 All right, everyone. Well, welcome to this talk here. We're going to talk about the new generation of main framers. And we got one person that's a multi-generational main framer. And I guess I'm a main framer by association. You're the new main framer. Yes. Yes. So Lenzantilichia, go ahead and introduce yourself. Hi, everybody. I'm Lenzantilichia. And I am the CTO and business development manager for a company called Vicom Infinity based here in New York. We are a converge company as well as a IBM Platinum Business Partner. And I also happen to be the chairperson of the Linux Foundation Open Main Frame Project, working with John all the time and some of our folks here in the audience, some of our colleagues. Absolutely. And I'm John Murtic. I'm one of the program directors here at the Linux Foundation. I have the fortune of working with the Open Main Frame Project for the last six years. And we've seen a huge amount of growth and some really exciting stuff. And I would just say even broadly in the main frame industry has really came really into being here. But first, I think we always have to set context. And we're talking about main frame, because main frame is probably one of those terms that you see thrown around of any big mysterious computer out there. Also, sometimes people look at this picture here and think that's a main frame. Which is, that is actually, but that's not what the main frame is today. That's the main frame if you're riding the spaceship Earth ride at Disney World or seeing an old movie. But the main frame today is what we got up here, the Z15. And I know you deal with these boxes a lot. What is the Z15? Well, the history, it goes like this. The first picture you saw there was in the 50s when my grandfather and father were working at that time. I'm a third gen. And then I came about with IBM in the late 70s. And this evolved into something called a Z family, which the Z stands for zero downtime. And a lot of people ask the question, well, what is a main frame? And it's a very complicated question to answer because people think of it as the MVS, ZOS, VSE, TPF, traditional type of things. And then on the other side of it are miles we can say things about Linux and containers and virtual servers and all kinds of things that it could run at the same time. So the specs that you see here up on the screen are, it's the fastest microprocessor in the business and it has 190 of them. And that's only just for the applications. It doesn't count anything in there for the IO processors, which are several hundred of and other specialty processors in there that so the application processors don't get overburdened with anything else but running the actual applications. And it wasn't too long ago in those 50s and 60s time frame that KB was the size of the memory and it was very precious and very expensive. Now we throw around terabytes of memory in this thing like it's penny candy. Remember seeing pictures of them loading 40 megabyte hard drives onto Pan Am 707s and they're about the size of a shipping crate. That's right. Yeah. So it's definitely, as I like to say, because of my grandpa. It's not your grandfather's mainframe anymore. This thing is really able to do so much more and still preserve the investments everybody has made over the years with their heritage applications, as I like to say. Absolutely. Absolutely. And it's an amazing platform for Linux and open source. But what's really interesting is, and I've seen this very much over the last six years, is we're seeing a whole new wave of people being interested in mainframe. And especially people at the early age of their career. I mean, it's always the most normal people think is like, oh, mainframe is for people on the back end of their career. But we're seeing so many people in the early parts of their career now interested in mainframe. And we have a mentorship project that has brought well over 50 students into it that's making a gigantic impact. I know you've worked with some of them. Yeah. Some of them worldwide, not just only here. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And I think we've worked on students on five different continents. So it's made a huge, huge impact. So I guess the big question for everyone here is, why are they interested? What has made this an appealing area? And I think we kind of pulled together three really interesting ideas here. The first, I think, is we're actually seeing investment happening. So we've always heard of people trying to move off of mainframe, people trying to get rid of their mainframes. The reality that we're seeing, and I know you see it on the front lines, is people are putting money back into their mainframes and they're expanding their front frames. I mean, what do you see in there? Well, I'll tell you something that a lot of people don't know is that this generation, this last generation, most current generation of Z15, is actually the most successful mainframe in the history of the mainframe, which is over 50 years now. It has shipped more systems than ever. And for some reason or other, it keeps on going. And I think a lot of it has to do with the fact of all the different things it offers. And from the mentorship program, the mentee ship program, I'll tell you a little story. There was a college that we went to. And we said, hey, why don't you program this and here's the system? We didn't tell them what it was. We didn't tell them it was a mainframe at all. And they started working in Java, Linux, and all kinds of other things. They liked to containers and whatever. And at the end, when they were done with their project, we said to them, did you know you were working on a mainframe? And they were like stunned. They