVs like Compuware and Syncsort, have succeeded in extending the GUI deeper into the Z but that alone is not enough. It remains too difficult for newcomers to take their newly acquired computer talents and readily apply them to the mainframe. Maybe Zowe can change this.

And here’s how:  Recent surveys show that flexibility, agility and speed are key.  Single platforms are out, multi-platforms, and multi-clouds are in. IBM’s reply: let’s bring things together with the announcement of Zowe, pronounced like joey starting with a z. Zowe represents the first open source framework for z/OS. As such it provides solutions for development and operations teams to securely manage, control, script, and develop on the mainframe like any other cloud platform. Launched with partners CA Technologies and Rocket Software along with the support of the Open Mainframe Project, the goal is to drive innovation for the community of next-generation mainframe developers and enable interoperability and scalability between products. Zowe promotes a faster team on-ramp to mainframe productivity, collaboration, knowledge sharing, and communication.

In short, IBM and partners are enabling users to access z/OS using a new open-source framework. Zowe, more than anything before, brings together generations of systems that were not designed to handle global networks of sensors and devices. Now, decades since IBM brought Linux to the mainframe IBM, CA, and Rocket Software are introducing Zowe, a new open-source software framework that bridges the divide between modern challenges like IoT and the mainframe.

Zowe has four components:

1. Zowe APIs: z/OS has a set of Representational State Transfer (REST) operating system APIs. These are made available by the z/OS Management Facility (z/OSMF). Zowe uses these REST APIs to submit jobs, work with the Job Entry Subsystem (JES) queue, and manipulate data sets. Zowe Explorers are visual representations of these APIs that are wrapped in the Zowe web UI application. Zowe Explorers create an extensible z/OS framework that provides new z/OS REST services to enterprise tools and DevOps processes.
2. Zowe API Mediation Layer: This layer has several key components, including that API Gateway built using Netflix Zuul and Spring Boot technology to forward API requests to the appropriate corresponding service through the micro-service endpoint UI and the REST API Catalog. This publishes APIs and their associated documentation in a service catalog. There also is a Discovery Service built on Eureka and Spring Boot technology, acting as the central point in the API Gateway. It accepts announcements of REST services while providing a repository for active services.
3. Zowe Web UI: Named zLUX, the web UI modernizes and simplifies working on the mainframe and allows the user to create modern applications. This is what will enable non-mainframers to work productively on the mainframe. The UI works with the underlying REST APIs for data, jobs, and subsystems, and presents the information in a full-screen mode compared to the command-line interface.
4. Zowe Command Line Interface (CLI): Allows users to interact with z/OS from a variety of other platforms, such as cloud or distributed systems, submit jobs, issue Time Sharing Option (TSO) and z/OS console commands, integrate z/OS actions into scripts, and produce responses as JSON documents. With this extensible and scriptable interface, you can tie in mainframes to the latest distributed DevOps pipelines and build in automation.

The point of all this is to enable any developer to manage, control, script, and develop on the mainframe like any other cloud platform. Additionally, Zowe allows teams to use the same familiar, industry-standard, open-source tools they already know to access mainframe resources and services too.

The mainframe may be older than many of the programmers IBM hopes Zowe will attract. But it opens new possibilities for next generation applications and for mainframe shops desperately needing new mission-critical applications for which customers are clamoring. This should radically reduce the learning curve for the next generation while making experienced professionals more efficient. Start your free Zowe trial here. BTW, Zowe’s code will be made available under the open-source Eclipse Public License 2.0.

DancingDinosaur is Alan Radding, a veteran information technology analyst, writer, and ghost-writer. Follow DancingDinosaur on Twitter, @mainframeblog. See more of his work at technologywriter.com and here.

 

IBM Preps Z World for GDPR

Remember Y2K?  That was when calendars rolled over from the 1999 to 2000. It was hyped as an event that would screw up computers worldwide. Sorry, planes did not fall out of the sky overnight (or at all), elevators didn’t plummet to the basement, and hospitals and banks did not cease functioning. DancingDinosaur did OK writing white papers on preparing for Y2K. Maybe nothing bad happened because companies read papers like those and worked on changing their date fields.

Starting May 25, 2018 GDPR became the new Y2K. GRDP, the EC’s (or EU) General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), an overhaul of existing EC data protection rules, promises to strengthen and unify those laws for EC citizens and organizations anywhere collecting and exchanging data involving its citizens. That is probably most of the readers of DancingDinosaur. GDRP went into effect at the end of May and generated a firestorm of trade business press but nothing near what Y2K did.  The primary GDPR objectives are to give citizens control over their personal data and simplify the regulatory environment for international business.

According to Bob Yelland, author of How it Works: GDPR, a Little Bee Book above, 50% of global companies  say they will struggle to meet the rules set out by Europe unless they make significant changes to how they operate, and this may lead many companies to appoint a Data Protection Officer, which the rules recommend. Doesn’t it feel a little like Y2K again?

The Economist in April wrote: “After years of deliberation on how best to protect personal data, the EC is imposing a set of tough rules. These are designed to improve how data are stored and used by giving more control to individuals over their information and by obliging companies to handle what data they have more carefully. “

As you would expect, IBM created a GDPR framework with five phases to help organizations achieve readiness: Assess, Design, Transform, Operate, and Conform. The goal of the framework is to help organizations manage security and privacy effectively in order to reduce risks and therefore avoid incidents.

