 Alright, well welcome everyone to this panel talk here and the title is trends in enterprise open source and you know we've already heard a lot in the keynotes about you know some of the things we're seeing in enterprise open source specifically around security and angles like that and I think here we're going to broaden more on an IT infrastructure aspect and seeing how we're seeing some of the interactions there especially as that is evolving and continues to evolve and we got a great set of panelists here that are going to kind of help talk about this from a number of different perspectives. I want to start off first in the middle here with just because that's the way it's in the slides I should honor it. With Misty Decker of Microfocus, Misty I don't know if you can introduce yourself. Yes my name is Misty and I am prone to singing. So I work at Microfocus and I am the director of product marketing. I've been there for not quite two years after spending 30 years at IBM all in mainframes. So a lot of what I do for my day job overlaps with what I do with the Linux Foundation and that is advocating for mainframe modernization both by modernizing on the mainframe and modernizing by moving applications off. And I do that in my role as chair of the mainframe modernization working group at the open mainframe project. And I'm also lucky enough to serve on the board for the open mainframe project. Awesome. Thank you Misty. Next, right next to me here, Len Santoluccia of ViCom Infinity. Hello everyone, Len Santoluccia. I'm the CTO and business development manager at ViCom Infinity. We are a converged company as of a year ago. And we are focused on the IBM mainframe ever since the inception of ViCom Infinity. I like Misty was a former IBM-er myself. I worked at IBM right here in New York on the Wall Street area for little over 31 years. And then when I retired in 2008 from IBM I came to work here. I've been here ever since. And next year I'll be celebrating my 50th year in the business of the mainframe. Awesome. Thank you, Len. And last certainly not least, Alex Kim of IBM. So we have two former IBM-ers and a current IBM-er. Yeah, that tells something, right? Hi everyone. My name is Alex Kim from IBM Research. I support many open source projects from IBM Research. Currently doing business development and also open source advocate. And partially I lead a small incubation project for open mainframe project called Zebra under Zoe. And I serve the financial sector clients about 15 years so far. And I was a chip designer in the beginning of my career and a mainframe crypto chip and then serve the large systems in financial sector. And right now there are many, you know, aspect of open source in the enterprise space that, you know, our research colleagues contribute and as part of the open mainframe project that we can have some interactions, very interesting interactions with our team and as well as, you know, mainframe foundation, open mainframe project. Awesome. Thank you. So the theme that we kind of really want to hit on is if you look at enterprise computing over the past few decades, it's sort of has transformed where an enterprise was looking for software and services. They wouldn't found a vendor. That vendor gave them this is all the things that we provide. You kind of signed on with that vendor. You got all the stuff that they provided and, you know, every, you know, life continues on. That's sort of where some of the famous sayings of you don't get fired for filling the blank companies are probably came from. But, you know, over time, all of that changes, you know, part of it is just through market forces where companies get acquired. Different business units come together, you know, some of the decision making changes in different areas and you all of a sudden end up with this sort of one might look at it as a spaghetti code of infrastructure, but another kind of looks at it as, you know, hybrid and, you know, different pieces of legacy infrastructure that one might be inheriting. And back, you know, not too long ago, people would look at that and say, oh, geez, well, that's just kind of, you know, the cost of doing business. You inherit all these pieces. You inherit all these old systems. You inherit all these different approaches and you kind of have to, you know, figure out how to weave them together. But one trend that I think I know I personally have seen and I think a lot of these folks in this panel have seen is no longer is that kind of that cost of doing business, but instead that's a competitive advantage because forward thinking enterprises sit back and think, you know, if I want to be just as good in an IT customer engagement aspect as my competitors, I would call up my fill in the blank vendor rep and have them fill in and give me exactly what's off the shelf. But my ability to uniquely engage my customer, you know, not only is just me from a business standpoint, but me from an IT standpoint and the systems and tooling that I built up, that's a competitive advantage to me. And what that means is enterprises are more and more, you know, hybrid. They probably all along have been very hybrid, but now it's sort of coming to the forefront is, you know, we've seen cloud take off and we also see edge take off and all sorts of different computing infrastructure. So I want to throw this sort of first question to the group here. Oops, I skipped too many ahead. Why do you all see enterprises embracing hybrid? Whoever wants to jump on that one first? Go for it. Okay. Hybrid is becoming popular because, first of all, it helps them protect the investment that they already have made for many, many years with their legacy, traditional systems they have in place, and then leverage them with the newer technologies that are available in public and private clouds. And hence that produces what we all know now today as a hybrid environment. One of the things that I've noticed over