were absolutely amazed. This is mainframe, because they had the connotation of that first picture we showed in some cases. And when they had that kind of experience, they said, we can live with this. We can work on this and we can go to work. And then when they started hearing the kind of money they could make in some of the firms right around here. I guess I just was walking on stage and I just saw, I think was it JP Morgan Chase that was just presenting here. I know the lady. And they have tons of mainframes, Citi, Morgan Stanley, Goldman, all these guys around town, especially in financial services. And when they hear the kind of bucks they can do and how much in demand they are, they can get quite interested after. And then the icing on the cake was a session just like the one we just had here with the college. Exactly, exactly. And I think what's interesting is it's not just legacy applications that are being invested in. We're seeing new workloads overall. And I think this article, I encourage you to come check this out. I mean, it's about, it's from last spring. It was right after, but what I really found interesting here was new feature deployments is actually outpacing other platforms on here. And two is it's not just putting old kicks and more legacy sort of applications. We see people doing DevOps in the mainframe. We see them integrating into the rest of there. Yeah, the whole nine yards here, moving to an agile. So you're seeing a lot of this coming together and you're seeing what I see here, and I think you see, is these companies seeing that the mainframe has a huge intrinsic value to it. And now as we're seeing more people becoming interested in it, they're wanting to double down their investment. And at the same time recognize, hey, I can invest in mainframe for the key workloads. And I guess I'd click this by accident, but I think I segwayed myself right in there. Things have a way of working out, Jeff. They do, they do. It's easier to develop on these than years past. Not only are we just seeing modern languages. I hate to always say the word modern, but just kind of the languages you see too. The newer languages. But we also see languages and tools that are native to the mainframe becoming so much easier. You can write COBOL code using Visual Studio code or Eclipse Che. You have a technology like Zoe that's opening things up quite a bit. And it's really just giving, working with the mainframe, just rest API's got it. CLI on your laptop got it. Having a GUI desktop that connects all those things. And I know you all have do a ton of development and you're leading some modern development on the mainframe. I mean, I think you've seen this impact firsthand. Oh yeah, especially with the Zoe project, one of the biggest projects on the Linux Foundation Open Mainframe group here. We actually developed a secure voice assistant. We call it VIVA, VICOM Infinity Voice Assistant. And it interfaces to Zoe so you can actually talk to your mainframe and ask it to do what you want it to do. And talk about bridging the skills gap. It can't get much easier than talking to a mainframe. Not at all, not at all. And a lot of those technologies that were used to build that, I mean, built on a Raspberry Pi using Zoe for the interface, not dealing with green screens and things like that, but just modern tooling. That is really sort of the key here. And if you make the tools, the same as what you're using everyone else, all becomes a lot easier. Yeah, there's no defans or butts as they say. Exactly, exactly. And there's a great article here I found, develop on the mainframe just like it's any other cloud platform. I mean, that's really where the name of the game is now and that's where we're seeing so much of this shifting to. In fact, they call the mainframe the hybrid multi-cloud environment with the security that you need. And it has, that's why it's, I think gotten so much into the inroads of tool and inroads into some of these larger firms and even some smaller firms that never thought they'd ever think about a mainframe. It never had a mainframe. It's just made it so much easier. Exactly. And you kind of hinted earlier here about the mainframe job situation and there is a ton of them. The last system I saw, John, was about 55,000. So there's plenty of work out there and they are very well-rewarding careers and not just a job, they're really careers that people can turn into nice long times and long-term careers in general. And great even at an entry level. So somebody who's just getting new into this space here, coming out of school, junior developers are well north of 100,000, 150, I mean, these are figures here from, you can see on the article, well over a year ago and we know what inflation's done right now. So these are really, really, really well-paying jobs and they're plentiful, they're out there and people are seeing that and now they're taking the classwork to invest in it. Oh. We lost our... And we're back. And we're back. Little blip. Little blip there, little blip. But yeah, I find that really is sort of a fascinating thing and is it, do you find it, and I know you work with customers that are trying to hire in Mainframe, you probably are hiring too, is it becoming harder to find this talent? Is this talent, what is it like for you all to find talent right now? Well, a while back it was pretty tough and it's still not where it needs to be. And that's why we have the Open Mainframe project and its mentorship program and trying to encourage schools to do the same thing. So we're working with other schools to maybe do capstone projects where our students work on it for a year, for somebody to do something that needs to be done on