 Hi, this is your host Abdul Bhartian. Welcome to another episode of Mainframe Matters. Today we have to guest John Murtic, Executive Director of the Open Mainframe Project and Elizabeth K. Joseph, Global Head of the Open Source Program Office for IBM Z. Elizabeth, John, it's great to have you both on the show. Thank you. Thank you, it is definitely great to be with you. Yeah, and we're going to talk about Open Mainframe Summit and if I'm not wrong, this year we are going to have not one but two summits at two different location, West Coast and East Coast in Las Vegas and New York. John, let's get started with the first of all, talk a bit about what is Open Mainframe Summit all about and also then let's talk about why we're having two different summits and if the focus for those two summits is going to be different. Yeah, so Open Mainframe Summit, we started this event a few years ago with the idea that there really wasn't an event that brought together the open source and mainframe community into one avenue. There's a lot of great events on the mainframe side, especially community events, where they're very much driven around training education but less around sort of collaboration and interaction and building a lot of great, cool, interesting ideas and also just bringing elements of the open source community in. So this event was founded with that principle and we ran it through COVID the first couple of years, meaning it was an online event, which really went really well. I mean, we had a huge uptake, lots of interest, some great talks. Last year, we were in person in Philadelphia, which was really neat because many of the people who attended hadn't seen each other in years because of the pandemic. So it was almost a great opportunity to bring that community back together in a lot of different ways. This year, as we talked with a lot of the folks that attended the event, they said, hey, you know what, this is great stuff. How can we get this even closer to our end users who are the direct really beneficiaries of the great technology that's happening? So we had the fortune of being able to partner with two great events out there. One of them is the IBM Tech Exchange event. It's actually a new, it's a new event by name, but the concept of this event has been running for a number of different years that brings together IBM customers, users, partners all together under one roof, you know, to discuss a lot of the great technologies and the work that's happening. We're part of the day zero community day there. So that's gonna be a great opportunity. It's gonna bring together the mainframe customer and user and vendor base and kind of the people slightly removed from that as well. The second partnership is with Finos, which is another one of the projects here within the Linux Foundation. They hold a great event called open source finance forum. They've been doing it for several years now and they hold it right in Wall Street. So it brings together all of the big financial institutions with the amazing focus of having an event that's very cross-functional across a bunch of different domains, whether mainframe, web dev, cloud, blockchain, FinOps, you name it, bringing it all together. So us being a part of that event showcases mainframe as a part of that larger financial services story and helps us sort of plug in, get in front of people that we would not have necessarily before, but also better advocate because a lot of these financial services companies, there's a lot of disconnect between the mainframe side of IT and the rest of IT. And so this is an opportunity to bring it together. So it's a little bit of a split focus, but we see this as an opportunity to hit two great audiences in different unique ways with some really cool messaging. From your perspective, when we look at open mainframe summit, what value do you see it brings to not only the mainframe, but at the same time bringing the mainframe community to the open source. Can I talk about the bridge there? I mean, so in some ways, the open source community is not something that is unfamiliar to mainframers. I mean, the major conference and the major organization within the mainframe community is called Share, and it is what they do. They've been sharing technology and programs and tips and tricks for decades now. Open source name is new to the mainframe community though. And so what we're trying to do is kind of bridge that gap from what is known and what mainframers have been doing for a very long time and what is kind of the industry standard now with open source software. And that's for one, why I'm really excited that the Linux Foundation is involved in the open mainframe project in general. And now why we're bringing these events to a broader technical audience. Talk a bit about what will be the focus of tech exchange and then we'll talk about the presence of the open mainframe community there. It's really about getting professionals and folks who are interested in technology in general together to learn about a bunch of different things. So as John mentioned, we're gonna be on the community day which is like the day zero of the conference, but then woven throughout the rest of the conference will be of course more talks on IBM Z Linux one general mainframe topics along with the whole pretty much portfolio of technologies that IBM has invested in. So I think it's gonna be a really interesting opportunity for participants because they're going to be able to get the open part of it and come to the open mainframe summit and then ease into some