the last 50 years is history has a tendency to repeat itself. And if you look at the many times of things trying to replace mainframes over the years, PCs, sun systems, 86 clusters, you know, things like that over time, they all still seem to have the need for the legacy mainframe systems to hang around because that's where a lot of the data resides that they need. So the people that have gotten smart at this now are those that have gone by way of hybrid. The blending of the different worlds leveraging each other's strength instead of trying to play them against each other. And it's really been working out quite well. That's kind of things I've been seeing. I'd like to add to that, if I may. Go for it. I've developed a new pet peeve. There's a word that I've come to hate and the word is the, T-H-E, the, because so often people talk about the best way, the way, the best platform. And I don't think there is one best way. Hybrid is becoming popular among a range of options. There is modernizing on the mainframe. That's one way. Modernizing by moving everything off of the mainframe. That's another way. And there's also modernizing by having a hybrid approach. So I struggle with this implication when people say the that there's only one way. And a lot of what I've been trying to advocate for is step back away from that innate desire to find the best because there isn't the best. We don't need to have that philosophical debate about, is it the mainframe or is it cloud or is it hybrid? It's irrelevant. The debate is what's best for that application. What is best for that business? It also, it also helps that the hybrid does not roll very well off the tongue. So go ahead, Alex. I think it means they had a great point where putting things where it makes sense where it does the best, right? I used it though, but different different aspect, right? So everybody in financial sector here probably, you know, been living in multi-vendor, multi-solutions, not only one vendor, right? You always have a backup plan. You're this kind of smartest, you know, tech industry people and you know how to do that very well. And even before the war, the word hybrid cloud or hybrid computing came on board, they knew what to do with the multi-vendor, you know, solutions. And hybrid is just format of those infrastructure being in the right place, I think, and take advantage of the, you know, being agile and being, you know, taking advantage of, you know, putting the best solution out there and such as like, you know, using the right API for your banking solutions and exchanging the data with other partners, you always come to the right place to choose right solution. And with this modern, you know, computing world, we always have, you know, best platform to put the right workload. And I think that's where, you know, this large system can actually play a big role that they can become the core for the data-centric, you know, repository. And other, you know, places can make more sense to put other, you know, upfront transactions services, too. So one of the kind of, and as you can see, we are here, we have a crowd that definitely has a lot of experience in the mainframe industry. And one of, I guess you could say the dirty words in mainframe is called modernization. And it's often because it's such a loaded term, you know, one might even consider it a cover term for, you know, for moving things, you know, away from that architecture. And to be honest, I think it's also one that kind of, you know, prevails to any sort of legacy technology, you know, let's move away from, you know, this data center we maintain to a cloud, you know, let's move away from, you know, what we might have been doing before computing to maybe edge computing, you know, let's move away from, you know, a Windows-based system to Linux, all those things. Modernization kind of has always had that sort of veil of rip and replace. But that's not really necessarily the case. And Misty, I think you'd mentioned modernization as a big passion of yours. I know I've hit a nerve there. So start talking. Modernization is my favorite word. So if you talk to a mainframe company like IBM, they'll use modernization to mean updating in place on your mainframe. And let's say you're changing your development process to DevOps on the mainframe. If you talk to a non-mainframe company, a company that's not making money in the mainframe, like a cloud vendor, they use that term to mean moving off the mainframe. And I did a Google search and I found fully 50% of the articles assume you understand that modernization means in place. And 50% of the articles assume that you know modernization means moving off. That's a lot of confusion. So I am on a mission to redefine that word across the industry. So I'm building a coalition of these very different points of view, bringing everybody to the table through the open mainframe project, a brand new working group called the modernization working group. And we're going to create a single definition that's agreed to across the industry. And it will probably be an outcomes oriented definition instead of a technology oriented definition because that word modernization when you apply it to technology kind of implies new, right, new modern technology. But what really matters is that you're meeting the modern needs of the business. So we're going to define modernization in terms of outcomes. And we're going to build a repository of thought leadership materials, contributed by this wide range of vendors. So side by side, you will have a white paper that says why you need to do your DevOps off of the mainframe, and you will have a white paper that says why you need to do your DevOps on the mainframe. And you can read both side by side and make your own conclusion, completely agnostic. And the reason I'm so passionate about it. I love this mainframe. The war has bothered me my whole career. The war, you know what I'm talking