 Hello, everyone. Welcome to this session, Bridging Modern DevOps in the Main Frame. We have a great panel of folks that have been around the Main Frame for quite some time, have a lot of depth of expertise, and we'll be sharing just a lot of their thoughts around this specific topic and what we're seeing in this emerging DevOps movement as it's coming within the Main Frame environment. So first, let's introduce who our panelists are. I'm the moderator and panelist. A bit here. My name is John Murtik. I'm director of Open Main Frame Project. I'm also part of the Linux Foundation, serving as the director of program management. And I work with a number of our communities, including the Open Main Frame Project on driving success and open collaboration. And we have two other great panelists from our Open Main Frame project community. Len, why don't you start? Hello, everybody. My name is Len Santoluccia. I am the chairperson of the Open Main Frame Project governing board. I am also the chief technology officer and business development manager for IBM business partner ViCom Infinity. And prior to my time with ViCom Infinity, which has been about almost 12 and a half years now, I was with IBM for 31 years. And my career has been entirely centered around the IBM Main Frame. Awesome. Thank you, Len. We also have with us today Jen Francis from IBM. Jen, you introduce yourself. Hi, I am Jen Francis. I am a developer advocate with IBM. I'm also an open group master certified architect. So I have the privilege of working with developers from every kind of space you could imagine to help teach them about how they can work better with the IBM Z platform and the different technologies that run on it. Awesome. Thank you, Jen. Thank you both, Jen and Len, for participating in this. And you can see we have a depth of great experience here on this panel. So I think to really start to dig into this topic, we really have to turn back the page a little bit. The Open Main Frame Project turned five this year, which is a big milestone in any foundation. And, you know, Len, I know you were involved at the very early days of this, so you probably have some great insight. And then I'd love to hear, you know, Jen, some of your commentaries of, you know, talk about the challenges and opportunities that led to the creation of the Linux Foundation's Open Main Frame Project. And then from there, two years ago, the Zoey initiative. Jen, I don't know if you wanted to go first. You go first, Len. Okay. All right. Well, you know, I had the distinct pleasure of being part of the Linux Foundation Open Main Frame Project since its inception. It's actually at the same time when IBM decided to announce what they call today the IBM Linux One System. And it's been a very good organization for helping bring the mainframe into the world of open source and different kinds of open projects similar to what's been going on with Zoey. And prior to that time, I was also able to be part of the initiative when IBM decided first to get involved with Linux in general back in the 1999 time frame and to see it evolve to what it did. And then eventually with the Linux Foundation Open Main Frame Project coming about, you can really get the feeling that the IBM mainframe and its associated software products that are within IBM and also from other companies who are involved with Linux on the mainframe are really starting to take hold of this whole concept. And it's helping organizations that might not have ever thought of the mainframe as a platform that they would implement their Linux and open source solutions onto are now taking a good second look because with the name of the Linux Foundation behind the open mainframe project, which is where Linus Torvalds resides, really I think makes a very big difference. It's helping break down barriers that normally were in the way, standing in the way of the mainframe being considered in other areas other than traditional types of workloads. And I have seen in these last five years, I've just been a whirlwind of really seeing this acceleration because now there are what, John, around 12, 13 projects now in the open mainframe. 15, wow. At least at the time it is recording. It's just hard to keep track of them. And I try to get involved with as many of them as I can, working it around what we all call our day jobs. And just seeing the different kinds of people and meeting new people outside of the traditional mainframe world has been just extremely exciting. So John, that's a little bit of what I've been seeing and how I feel about what I see going on. That's fantastic, Len. Jen, I don't know if you work a lot as a developer advocate with developers in the field. I'm sure you have some interesting context of how you've seen this come around. Yeah, so I love some of what Lin had to say. So pre-open mainframe project and really pretty kind of the Zoey initiative. We were running Linux on L-Pars on Z when we announced the Linux 1 system in and of itself that really kind of gave a new life. It brought in a new set of developers. It brought in a new ecosystem. And it's really opened up the doors to who we've worked with. And having the open mainframe project announced around that time and really opening up the collaboration and actually gave us a better place to play and meet and talk because before it was a lot of ad hoc, I might be out meeting with customers and they might say something and maybe some of their developers or some of their system programmers wanted to contribute to things. But it was hard to know what code ran on Linux 1 and what code ran on the mainframe or could we tweak it or what's been happening? And it was just hard to keep track of everything. And actually having that community through the Linux Foundation for the open mainframe project has actually allowed better collaboration and knowing what we can actually do and actually work together. It's not IBM's doing this and we've got to wait on IBM. It's actually, no, we're all working on these systems together. We're all working on this technology and actually collaborating and driving the initiatives that we see are important. Yeah, exactly. And from the Linux Foundation, we see this in ecosystem, industry, community, after community. The desperate efforts when they come together under one umbrella, all of a sudden the innovation kicks off, especially as you get industry competitors coming to the table. And this is always a great example of that. IBM Rocket Software and Broadcom, they partnered on this, but they're competitors. Like they're going after the same customers, they have competitive offerings up against one another, yet they're collaborating in this arena, which is really an interesting aspect and sometimes a