more general topics. And it's not something that's completely, the talks are not all from IBM or it's in the main event either. I mean, the call for papers was totally public and open. So we're gonna have a lot of really interesting stories from clients and other practitioners and organizations using mainframe tools and of course other products. The focus of each event going to be different character to the audience which is going to be there or it will be the same focus irrespective of the two shows. I think we're gonna see a little bit of a different focus. The tech exchange event is really gonna be going to the bread and butter audience of main framers because you're gonna see just a lot of those users there. They're gonna be looking at other various IBM products and services and things like that. So it's gonna be a natural intersection point because the education already happening. I'm seeing sort of this Finnaz event while we will get some mainframe audience there it's certainly gonna be sort of the non-believers crowd if you would, people that may have some familiarity with the mainframe, maybe they've worked on it in the past maybe they know it, it is this box that sits on the whole other side of their company they didn't know anything about. And I think we're gonna see a lot of the focal of that event is really helping close that gap and cross that chasm and talk about the technologies that are interchanged because as we talked to these customers the mainframe deployments are not shrinking, they're growing and the challenge within any business whether it's a mainframe infrastructure, cloud, IoT, whatnot, it's how do you better leverage them within your organization to drive business results? So that is gonna be really a lot of the focus that we're gonna have is educating people on technologies like Zoe for example that really helped cross use a lot of this data and a number of other technologies and work we're doing as well. What is going to be a theme of open mainframe summits is once again same or depending on these two events it will be slightly different. Of course as you said audience is totally different and you're also looking at a kind of different kind of content also. I'm anticipating the thematic and I think we have a program committee coming together which Elizabeth is a part of that's sort of looking at the talks and coming in but I think there's gonna be a lot of thematic for the open mainframe summit within Las Vegas to be really focused on education driving awareness around the technologies helping people understand open source as it relates to it because there's a lot of information that hasn't, a lot of folks just don't understand how you engage what it's a part of things like that helping understand how these technology benefits them. There's so many of these customers that are or vendors that are building technologies that do a lot of the same things as our projects and how can we get them to work in these communities to build those technologies stronger so that they can work at a higher level. So I'm anticipating that's gonna be a big focus there where we're looking at the New York event is kind of got to where I was saying earlier about that audience may not necessarily know what's going on with open source in the mainframe but they know they want to try to leverage and bring these computing power within is talk about the technologies that are doing that the customers that are doing it successfully what those stories are looking like so they can kind of help go down their own journey. We're seeing some real pioneering customers out there that are at the forefront of driving forward with these technologies as being a part of their forward strategy. So helping showcase that thematic so that the people in attendance can see, hey, wow, we do have these mainframes and we're not taking advantage of them very well. These are the technologies to help us get there. I have you folks already started working on what kind of talks out there are you working on call for papers and things like that and what kind of content you're looking for. One of the things that we're really looking for is practitioners and folks who are already using the tools and so they can be an example to other organizations because no one wants to be the first to be using these tools and I mean, some of them maybe want to play around with it and do some development but for a lot of the organizations that we interface with they want to see proven examples out there in the industry already. So those stories or at least the building blocks on how to get there. So like, what are these tools bringing to my organization and how can I get to a place where I'm production ready? So seeing other trailblazers is really helpful. Also, one of the things I like to tell people is we really want to demystify the mainframe. When I started working in this area about four years ago I could barely tell you what a mainframe is. I said, it's a computer, does it have storage? I couldn't answer that question. And so it's really about making sure that we're telling that story and explaining that open source software does work on these systems that a lot of the tooling that is already being used by your organization can be used on the mainframe and how projects like Zoey can interact in that story. John, Elizabeth, thank you so much for taking time out today and talk about these two upcoming events. Of course, I would love to chat with you folks again and of course, we look forward to attending these events in person as well. Thank you.