about, right? The war mainframe versus everything else. That mainframe team in your organizations, I see some head nods. They're very insular, and they just hold on to everything as tight as they possibly can. And then every other part of the company either ignores that mainframe team and ignores those mainframe assets. It's fine. We're just going to ignore it. We're going to do all the innovation over here. Or they're actively attacking them during to get rid of them, right? We have and the reason I love my new company is because we do all of that modernization. We don't pick a side. And we have a brand new customer case study where AG insurance did modernization in a way that acknowledged the mainframe people and the non mainframe people and drove a cultural transformation through the technology transformation. So that's what I'm hoping. I know small goals. I'm going to stop a war. And I'm going to bring very different vendors all together to the table into one big happy family. But that is that is what we're trying to do. Seems almost too simple, right? I don't know if you either have anything bad briefly quick to that. I'll just make it quick. So I know missy is very passionate about modernization. So I can understand. So the question, you know, what does it mean? Right? I think modernization is something that you want to sustain. It's about sustainability. Yeah, how do you maintain your software, you know, for 10, 20, 30 more years, right? All the software that written for Microsoft Windows 3.0, like 30 years ago, it's not running the same way today. They have been modified, modernized, and different languages, different platforms, same thing. Same thing goes to every platform and every industry sectors, right? You want to make it more sustainable. And you want to make it more innovative. So choosing right platform that support from hardware to all the software stack to innovate and then sustainable, I think that's the modernization. Yeah. So I know you all came to an open source conference and we've kind of won a big detour here in the mainframe, but I want to kind of pull back a little bit and say, Okay, well, how does open source fit into all of this? And what we see is, is it's that connective thread? And if you think about it in any technology that's out there, open source has been that connective thread and it pulls so much together. And I want to kind of throw that at you, because we need to get to you on the last question here. You know, you've seen it as you're working with your customers. Tell us about how you're seeing open source become that connective thread. Well, you know, when you're dealing with enterprise customers that that are heavily oriented towards the mainframe, open source not too long ago was kind of a dirty word, you know, and now what we're seeing is that open source is actually something that connects them to a lot of different things that they never would have thought of connecting with before, especially in and around this topic of modernization. And you know, when we were acquired by this converge company, we were acquisition number 21, I think, at in October of last year. So a year ago. Now, there are over 35 companies that have been acquired as of this October. And what this has done is that we are there, we are converges mainframe practice because we are a mainframe company, but being associated with all these other companies, we now are finding that we can bring this tech these insights from all these different things in and around open source and other things that never were thought of before. And now these were actually ending up being kind of the glue to bring it back to this what really modernization should be as misty defined it very well, as as well as what we were talking about before with hybrid. And it's really kind of becoming that glue that's bringing all these different pieces together, in my humble opinion. Now that's that's really interesting insight, you're just seeing it, you know, from a company standpoint, but then, you know, you're bringing different parts of your customers in, you know, that might have been in siloed areas. And now you have this common language of open source and open technologies that are yanking it together. And that's the thread. I don't know if either you want to add or you want to add something other Alex. Yeah, yeah, I think connection to connecting to other side of the companies as well as communities is a great benefit of open source community. I've been with this open mainframe project from the beginning about eight years ago. Throughout the time, there were very interesting points of life going through these communities, communities, starting with a very small team of, let's say, 20 people. Now, if you go to our Slack channel, there was, you know, a few thousand people. And as you probably heard over, you know, in the beginning of pandemic, you know, New Jersey governor say, you know, covalts, right? So meaning, you know, cobalt, programmers are needed for supporting those, you know, the programs that the New Jersey state government wanted. They were looking for people. And as a community, we could actually get our people together. And then, you know, means to be, you know, cobalt experts here to play a big role that providing support or answering questions, finding people. And those are the really, really great value that, you know, the open source community can bring together. In our open mainframe project, you know, there are many different generations from even middle school kids to high school college kids. And then there are people who have been in industry for over 50 years that who still maintain the software they wrote 50 years ago. You wouldn't believe it. We still have people who wrote in tape library or tape, even not library tape as a tape, still supporting those code that that doesn't work. That that is the amazing part of being open in community in this organization. I think