a Mainframe environment for some XYZ company. Yep. And by doing that and then IBM themselves came out with something called IBM Z Explore that's spelled with the XPLOR. You can see it on the web and it's an education hub for anybody that wants to teach or learn about the Z, about IBM Mainframes. And so it's, and we had mastered the Mainframe contest going on that was teaching at the same time people were having fun and learning and getting some exposure to events like this and going to the big Mainframe event known as SHARE, it's run a couple of times a year. So it's getting better but we can't take our eye off the ball because there's still more work to be done because there's, but it's not just the Mainframe. I'm finding out that technology Yeah, it's an in general problem here for sure. We really need more technologists. And you know, Arvind, I don't know if everybody knows the name Arvind Krishna from the CEO of IBM, I have been to know him. He's got a commitment now to try to educate something in the range of a couple of hundred thousand people over the next few years. So he's putting some major investments behind that too. So as our other places. Absolutely, but I think the big takeaway is like you've seen that uptick starting to happen. You've seen so many more people that are out there on the market. I mean, the jobs are still way out there. There's still tons of them, but there's more of people that are saying, Hey, I'm turning my career into Mainframe investing. I'm making this the base of my career. So, you know, that that poll of candidates is jumping up quite a bit. And having been in business as long as I have a lot of people in the mainframe world know of me and they kind of take me. Hey, Len, you got anybody I can hire and you know where I can go find, you know, so I see it and feel it all the time. Yeah. And it's not just only traditional applications. It's the Linux stuff and everything else that people are doing more on the IBM mainframe. Absolutely, absolutely. So this is our basis here. You know, we have the jobs are out there. You know, we're seeing how to develop on a mainframe is becoming so much easier. And just the investment that companies are putting into mainframe. All of these are really increasing. This is why we're starting to see this renaissance for lack of a better term into mainframe starting to happen. So, you know, we have been really fortunate and you probably even more than me just seeing this firsthand, seeing these students, these newcomers into this space, you know, start to jump in and start to invest their careers in it. And I don't think I have a slide on this in here, but you know, we have a great podcast that I encourage all of you to check out. Oh yeah, I'm the mainframe. I am the mainframe of podcasts. It's on every podcast client and it talks to people all over their career. You know, everyone from a student who's just graduated to Ross Moray and Ross Moray being the GM of IBM Z. And it really talks to people who have seen this as sort of a key part of their career and really where things are going. But I pulled out kind of a few success stories of folks and some of these are on the open mainframe project blog here. You know, Sudash knew, you know, Dubey he was one of our mentees from this past year. He did a really, really, really good blog post and I think he really captured it really nicely of, you know, you think about just being a mainframe, you think about what it is. And these students maybe, you know, they have sort of the same sort of pop culture reference to what a mainframe is. Big massive computer somewhere in the sky with a nice movie OS interface on it. But, you know, him being able to engage in this was a life-changing moment for him, which is, it's a really fascinating thing. And I think we've heard this over and over again participating in some of these programmers, it's opened this new door to him. And I know you've seen this so much of that first hand. Yeah, yeah. I don't know who else, John, of names that you have in there, but it was Celizu Ali. Yeah, he's one, I didn't get him in the deck here, but I know you guys have worked with him. Yeah, this kid is amazing. He's a medical student in Nigeria of all places. He applied for a mentorship and, well, we took him on and here at ViCom and we had him help work with the voice assistant I just mentioned to you and other things in regards to him, a bot and so on. And the kid was just absolutely amazing. And then we're still working with him because he still wants to keep working with him. He tries to fit us in between his medical school stuff and that he's got going on and he just kind of won't go away. No, he was so excited about this that he brought in his brother this year to be it. So we have Muhammad Ali, his brother, who's now is a main framer. He's brought it all through the family. I'd love you guys to meet him sometime because he's just quite a different for someone of his age and what he's a medical student, what's he doing with in and around the main framery? He just kind of interested in it and he's kind of got to, so we got to maybe a doctor remain framer, who knows? Yeah, you know what? It gives him some career options, you know, if this whole surgery thing doesn't pan out well, he's got to keep all of us old guys to keep the main frame around. Right, right, right. And then he can help out in the meantime. So we got both ends of the stick there, right? I never know. This is another one of innocent and I think he worked with Jerry Edgington and he's with Jerry Edgington, Western Southern life and he leads our polycephaly project. And again, another great story here. He's always wanted to learn about the main frame and