 Hello everyone, welcome to this session at open source strategy forum bridging modern DevOps in the mainframe and we have a great set of panelists here across the mainframe industry. We'll start. I'll introduce myself. My name is John Murtake. I'm director of the mainframe project. I work on behalf of the Linux Foundation across many of our projects here, really helping focus the mainframe project in communities, successful in supporting the activities of the community. And we have three great panelists to join me here. First, I want to introduce Len Sentunucci, a chairperson of the open mainframe project and the CTO and business development manager for Viacom Infinity. Welcome, Len. Thank you, John. Appreciate the opportunity today to be on the panel. We have Jen Francis, who is developer advocate for the IBM open group and a master's certified architect. Welcome, Jen. And we have Sam Knudsen from the VP of product and from Conquare, who is a BMC company. Welcome, Sam. To be here, John. So let's dig right into it. And the first topic to discuss here today is talking about how we got here. The Linux Foundation's open mainframe project for five years old, this month or not this month, I'm sorry, this year, and a lot led up to that open source has really been a part of the mainframe for a long time now. Really, since the early days of the mainframe back in the 1950s and the Zoe initiative project launched two years ago in 2018. And so we're going to talk about what today here on the panel. Maybe Len will start with you as you're really along in the early days of the mainframe project and even beyond of Linux coming to the platform. What were some of the challenges and opportunities that really led to the creation of the open mainframe project. And well, the Linux Foundation's timing of the open mainframe project was excellent. It was actually at the time. Exactly when IBM announced the IBM Linux one system, if you might recall, it was up there and it was an event in Seattle. And with the new Linux only mainframe type system plus Linux already having quite a footprint on mainframes in general. The need for helping bring more focus on open source, open source projects open source software to the platform was just at just right at the right time. So a lot of times people run into barriers of bringing that kind of those kinds of solutions based in and around open source and with the experience of the Linux Foundation helping form this project around the mainframe. And then also with the Zoe initiative which started a few years later, one of the very first ZOS open source projects open projects. It was really needed because of how bring good semblance around the work that needs to be done with compliance and project management and bringing the different organizations that wanted to participate and contribute to the project. It was just, you just couldn't ask for a better thing to have happened. And now, today, there are 15 established strong open mainframe project projects to say that fast three times right now. And all in different stages. There's a lot of work that's going on a lot of different people contributing in organizations some are on multiple projects. And it is also helped with the internship program, bringing some of those resources from some very bright students, working on some of that some of them and actually some of those actually turned into actual projects themselves. One of these 15 that we just mentioned today. So that's been kind of my perspective and then, you know, I volunteered the first year and then I didn't realize it was going to turn into a career. It's been great though I really enjoy it. I can't believe five plus years have gone by already, and I don't see any end in sight the the the open source projects and the open source coming to the mainframe is just exponentially growing job. Absolutely absolutely and you've been a great asset not only the project but just the mainframe community as a whole. Jen maybe just some of your thoughts and I know you've been involved more in the project here recently. You know certainly as Zoe is really taken off and I know you work with a lot of customers in the field tell me about some of what you've seen. You know, I think Lynn started to really hit the nail on the head. So, you know, the whole life cycle of just Linux looking at the operating system and then when the Linux foundation came about. It's always been the community involvement community contributions that open collaboration when open mainframe started five years ago and actually started to break down those barriers that we've always had around Z. It's always been, you know, what IBM said what the other vendors have done that have built on top of IBM Z and for the first time I was saying, No, we really want to foster collaboration. And Zoe was really this like kind of really big effort between all of these big Z shops and I say shops in the way of like, you know, everywhere in Broadcom and IBM and Rocket and all these companies saying we're actually going to work together on a project to make something that will actually open up how we can interact with the traditional side of IBM Z with ZOS. And that's been amazing to see that all come through what we've been able to do with it how we've been able to grow it, and really how it started all of these other projects that are really addressing what we all see and feel as we work with clients as, you know, we're working our own companies. So now we've got projects like the open mainframe education project, where we're working to have collateral available that everybody can use to have a path to help people learn how to work with the ZOS side of the house. And, and having that be like a joint effort. It shouldn't just be one company