it's amazing. Yeah, I have a fun party trick for all of you. Well, it's not a party trick. It's a fun thing to do at work. Go find you're all here because you're fans of open source. Obviously, I'm just going to assume that. Go find your CTO, your open source teams, even go to your mainframe teams and say, did you know there's open source for the mainframe and then watch their face? Yeah, yeah, it's it'll be really fun. You'll just shock the heck out of them. Yeah, and it's a great segue in here, because a lot of those were driving here. And if you look at some of these projects up here, you know, yes, we've had projects have been driven for more than 50 years. It's the one interesting thing that if you go talk to your folks who have been around for quite a while, the first thing that they'll say to you, if you talk about any new technology, they'll say, oh, geez, we did that 30 years ago on the mainframe. Why are you like bringing this up? But what we're seeing is so much of the innovation now is focused on those glue parts of connecting things together. And here's a sampling of projects on even the cobalt, but that's kind of more in the form of a programming course, which is actually teaching cobalt using VS code, not a 3270 terminal, and using sort of modern technologies and techniques there. But Zoe pulling together ZOS back with the rest of your enterprise with REST APIs and command line interfaces and GUI tools and Feilong that's making it so that you can deploy out, just in the same way you deploy out an application over OpenStack to an x86 or cloud server, you hit it the same way out to a Linux on Z machine there. So yeah, that's interesting talk technologies that are starting to form here. And I don't know if any of you guys want to make any comments on any of those. Yeah, it's definitely Alex. So I'm part of the Zoe community that develops all those modern interface to mainframe. And we have been getting lots of lots of clones and downloads over the past three, four years. And I think it changes not only the users of open source, but traditional application users and developers, they get to see what the benefit of open source community can be. And so the keynote just before that how to start becoming a member of open source community, we actually experiencing with Zoe and also fell on and also cobalm. The people come from, you know, non mainframe space and trying to understand through what they know already about from, you know, their experience and becoming on expert on mainframe. And the other why the mainframe experts that doesn't know about open source, they know how to contribute how to become a community member through this effort. That was a major experience. Yeah, and that's kind of an interesting thing is, you know, as many of you come from an open source space, maybe not so much a mainframe space and Missy sort of talked about a little bit of that tension that happens there. That's kind of a way to sort of cross that bridge a little bit is say, Hey, you know what, I see you're the mainframe. There's some cool open source being driven there. How can we collaborate? How can I kind of help you learn the ropes there? And at the same time, you're learning that technology and making a connection. So it's it's kind of a fabulous thing that it's doing on a lot of different levels. I know we don't have a ton of times. I want to get to one real quick one here, and then we'll have maybe a couple of minutes for any questions from the audience. In a brief second, what do you all see that's next out of this this growth of open source that's happening in enterprise and bringing together, especially around the mainframe? Well, I obviously care about modernization in the working group and building a repository of thought leadership. What I'd really like to do is bridge mainframe modernization with modernization of non mainframe things and stop dividing everything even from a thought leadership point of view. So we're starting this working group in the open mainframe project, but we do have plans to bridge it to other Linux foundation projects and broaden the topic and broaden the repository of thought leadership. Yeah. I want to see also crossing the bridges that innovation doesn't have a boundaries, right? There are so many interesting projects that started from outside of our open mainframe project, such as IBM researchers at Tresl compliance tool for security that landed in a Linux one machine that utilizes open source packages. And then there are some modernization tools like conveyor that can come to our community and play a role. I want to invite all of this of today's Athena's opens source financial forum projects, try to see what they can do with our community. We want to invite everybody to see what can we do together. And to add to what Missy and Alex have said. My desire is that, you know, as I decide to move on to other things in my second 50 years, this is what I'd like to see. No matter what the attribute is of the application, whether it's IO intensive, numerically intensive or data in memory type of intensity, once you understand the attributes, what three of those it may or may not have of your application. Now, you have this big thing in the sky. It should be decided by the effort to see. It's kind of getting their hybrids helped out a lot. And lessons learned from the past that people found out, you know, the word is bad. And there is not one single solution. It's a combination. And I'm hoping to see that as I move on to some other things in the future. It's a great world, hopefully moving forward. And one thing that we're trying to, that the open mainframe project is trying to do is to make sure that, you know, there's a place for this innovation can happen. And, you know, if you're familiar with Linux Foundation projects, you know, just that vendor neutrality in the area to have this open collaboration is one half of it. One thing I'm always asked