DancingDinosaur is not an expert on GDPR in any sense, but from reading GDPR documents, the Z with its pervasive encryption and automated secure key management should eliminate many concerns. The rest probably can be handled by following good Z data center policy and practices.

There is only one area of GDPR, however, that may be foreign to North American organizations—the parts about respecting and protecting the private data of individuals.

As The Economist wrote: GDPR obliges organizations to create an inventory of the personal data they hold. With digital storage becoming ever cheaper, companies often keep hundreds of databases, many of which are long forgotten. To comply with the new regulation, firms have to think harder about data hygiene. This is something North American companies probably have not thought enough about.

IBM recommends you start by assessing your current data privacy situation under all of the GDPR provisions. In particular, discover where protected information is located in your enterprise. Under GDPR, individuals have rights to consent to access, correct, delete, and transfer personal data. This will be new to most North American data centers, even the best managed Z data centers.

Then, IBM advises, assess the current state of your security practices, identify gaps, and design security controls to plug those gaps. In the process find and prioritize security vulnerabilities, as well as any personal data assets and affected systems. Again, you will want to design appropriate controls. If this starts sounding a little too complicated just turn it over to IBM or any of the handful of other vendors who are racing GDPR readiness services into the market. IBM offers Data Privacy Consulting Services along with a GDPR readiness assessment.

Of course, you can just outsource it to IBM or others. IBM also offers its GDPR framework with five phases. The goal of the framework is to help organizations subject to GDPR manage security and privacy with the goal of reducing risks and avoiding problems.

GDPR is not going to be fun, especially the obligation to comply with each individual’s rights regarding their data. DancingDinosaur suspects it could even get downright ugly.

DancingDinosaur is Alan Radding, a veteran information technology analyst, writer, and ghost-writer. Please follow DancingDinosaur on Twitter, @mainframeblog. See more of his IT writing at technologywriter.com and here.

Mainframe ISVs Advance the Mainframe While IBM Focuses on Think

Last week IBM reveled in the attention of upwards of 30,000 visitors to its Think conference, reportedly a record for an IBM conference. Meanwhile Syncsort and Compuware stayed home pushing new mainframe initiatives. Specifically, Syncsort introduced innovations to deliver mainframe log and application data in real-time directly to Elastic for deeper next generation analytics through like Splunk, Hadoop and the Elastic Stack.

Syncsort Ironstone for next-gen analytics

Compuware reported that the percentage of organizations running at least half their business-critical applications on the mainframe expected to increase next year, although the loss of skilled mainframe staff, and the failure to subsequently fill those positions pose significant threats to application quality, velocity and efficiency. Compuware has been taking the lead in modernizing the mainframe developer experience to make it compatible with the familiar x86 experience.

According to David Hodgson, Syncsort’s chief product officer, many organizations are using Elastic’s Kibana to visualize Elasticsearch data and navigate the Elastic Stack. These organizations, like others, are turning to tools like Hadoop and Splunk to get a 360-degree view of their mainframe data enterprise-wide. “In keeping with our proven track record of enabling our customers to quickly extract value from their critical data anytime, anywhere, we are empowering enterprises to make better decisions by making mission-critical mainframe data available in another popular analytics platform,” he adds.

For cost management, Syncsort now offers Ironstream with the flexibility of MSU-based (capacity) or Ingestion-based pricing.

Compuware took a more global view of the mainframe. The mainframe, the company notes, is becoming more important to large enterprises as the percentage of organizations running at least half their business-critical applications on that platform expected to increase next year. However, the loss of skilled mainframe staff, and the failure to subsequently fill those positions, pose significant threats to application quality, velocity and efficiency.

These are among the findings of research and analysis conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Compuware.  According to the study, “As mainframe workload increases—driven by modern analytics, blockchain and more mobile activity hitting the platform—customer-obsessed companies should seek to modernize application delivery and remove roadblocks to innovation.”

The survey of mainframe decision-makers and developers in the US and Europe also revealed the growing mainframe importance–64 percent of enterprises will run more than half of their critical applications on the platform within the next year, up from 57 percent this year. And just to ratchet up the pressure a few notches, 72 percent of customer-facing applications at these enterprises are completely or very reliant on mainframe processing.

That means the loss of essential mainframe staff hurts, putting critical business processes at risk. Overall, enterprises reported losing an average of 23 percent of specialized mainframe staff in the last five years while 63 percent of those positions have not been filled.

There is more to the study, but these findings alone suggest that mainframe investments, culture, and management practices need to evolve fast in light of the changing market realities. As Forrester puts it: “IT decision makers cannot afford to treat their mainframe applications as static environments bound by long release cycles, nor can they fail to respond to their critical dependence with a retiring workforce. Instead, firms must implement the modern tools necessary to accelerate not only the quality, but the speed and efficiency of their mainframe, as well as draw [new] people to work on the platform.”

Nobody has 10 years or even three years to cultivate a new mainframer. You need to attract and cultivate talented x86 or ARM people now, equip each—him or her—with the sexiest, most efficient tools, and get them working on the most urgent items at the top of your backlog.

DancingDinosaur is Alan Radding, a veteran information technology analyst, writer, and ghost-writer. Follow DancingDinosaur on Twitter, @mainframeblog. See more of his work at technologywriter.com and here.