I mean this is technology well love why not share that passion. So it's been really fun to see how that's grown and change and all different projects that have come about. And how do you want to change the future for the technology that we all love to use. Absolutely absolutely looking always forward to the future. I want to talk to you here I mean come here and see we're part of the initial launch, and I know you've just been around the mainframe community for a long time I mean I think if if anybody, you know talks about people who install words in the mainframe community, you know Sam your name is right there. All of them. And I know you've been able to see this definitely from a broader perspective tell me, you know a little bit about what you've seen is sort of the challenges opportunities around open source in the mainframe and how you see you know open mainframe project Zoe and some of those projects fitting in. Right this has been really a long time theme on the mainframe which is collaboration and cooperation and sharing amongst customers. And you know the share user group is if you think about where to the roots of some of these things that are today, you know mature in the the open mainframe project. And the share user group since the very early days of the, the platform was customers coming together at first just a handful to support each other directly in ways that were complimentary or sometimes filled in gaps from IBM as a platform provider. And so things like the share program library agency the SLA tapes you know back when code was exchanged on listings or punch cards and eventually round tapes, the evolution to private collaboration of customers through things like the CBT tape, which was a collection of collections, which was named from the Connecticut bank and trust, where one of the chief curator, you know, Arne Casagino worked, and now Sam Gallup and I continue to carry that on and most recently, really coming into the open mainframe project and getting started in continuing to foster those efforts so it, it is the community that spans more than five decades and has evolved. And so the, it's just natural now that comes into a framework where there's, you know, more formalized support, there's some ideas that will help it to build up the modern open source practices and governance, and all of those things are just natural changes over time but with the spirit that goes back to the launch of the mainframe is unchanged and that is customers want to help each other on this platform and they want to share knowledge, and they want to share code that will help other people accomplish the same goals. They want to help raise the platform up and make it the best experience for everybody. You know, there's that there's a column that I read years ago and I talked about, you know, we are all smarter together, and solving other people's problems. And there, there is tremendous satisfaction in that, but there's also, it's a little bit of, you know, self interest in that you help other people solve their problems but you're helping them so you see it in community forums, sharing code. Open source is today's incarnation of that effort, and I'm sure if you looked out 10 years in the future 20 years in the future, it'll look a little different than today but I do think this idea of open collaboration is here to stay. And the open mainframe project is is a perfect example of how that's working in the mainframe community. Awesome, and you know, and Sam I always, I think ever to look forward you always have to look backwards and you know when we talk about open source be exactly the point right back to share 1955. And that initial collaboration that came together and, you know, work that came from the CBT tape forming in 1975 and just bringing all of those, you know, all of that initial code that you know we would think is code I guess but you know it's people exchanging ideas and things and bringing it forward. I learned recently that Jim Zemlin, his grandpa was involved in the mainframe and he always used to joke with them and say, you know, every new technology Jim would talk to him about he's like well the mainframeers did that decades ago and open source is one of them for sure. But on top of that he said he actually attended share as a kid so it's so interesting to see all of that just come completely full circle. It's a very generational involvement in the community, you know, where, you know, parents, children who are now in their 20s are entering into similar careers on the same platform, and that's pretty amazing, but you think about the contributions. It's thousands of individuals and that is a, you know, an actual number that I looked at and it's more than a couple of thousand people, thousands of companies. Over over the span of time, it is phenomenal the number of people who've had their hands uplifting the platform together. Absolutely, absolutely. Well let's let's jump forward to the next question here for this group. And, you know, when touched on it so he is that first open source project that's really based on the ZOS, you know, platform itself. And, you know, the concept of why came together was to help create that integration platform for the next generation of tools that need to support us and really help bring together that entire ecosystem it really brings together even within the organization and I know Jen you're like I said you're really customer facing you're talking with developers talking to people, you know, tell us a little bit like how you have seen this sort of play out. So, initially Zoe was like, can I like big bombshell kind of news like everybody's like, what is this what is this. And really now it's been like, okay, what are we going to do with this how can we