this is sort of the first time he was able to connect to it and being able to work with, and Jerry, you've known Jerry for years. Oh yeah. Jerry's a stalwart in this industry. Yeah, he's the one that's brought the polycephaly project to and it just became a regular project as opposed to an incubation project. And the reason why is that you might have all heard of the development tool called Jenkins and people wanted to see that made available for not only the Linux environment, it's available on the main frame, but also the ZOS environment and he did. And now with that being said, some of the large banks around here are actually bringing polycephaly in to use it because they wanted to have it and lo and behold, here's a major banks as a major banks that are bringing in polycephaly and using it in their everyday development. Exactly, exactly. And this is also a great example of innovation coming out of a mainframe customer and being brought out onto the scene as well. And there's just so many stories with this. The one, and I wanted to put a slide in it, but I couldn't find, I was putting my slides together late on this, was I think you remember the student that ported Alpine likes. Oh yeah. From Vietnam. Yeah, from Vietnam. His name is Escapesome of the Mum. I knew it off the top of my head. Oh, one. One. Yeah, one tongue. He was a student. He was one of our first mentees. He ported Alpine Linux over to mainframe, then ended up moving here to the United States. Went to grad school at Marist. Now he works for IBM. Now he works for IBM. We had another student from, that worked on Cloud Foundry for Zee that worked with Susie, who's one of our members as well. Now he works in Susie in Germany and is continuing to work on that. So we're just seeing so many, and I remember when our first class of mentees came through, we invited them I think to a Zee Council in New Jersey and everyone in the room was just so awestruck by how smart the kids, how interested they were. I think there's a couple of people in that class that are still in mainframe right now, still employed. Yeah, what's Robert's last name? Robert Starr, he works for ADP. He works for ADP. Yep, he has an analyst over there. I'd ran into Sebastian Wynn that was in that class. He works for an IBM partner in Germany. So, so many more new people that are coming into this. And again, they're seeing the opportunity that people are investing more in mainframe. They're seeing that developing on it is a great experience and they see these are amazing paying jobs. A younger generation coming up. Exactly, exactly. So, I mean, I encourage you all here, there's a lot to learn about open source in the mainframe. This is a exploding area that we're seeing just across the open mainframe project alone. We have 21 projects and working groups that if you look at all of these projects, they're in different areas of mainframe operating system from ZOS, Z-Linux, ZVM, things in between. But they're all in here as technologies that are bridging that gap. They're connecting that mainframe more tightly back into the rest of the enterprise, which is exactly where enterprises are going. They have these mainframes, they see the immense value that they have for them, but they want to optimize how they're using them. And with technologies like these, they're all making those connections really nicely there. And we're just seeing even forward work happening and things like COBOL, who would have, I always joke about this now anymore, but who would have thought two years ago we'd be sitting here talking about COBOL as the new thing? But... And the COBOL group inside the open mainframe project did a survey and they surveyed a lot of customers and they found that there is still billions of lines of COBOL code used every single day. And it's increased over the last 20 years. It has grown. Grown, and not just like... It's still growing. Yeah, and not just like grown marginally, like grown a significant amount. Oh yeah. So this is a growing area we're seeing here. In addition, there's even more open source projects that are centric to mainframe and I encourage you many much, like a lot of our foundations here, we have a landscape, check it out, l.openmainframeproject.org. You can see a lot of what that's coming to be and just broad open source projects. This is probably even a subset, but these are the ones that I think even are best supported of just open source projects that run well on the mainframe and that people are using on the mainframe today. So you can see that cross section happening there. And we have, this is all possible because of this large group of vendors that see this is where the future is going. 46 supporting organizations and the numbers here on mentees and contributors and contributions are low. I mean, this is continuing to grow exponentially over time but we're seeing just so much more interest driving into this area. We'll soon see the logo of city on that too. Yes, we are, yep. So, I mean, for everyone here in the audience here, if this is an area of interest to you, if you have, you know, in your employer, if you're doing things in the mainframe space and you want to just see, hey, how do I get involved in this? Or maybe it's just tangibly interesting. Open mainframe, there's a lot of different ways you can get involved. You can get involved at events. We do an annual right open mainframe summit. We're actually doing our, we've done it virtually, but next year we're gonna be in person in Philadelphia. So you can take the train down and check that out. And that's in next September. We have a lot of stuff going on on social and we're at events like these here as well. Projects that are happening and