 Hi, this is your host Soplin Bhartiya and welcome to another episode of Mainframe Matters. And today we have with us Andrea Orth, chair of Geneva ERS, an open mainframe project. Andrea, it's great to have you on the show. Hi, thanks for having me. We covered Geneva ERS when it was open sourced. But since you are here, I would love to know a bit about the project. What is the project all about today? Geneva ERS, it is about being able to keep the data where it is at on the mainframe, keep it in its detail form. You don't have to do any summarizations. And you read all your data one time. And then you can create as many outputs as you need, whether those go into some sort of analytics or traditional reporting. And that's one of the unique things about Geneva is that you can keep the data in the state it is where it is, you know, unlike having to replicate two different platforms and keep all that in sync. And it's very high performing. We covered the project when it was open sourced. But once again, I want to reiterate, you know, what are some of the pain points or challenges that it was created to address? It allows users traditionally, they've been very large companies to process a lot of data in a batch window. So for example, one of the traditional spaces is finance. And when you have worked in the finance space, you often have things like quarter reporting, you have year end processing, you might have special processing around tax time. And Geneva allows all these type of, in this case, finance use cases to be able to read it all at one time. You don't have to split your jobs or your processes and then get your data out to the business partners that need it. Ever since the project was created, how it has evolved and if you can also share some of the milestones and achievements that it has made over the years. How the project has evolved is almost everyone who has worked on the project has come from the mainframe space and we're all new to open source. So being in that open source space where we have evolved and matured, so we're now utilizing what you would consider as modern techniques, working on builds. There's a little bit of continuous integration, continuous delivery, modernizing some of the code base to more modern languages such as Java, instead of C++. Pain points, as a project, probably the biggest pain point is Geneva is a little different because we're processing on the back end. And there's unlike other platforms you just can't go sign up for a mainframe in the cloud type of thing. So it makes us difficult as an open source project to be able to provide the data and the metrics to show just how powerful Geneva ERS can be. Can you talk about what kind of community is around the project? Of course, I just said mostly mainframe community, but if you can just shed some light on the community around the project. Mostly mainframeers. The majority have worked with Geneva ERS at some point in their career, whether like myself, I've been a user of it a developer. And others are they have actually built the commercial version of the product. We do have people in multiple countries, the US, Australia. Once in a while, we'll get some some people from India, at least sitting in learning more about not only Geneva, but about the mainframe space and the processing that can be done. Last year, the mainframe project, you know, you folks received, you know, your own mainframe as well. Is Europe going to leverage that hardware if yes, in what capacity? We are eagerly anticipating when that mainframe is turned on available for use for the open mainframe projects. This will allow us to set up, whether it's demos or proof of concepts that will really allow us to showcase the strength of Geneva, because we can set up large amounts of data and then run it through and show just how fast Geneva is and how worthwhile it can be for someone. Let's talk a bit about, you know, in the beginning of 2023, what are the things, you know, that, you know, you folks will be working on in terms of the project this year. We are continuing to mature and our documentation. You know, Geneva is a little bit of a different project where we started from a commercial project and we're at least releasing most of that to the open source community. So Geneva already had like 20 years plus of user documentation, including very detailed reference information. We have been taking that from its previous document format, and we are now leveraging markdown, GitHub pages, Jekyll, along with some CICD, to provide that for the open source community and a lot of work has been done on that. Most of the documentation is now out on its web page. We're just starting to refine and mature it so it's easier for someone new to Geneva to pick up and start using Geneva. Andrea, thank you so much for taking time out today and talk about this project and I would love to have you back on the show again. Thank you. Thank you.