leverage this how can we build on this. Pretty much every customer I talked to every organization I go to, everybody's looking to standardize their set of tooling that they use particularly for dev ops, you know, we don't want to have to have an ID for you know ZOS and a different ID for our cloud systems and a different ID for any like x86 based systems, we want to have a set of tooling if you need to switch views or something like that okay that's fine but we don't want to have to have our developers all the time trying to install different bases. So Zoe is really actually kind of kind of struck a chord with the audiences because it has a plugin it has a CLI we don't have to go to developers say, hey, I really need you to use this other tool to work with this other system over here, and make it feel weird and different they can use tooling they already have like VS code or maybe they don't use VS code maybe they like using a text editor and they like to use CLIs. They can do that too. And, but more than that, people can build on top of that because it is an open source project so it allows all of us to collaborate together to actually have what we need, and what we need to use and so the adoption of it's really been amazing. Everybody's wanting to try it everybody's experimenting with it everybody's really trying to figure out how it works best for their environment. And then from that try to figure out you know, could I build an extension on this maybe I need a different plugin, you know what we need to do so it's just been amazing to see how everybody's been so excited about this, and really trying to drive how they can standardize and use this across all of their systems. Absolutely it's a really great insight and it's great to hear that from the field and and I know Len at Viacom infinity. You all have really uses an opportunity to do some really unique things in the space. And I know one of, you know, yearly developers Alex Kim built a really interesting integration. Tell us about that and just tell us about how you're seeing this as you talk with customers. Thank you so much for John. The project that John just mentioned here at Viacom infinity is something called Viva Viacom infinity voice assistant, and it is based on Zoe. All of you who I'm sure are familiar with Alexa Echo and Google Home consumer level types of voice assistants that you use are in and around the house play music to order something to do whatever that you do at the consumer level but the issue that we started thinking about a voice assistant to use them would at an enterprise system level would have introduced some very serious security issues for enterprise type customers. So, Alex and his team set out to develop Viva and based on the interfaces within Zoe, and then take advantage of the technology for security in the mainframe area known as hyper protect services, which means that there's no way to be able to penetrate and look at the data, listen to other people's voice messages that might be being used over this over the Viva device or anything like that to net it out. And when we talk to people about this, they looked at it in kind of a funny way because they say wow, that means I don't have to use a keyboard anymore. Well, that's true. The world is starting to go more towards voice activation for everything. We know that all started with Star Trek and Space Odyssey 2001 movies, right. So now being able to talk to the mainframe helps with this device is being so secure makes it capable for any kind of enterprise level systems people want to use it with, because they don't have to worry about security and compliance issues. And secondly, if you're worried about skills with the mainframe, well, if you can't talk to English language, I'm afraid we can't help you. Viva allows you to use English language and talk to your system, command it and management, manage it just with your voice and what up more can you ask for today. We are just beginning to roll it out and get it into some particular clients to help fine tune the project and watch this space in 2021, which is can't get here fast enough for a lot of us, but it's going to be here soon enough. So that's a little bit about that story, John. Could you ask Viva something like how is job ABC doing what you know what's its status or what's its output. Yes, Jen, exactly. What's my processor utilization. How am I doing against my four hour rolling average of my for my software costs and the reason why we did this kind of as a starting point. You know, we work a lot with the financial services clients in and around the streets near our office where, you know, Penn Plaza near Madison Square Garden so you know there's a lot of financial services customers in and around us and I grew up in that space on Wall Street for when I was still at IBM and still doing it here. And, you know, when the market goes crazy. Everybody gets very concerned on their SLAs are my meeting my SLAs and how many times they have to interrupt their system programmers to do that kind of work when they're busy doing everything else, trying to keep the system up and running and doing their day jobs, afternoon jobs and evening jobs right. So, being able to do this, put something like this on your phones on on your desk and be able to ask those kinds of questions. Without having to interrupt is this going to make a big difference for productivity and safety of accessing that data and those kinds of pieces of information someone would be looking for, especially during crucial times. That's so cool and there's a great video on the open mean free project YouTube of demos and you should really go check that out. It's just a kind of standard action. It's really fascinating. You know, Sam, maybe a quick to you here, you