we're bringing in new projects all the time that are really compliment a lot of this space here and then opportunities for people to join the community as well. But if for nothing else, come find us out here on social. We have a lot of great content that is being driven here, both LinkedIn, Twitter. We also have a newsletter that is a great way that if you want to kind of keep on what's going. Subscribe to that. Subscribe to that, very easy there. And just a whole bunch of other ways you can just get involved here. Events, webinars, projects, sort of the whole nine yards. Everything we talked to you about is pretty much at openmainframeproject.org. It's easy to remember. It is absolutely super easy. So what are parting thoughts maybe even if we got some questions from the audience as well? One thing I'd like to say is that I don't know about you, but being an old guy like I am, I'm always very proud to see someone like John taking on the responsibility and driving the project like he has. And I saw him come from nothing to where he is right now talking like this. And I'm very proud of that and very proud to have seen you, John Growl, like you have to this point that you have. You're making me blush, Lynn. That's what I'm talking about, of course. That's my job. No, this is a great community to work with and I'm privileged to be able to. And other folks here, Alan and the audience I've worked with him, he's a member of our board, Alan Clark from Susei. And yeah, this is a really exciting project and I think this is also a group of people that just cares about, so I mean all of our project communities care about the future. But I think this group here recognizes, you know, the mainframe group. Yeah, they recognize the decades that people have put their life into it and they're wanting to make sure that that carries forward for decades to come. And that's can be a very unique thing because so many of the technologies we deal with, they're new, they're within the last 10, 20, I mean Linux only 30 years old, mainframes going on 70. There is no other architecture that has endured as much as long as the mainframe. Yeah, there are some that have come and gone, right? Some that have tried to copy it, some that have tried to replace it and not only has it endured, it has resonated to the best year ever in its history and I don't see it changing and it's because more people are becoming smart enough to understand its value to the world. Exactly, exactly. If you turned off Facebook and Google and Twitter and all these social media things, everybody would be pretty mad but the world would still keep on going. Go turn off all the mainframes and see what happens. Airplanes that fall out of the sky, banks would go under. Yeah, good luck buying that coffee, right? Retailers would go under, insurance company. The world would be in complete disarray and maybe even stop to exist. Yeah, it could. It is, it is so much of it is powering it and so much of our just technology heritage is built upon it. Like I remember Jim Zemmlein would always joke with me and said my grandpa was a mainframe. His grandpa took him to share when he was a kid several times. And he would always go to his grandpa and he would say, hey, this is this cool thing that's going on in the Linux kernel or this new technology has come out. His grandpa would just sit there and he's like, Jim, we did this decades ago with mainframe, like this is nothing new. And I always found that just so much, even open source, many people don't even realize, you wanna trace open source and they trace it back to the free software foundation and the free software movement of the late 70s, early 80s. You really wanna trace open source back, it's actually back to mainframe, with the launch of share. It started in 1955 with share. That's where you trace it all back. First open source project, I'm sure the free software people want me to say this but it's not the GNU tools, it's CBT tape, which was a gentleman by the name of Arne Castellano who pulled together all of these shared scripts and tools and things like that that people would go to share and contribute and share back with one another, that's the term share. He pulled it together and made it on a tape, which you can still get the tape to this day. You can send him a couple of bucks, it's not Arne running, it's a guy named Sam Goulomb, it runs it but you can send him a couple of bucks in the mail and you can get a tape of it but since 1970 he has maintained this as an open source project, again back in the day and it's hosted at the open mainframe project. So pretty much what I think we see the oldest open source project out there before open source, before free software, before all of these licenses were a thing. Here is this guy pulling it together. CBT, Connecticut Bacon Trust, which is a bank that hasn't been in a bank for 30 years. Although I heard there's a new version of it, not even related but it's fascinating. We just see so much of the heritage coming from here. Names get recycled. Yeah, you know. Everything gets recycled. We're only so creative as humans. So listen, we're gonna be here for a while. We're running out of time. So if you don't think of questions now, don't be worried to come up to us and talk to us. And we're gonna be here for a while, roaming the hallways along with you during the breaks. We welcome any kind of conversation or questions or ideas you might have. Yep, absolutely. And thank you all. It's great being back in person. I hadn't seen this guy in two years, so that's great. First time traveling for me since March, 2020. Yeah, I'm about the same, yeah, February, yeah, so. Well, great. Well, thank you everybody. Thank you. Thank you.