about is, hey, John, if you say this mainframe is so great, how can I get access to one? That's a real hard thing to do. Well, this is something that we're solving. We have a mainframe that we're working to get online here in 2023. That's the actual mainframe sitting in a box all wrapped up. And this is something that we are making to make available to any open source project that wants to get their heart, get their project supported on it. This is something you'll have access to. And this is more of this to come here. But this is sort of the commitments we have of trying to help bridge the enterprise because enterprise can't support these applications unless you know, these communities have the tools to do it. And so that's what we're looking there to provide. So I want to go into Marist College, a board meeting was just yesterday. And I'm on that board. And they are very excited about this. They showed a picture of it during the board meeting. And you know, brought up that, you know, will be helping you install it and keep it going. As John well knows that donation from Broadcom and Marist is hosting it. They're up in Poughkeepsie. And they're very excited about it because now they can actually have their students get involved with this. And they already are making plans for this as we speak. They mentioned that during the session yesterday. If you ever get excited looking into Raspberry Pi, right? And you should be really excited to get into mainframe access. It's cool hardware. It's cool hardware. Well, I know we're right at time here, but we're going to be around here. But if we do, maybe you have a quick minute, we can take any questions that anybody might have from the audience right up front there. Yes. Yeah. Yes, there is. Yep. If you ever go to Ivan Cloud, there is a bell metal that you can access to mainframe Linux. Yes, go ahead. Well, I mean, I will just say from my perspective, I think when we've seen technology shifts, they happen slowly over time. And I think the first one we're starting to see here is the deeper use of open source on this architecture. And that's sort of the first move. We saw Linux come to the architecture line was a part of that back in the late 90s. What the future holds, it's going to be always interesting to see for sure. I will say that there is this is an architecture here that is once to the test of time. But I think two has always been built with design principles in mind. And I think that's sort of a fascinating thing here. And how that continues to evolve in the future, who knows, but really the focus here at this point, let's get this to be a place where enterprises can deploy the same software that they're doing in other places. And let's open this up so that other people can try this out. And it's not this sort of hidden thing at the back of a data center that nobody has any idea about or how to use. Let's get this in the hands of more people. Ravi, I want to challenge you and everyone else to re look at how you think about the mainframe because I find that people conflate mainframe applications with the mainframe hardware. Those applications can run anywhere. I mean, that's that's literally half of our businesses taking those applications off the mainframe and running them in the cloud in AWS and Azure on X86. Those applications can be modernized on that mainframe. It's it's the applications that are really important. It's what those do for your business. And going back to Len's point, his view of the future, where the server underneath is just a server. And in fact, it is the only reason we keep thinking we have to get rid of the mainframe is because we've got issues with those applications. That's why modernization is so important to me. Modernization is not about the server. Modernization is about the applications and what they do for your business, whether it's on the hardware or off. It goes the same way to I'm sorry, just one quick to the other way. Their application from non mainframe goes to mainframe and financials inclined over here in New York recently deployed like thousands of MongoDB on mainframe just because the architecture support better on that, you know, the hardware. Well, we are we are way over time here, but I'll get the question. You'll get your last question and then we probably need to bail. Go ahead. Good question. Yeah. Yeah, OK, this one's mine because this is kind of what we do. So if you wanted to move that code, there's one of the things that people sell is is automatic translation into another programming language. I personally think that's too risky because how often does Google translate translate English into another language and kind of mess it up, right? So there's that there's moving it with something like we offer, which is enterprise server, which lets it run just like it's on a mainframe, but it's actually in the cloud and you can actually run it cloud native with that underneath. So so you can move those applications wholesale. Just it's exactly the same thing. But what I want to argue here is moving the application in and of itself is not modernization, right? It might be part of your strategy of how you're going to modernize that application, but modernization is doing something with that application, whether it's on the cloud or on the mainframe, it's adding an API, so it's breaking it into micro services. It's all of those things. That is what modernization really is. I don't know if you watched the opening keynote with the chat GPT joke. AI going to play a big role in that part as well. If you go, you know, check out IBM Research, the AI for Code Project, we are working very hard to help clients with the old legacy code to convert to eventually will be very, it will be very, very key too. All right, we are way over time and the next presenters are here patiently. Thank you all so much. We'll be around here in the hall if you all want to talk to each other, everybody. Thank you.