know, I know you've been, like I said around this platform a long time. Compuware and BFC are huge leaders in the DevOps space and thinking about how to connect the administration management of the OS systems back to the, you know, back into the rest of their environment. You know, how are you seeing a technology like this potentially being able to, you know, really modernize the mainframe. I mean, something that Compuware has really focused on since 2016 is evolving the developer experience. And, you know, our entire thesis has been that we wanted to mainstream the mainframe to make it different only in syntax. So there isn't anything that's, you know, apparently difficult about cobalt syntax versus Pearl or, you know, rust or go or JCL versus Ash or TCL. So syntax can be learned, you know, programming is generally kind of a 123 many exercise. And what we found is by bringing modern tools and by bringing open APIs to this space. This was an opportunity to really help mainframe development change to facilitate continuous delivery and that the sort of the order of the day would be developer experiences that were modern, and that were continuous delivery tool chains that were enabled by open APIs, you know, typically restful APIs that could plug into modern, you know, CI tools, and ultimately to modern deployment tools. And that's definitely been our experience working with early adopters we think that that type of approach is now moving to an early majority phase, where more and more customers are looking to do this. And naturally it's going to be multi platform multi vendor, as they they knit their own tool chains together. So things like the API API gateway and Zoe, you know, offer a lot of interesting possibility and Zoe is definitely at that wonderful stage it's like that the gangly teenager and you're thinking maybe it's going to get its first job soon. And, you know, will evolve it has it has a lot of potential so I'm very excited as the, you know, as Zoe fosters some of this development you see some, some key steps forward like the delivery of your sort of a gold standard binary and long term support. So I think these things are incredibly important. And in terms of the long term maturity definitely it's early days for Zoe. And I think in the next couple of years we'll start to see some very interesting things as customers figure out how does this fit into my overall development process and on the operational side. And then there will be technologies like ensemble that may become more than again, very early days, and vendors to this, you know, to this puzzle and it's always going to be a combination of the community, the platform provider IBM and vendors, really all bringing innovation and, you know, to the platform and applying it to running the platform keeping the lights on as well as innovating the way that these processes are done. And vendors, especially BMC have done an outstanding job of taking their, their investment in operational excellence and now incorporating modern modern user interface design and AI and machine learning. So all of this is coming together in a very interesting time for the platform and I'm, I'm really excited to see sort of where will Zoe be a year to five years down the road and I think it will be one of those things that help all three of those groups come together to really continue to reinvent the platform. Absolutely. Absolutely. I couldn't have said it better myself and it's great. You know, as computer and now it's a part of BMC has really been a leader in that space in the mainframe community, and just understanding how to bring, you know, all of it together because for so long, you know, the mainframe is a part of IT that's separated from the rest of the IT infrastructure, the IT organization and now as that's coming together that API first mentality is really a keen one, which is a great segue to what I want to start you right off with Sam because you talked about API and you talked about API first on the mainframe. What is it like what are you seeing interesting happening in that space. Principally that the people who do this work when I talk about the developer experience evolution. The people who are sponsoring it are not typically mainframe, you know, long tenured measures, these are people who drive digital transformation enterprise DevOps, and they look at the mainframe as just another platform and so they really want to drive out some of the esoterica around it. They look for API's that can be leveraged that are standard restful API's that are documented in swagger for instance, and things like the API gateway as a way to bring those things together are, you know, again have tremendous potential and so that's, that's where you really see this is the idea of being able to take tools, knit them together in, you know, in pipelines to build automation in ways that is absolutely compatible with what's already being done on other platforms is complimentary to the the automation and the investments that are unique to the ZOS platform, and those will always exist. You know, I would, if you want to talk about macro trends, things like Ansible, never completely supplement the automation that's built on platform, you know, the on platform management What's happening is those monitors, for instance, if you think of sort of classic tools are being modernized, you know, BMC talks about this in terms of Amy bringing, you know, a modern set of tenants and technology, you know, technology attributes to tools that have often existed for a long time, and again kind of reinventing them in this modern context so that's where I see customers going is looking at their existing investment and their applications on the mainframe working code, working code is gold. So