Full Schedule Announced for 2nd Annual Open Mainframe Summit

The expansive environment of mainframe computing continues to develop and adapt to the tumultuous landscape of various sophisticated innovations and disruptive technologies. The Open Mainframe Project serves as the focal point for deployment and use of Linux and Open Source (News - Alert) in a mainframe computing environment whilst increasing collaboration across the community as they continue to develop shared toolsets and resources.

Earlier this month, The Open Mainframe Project announced that the Open Mainframe Summit will take place virtually on September 22-23. The open-source initiative enables wide-scale collaboration across the mainframe community that includes speakers from DeployHub, FINOS, Jono Bacon Consulting, the Linux Foundation (News - Alert), ZEDEDA, and more.

The theme for this year’s Open Mainframe Summit was unveiled to focus on expanding beyond the mainframe to highlight a variety of influencers with strengths in relevant areas that leverage technologies, including continuous delivery, edge computing, financial services, and open source. Additionally, it aims to incorporate projects, diversity, and business topics that will offer seasoned professionals, developers, students, and leaders an opportunity to improve their practices and network with like-minded individuals.

“Mainframes are never going away. They have a rich history of being dependable and secure, and that will only get better as they modernize to work within the changing cloud and edge technology. Our second annual Open Mainframe Summit will continue our momentum of being a global celebration of the mainframe where students, developers, executives, open-source enthusiasts, and our community can network, collaborate and share knowledge and best practices. This year, we’re excited to showcase thought leaders of closely related technologies and how they interact and impact mainframe technology,” said John Mertic, Director of Program Management at The Linux Foundation.  

Working closely with the CHAOSS Diversity & Inclusion Badging Program, sessions at the conference cover a variety of diverse and inclusive topics as well as technical and business sessions presented by a plethora of industry veterans. These include:

• Discussed by Stacey Miller, Global Product Marketing Manager at SUSE, and Yvette LaMar, Director of the IBM (News - Alert) Z Influencer Ecosystem at IBM, Mainframe Mavens: 5 Women to Know will highlight five women who have been instrumental in mainframe technology advances over the past 50 years.

• Covered by Misty Decker, Product Marketing Director at Micro Focus, Derek Britton, Director of Communications and Brand Strategy at Micro Focus, and Cameron Seay, Adjunct Instructor at East Carolina University, The Facts about COBOL will discuss Open Mainframe Project’s COBOL Working Group recent broad online survey conducted to gain a better understanding of the COBOL marketplace and the methodology used, how it was accomplished, and what we intend to do with the survey results.

• Moderated by Dr. Gloria Chance, CEO at Mousai Group, Jeanne Glass, CEO and Founder of VirtualZ Computing; David Jeffries, Vice President of Development IBM z/OS Software at IBM; Greg Lotko, Broadcom; Andy Youniss, Rocket Software, Making Our Strong Community Stronger session puts a spotlight on diversity, equity and inclusion from an executive perspective as well as personal experiences and how they shape corporate inclusion, or the ability to bring your “whole self” is a privilege—and plays out differently for different people.

• As discussed by Mike MacIsaac, Systems Programmer at ADP, ConsoleZ - Accessing z/VM Console Data from a Browser will showcase the new open-source project named consolez that allows z/VM console data to be accessed from a Web UI.

• Talked through by Ray Cole, Product Architect at BMC Software (News - Alert), Workflow wiZard: A Flexible Workflow Creation Tool for z/OSMF will follow the open-source project that provides an easy way to build workflows dynamically by assembling a workflow through reading a library of workflow steps and a properties file.

• Presented by Mike Friesenegger, Solutions Architect at SUSE, Feilong: The Open-Source API for z/VM Automation will follow the Feilong project and how it is being used for customers in production deployments.

• Featured by Alexander Efremkin, Tessia Architect, Linux Workload Enablement on IBM Z at IBM, Integrating Tessia for Self-Provisioning of Linux Distributions on Z will develop Tessia, Linux on Z installation that can be simplified to a few commands.

• Introduced by Salisu Ali, Student at Bayero University Kano, Andrew Twydell, Intern at IBM and Alex Kim, Enterprise Solutions Architect at Vicom (News - Alert) Infinity, ZEBRA is an Incubation Project for Zowe, analyses ZEBRA which intends to provide re-usable and industry compliant JSON formatted RMF/SMF data records, so that other ISV SW and users can exploit them or use them with other Open-Source SW.

• Shared by Jessielaine Punongbayan, Product Marketing Engineer at Broadcom, and Richelle Anne Craw, Senior Software Engineer at Broadcom, DIY: Zowe Explorer Starter Kit, reviews building VS Code extensions using Zowe Explorer extensible APIs.