you don't want to throw that away, you know, you can't go buy the application that you have evolved over 40 years to meet compliance needs and line of business needs, because those applications don't exist in a catalog of packaged applications. You could buy on the cloud, even if you could get the same class of service from the mainframe, but what they want to do is say how do I reinvent the way that I'm updating these applications to work in to work in a new way to bring, you know, agile techniques and DevOps methods to the for with my engineers, and then give them different ways to do that work so that they're, they're taking all of these things that we've learned on other platforms and applying them to the mainframe is going to be around for another 50 years, absolutely, but it will be it'll continue to be reinvented. And as vendors in the community, we're going to embrace that new ways and, you know, API is is a good example of that more and more capabilities. It's important that they're exposed through API's in in many ways more so than what you are directly exposing to users through user interface, because you can't possibly anticipate all of the users needs. And you'll continue to see I think from BMC, you know, and Compuware, robust investment, but all of the other vendors who are looking at this platform as a long term, you know, place where their customers are going to be. Absolutely. Absolutely. And I know Jen maybe to you here as you know when I talk API's and the API first mentality developer advocate for those just connect right together. Tell me what you're seeing. Yeah, so API's definitely here are the latest trend buds, whatever you want for how you're going to integrate. And if I look back at what's happened with ZOS so when ZOS connect came out from IBM it was so much excitement because you can make a rest calls into kicks and DB2 and IMS and all these traditional systems and oh my gosh we don't have to change our code and we can just basically make them like rest enabled. And also that opened up so many doors. But if you've been watching since then we've actually enabled more ways to use API's with Z. So it's always a great example. You can manage your system through API's, but if you also watch what some of the other teams that are doing across companies that work on ZOS so like I'm going to pick on kicks here in Hursley, I get to hear a lot from the kick scene. They released the ability to use GraphQL with their kicks explorer so you can actually manage your kicks, plexes and see what's going on with them through GraphQL which is another API that's, you know it's open source technology that now you can use to manage kicks. That's just one example because API first is the way going forward. It is an easier way to manage your system. It is an easier way to integrate your systems. So if you're not looking for the ways to exploit your technology using API's, you're going to start missing the boat because it just allows so many different things to connect. And Jen, you remember when you asked me the questions that Viva could answer. Well, we're going through the RESTful API's and also ZOSMF and all those things. So it's taking advantage of all the labs that are building this API first technology. Absolutely, absolutely. And Len, I would imagine, you know, you're working with leading financial institutions, you know, in our country and in our world. I would imagine they're thinking the same thing as this API first mentality as well. Oh yeah. Oh yeah, they are. Very much so. Awesome. Awesome. Well, we'll wrap up on one last question and I'm asking you all to look forward looked into the future DevOps in the mainframe. Okay, maybe we'll start with you on this one, then Len, then Jen, you know, tell us what your thing, what is the future of DevOps in mainframe look like in your world? I think it is the just the normal way that people operate. I think if you were to look forward safe, you know, even five or 10 years, the way that people manage their mainframes will have been transformed. And it will naturally evolve into a platform that is tightly knit into the practices that are used for both operation in, you know, in terms and development of all the other platforms that are predominant. And, you know, mainframe and cloud really are incredibly complimentary. So today, you know, there are very few true commodity applications that make, you know, that are on a mainframe. As I see, you know, I think I mentioned before, you think about two platform IT is the strategy that compuers long pursued. I'm not going to run email on my mainframe. But what I am going to continue to run for the next 50 years are applications that have unique compliance scalability security and auditability requirements. Those applications will be developed using continuous delivery practices, and a developer experience that is equal to any other platform. So that our developers on the mainframe are excited that they can enter the platform without years and years of specialized training or apprenticeship, because skills is one of the biggest issues that customers talk about. But you don't, you don't just fix skills with one thing. There's no silver bullet. So it takes investment in terms of hiring and mentoring and culture to really attract people to work on the platform. And it also takes a great developer experience. You know, that's certainly something compuers going to focus on every day. I got people who get out of bed and just obsess about that every day to make sure we can make happier developers. And everything that we've talked about is part and parcel to that. So you're going to see continued evolution of commercial tools that plug into both, you know, open source technologies. So things, you know, if you think about CI tools like Jenkins, which is a, it's both an open source project and a commercial offering. I think that's one of the trends that will bubble up bubble up as you continue to see that open source technology applied to some of the mainframe technologies, but it's absolutely going to be a very different world. You will see operations that is supported by assistive technology, machine learning and AI ops. And this is where, you know, BMC is going into the future. We, you know, they have an amazing vision for enterprise DevOps on the development side. They have these applications of technologies that really help people to proactively manage their mainframes in ways that are almost hard to imagine now, because we're really kind of in many ways still flying by planes and pretty, pretty soon. You know, when soon as five years, you know, in the beginning right now, we're going to have mainframe installations that are managed, you know, by systems that are the equivalent of autopilots in our latest airliners that can actually do incredibly complex tasks, not just sort of keep things on the level that actually take off and land and automation that anticipates problems and prevents them from happening. We're going to have that in a vision now, but it's only just starting to be realized. So, all of that is going to require that customers invest in an API strategy that they really look at developers as high performance athletes that can be encouraged and and provide and help them to be successful. So they'll implement practices like automation to support those development activities, integrated sets of third party tools and measurement to really help their their developers be amazing contributors to those applications that run on the mainframe platform, because it's the only platform that can host those applications and meet all their requirements. Look at the future there. Definitely a definitely exciting look at the future there. Len, Jen, what would you want to add to that. Jen, I want me to go. Yeah. Okay, sure. I kind of look at it. And perspective of family. As you can imagine with the last name like mine, Italian families are very important thing. And the best way to get collaboration and cooperation is treating someone like family. And all the other alternative platforms that are within organizations, if they start treating each other like family, all become part of dev outs, all become part of CI CD. Watch things happen in a very positive way. And it will be for the betterment of the mainframe and the betterment of the other platforms that sometimes try to ignore the mainframe or pretend it doesn't exist or don't want anything to do with it, whatever you want to say. Once this is all united, following the policies of dev apps CI CD, the future of the mainframe will be as bright as that sun that we see on this slide. It's a very, very bright future when when all of this finally comes together. Jen, how about you. Yeah, I love the analogy of family there. I think it is exactly that and I think particularly collaborating more in the open source forum is really enabling that as we continue to move forward and look to the future. Everybody is collaborating together, all the different languages, all the different tools, they are just that they're just tools, because we now can have, you know, standard interfaces through things like apis or even CLIs. We can pick and choose and have a standard kind of tool set it to create whatever we need so we're not kind of putting the mainframe over here in its little box in the corner anymore, we're saying it is one of the platforms you can use the tools that you're using you can actually start to use those or you are already using those with your mainframe and that will just continue to evolve through all of this collaboration. It becomes a matter of, you know, my mom and I would both love to cook. But if you give us the same recipe we're going to go about it differently. She's going to have her preferred methods I'm going to have mine. But at the end of the day we end up with the exact same thing. And that's what it's really all about. So if we can collaborate to find the best of those methodologies. That's what all of this is about. So we have the best of both worlds, and we can have the best solution and the end and build on all those years of experience. So like all the experience my mom has with making the absolutely perfect pie crust. I'm so perfecting mine she's got it down. I'm going to pick up some of her techniques and add in some of my new ones. And that's exactly what we're doing with all this collaboration and what we're seeing with DevOps to really have the best possible platform in the future. And then you ought to ask my aunts and grandparents about recipes. Oh it's a little bit of this, a little bit of this, a little pinch of that. What are you talking about I'm trying to tell me how much a cup is a teaspoon what is it. I think you all got me hungry here so maybe we need to wrap this up. Thanks all of you. This has been a great panel. I really appreciate all everyone's time the different perspectives to learn where about the open mainframe project go to open mainframe project or you can learn about any of our 16 hosted projects and working groups on the projects page open mainframe project or slash projects. And if you're looking to get involved if you're an organization in this space and really see stewardship in the future the mainframe important to you. I encourage you looking at membership opportunities and you can learn about members and how to become a part of it and I just want to thank everyone. This has been a great panel. I hope everyone here enjoys the rest of open source strategy for and has a great day. Thanks john. Thank you john.