little counterintuitive to folks. But, you know, we see this time and time again in every industry we're a part of. You get these industry leaders that come together, they're competitors, but the R&D that comes from it is amazing. And one of our big projects with the Linux Foundation kind of pre-Zoe was Hyperledger, that whole project under the Linux Foundation, and it was the exact same situation, and that has taken off in its own business unit. It's got this massive life in IBM that we built on top of, but it all started with that collaboration and working with, I call them our front of means, because we, you know, might compete against some aspects, we also work with them and we collaborate with them. And the Linux Foundation in a few different areas is where we're given us a chance to do that, to drive more innovation. Absolutely. And you know, what's interesting is, as we talk about open source in this collaboration, most people don't realize that this really all started with the main frame. You know, when I talk about the history of open source, I have to start at 1955 with share, as, you know, mainframe operators coming together in the Los Angeles area got together in a room and they collaborated. They had this new hardware from IBM, and I believe it's, and Len Kirkmeyer, I think it's the IBM Model 701, if I'm not mistaken. Yes. I got that right. They all got together in a room and they said, you know, we have this new hardware. Let's get ideas of how this works. Let's collaborate on the ideas. And those things built up over time to in 1975, one of our newest projects to the open mainframe project, but one that's, you know, right now in its fourth decade, CBT tape was a collection of all of that early work put together really before open source and really even the free software movement were a thing. And so it's really interesting because you just, you know, there's often a saying in the mainframe world that, you know, everything that's new in technology, the mainframeers have done two decades ago. But I think just this idea of collaboration is rooted as well. And I know Len, I don't want to call upon you as just sort of the statesman in here, but I know you've seen a lot of that firsthand. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. You know, from 1955 through 1964, you know, there were seven different architectures that existed. And then, you know, IBM took the big gamble and announced on April 7, 1964, this thing today we call the IBM mainframe, which brought all those different architectures under one umbrella. And it's never been the same. And so that innovation and that open concept, open source concept that existed way back when from the 55 until then is what really helped bring us to where we are today. We all have a lot to be thankful for that. Absolutely. It's absolutely. It's absolutely. And I'm sure Jen probably in your work out in the communities, you've seen the spirit. Yeah, one of the things that made me think of this was listservs. I know when you join an open mainframe project or you join any kind of community project, you usually join the mailing list and things like that. But mainframes have listserv. I don't even know how long, which was kind of the original place of like, yeah, this is going to reach out to the community or here's where I'm going to collaborate. Right. Yeah, that's right, Jen. You're right. Right. Yeah, everything. Yeah, everything old is new, I suppose, right? But it's great to build upon the heritage that this community has brought us. And it's thrilled to sort of see it come full circle here. I could go into history all day long, but I know we have some really forward looking topics to look at. And really here, Zoe, and Jen, this is one I really want to throw your direction here. Zoe is really truly this first open source project based on ZOS. And that's a real landmark move because this platform is often being considered very proprietary, very locked down. And the idea of having an open source project focused on this platform is extremely revolutionary. I was at Sharon St. Louis when it was announced. And I just remember sitting in the room and seeing all of these mainframes has been around this platform for decades. And you could just see their mind was blown. Like they just didn't almost know how to react. So talk to you a little bit about, you know, this is an integration platform, the management and, you know, just talk a little bit about that. Yeah, so a few things I want to point out with Zoe and how it was so original. And so definitely is the first open source based project through the open mainframe project. And I want to point out a clear some clear distinctions. You'll hear people talk about what about this open source software for ZOS. And it might actually be software that they've adapted or work with the architecture to actually run on ZOS. And we see a lot of that. But Zoe is really the first one that you can actually contribute upstream to. It's not very often we see that on ZOS for all the reasons, John, you just mentioned, because it is really considered this proprietary platform. So Zoe has really kind of been the game changer in this space. And we're actually seeing more and more projects come out, which is really actually pretty cool. The thing I love about Zoe, particularly working with a developer audience is it actually changes the game for how I can work with the mainframe or with IBM Z with ZOS. For the first time, we actually have a CLI that allows me most of the functions I'm used to through a green screen, which as a developer is everything. I can't I don't even know how many CLIs I have on my laptop. I've got some for when I'm working with the cloud. I've got some for when I'm working with ZLS and I've got some for pretty much any kind of language or tooling I might need. But that allows me to easily work with them. And it's I'm so used to them being set up on my system and just being able to do what I want. That if I use somebody else's system or I remote into something else, I often forget that oh, I might have to do some setup just because that is my everyday tool. And it's just it's just there. So Zoe with that part of the function line is just amazing. The second part that it kind of builds on is being able to maybe do things through a web page using some of the API integration to be able to offer different tools for administration. It basically allows different ways that we've always talked about or dreamed about but are not actually realities and they're it's actually fairly easy to get to do. You do some setup on ZLS and you do some setup maybe on your system if necessary. And now I've got this functionality. I don't have to worry about can I get an emulator to work and I run a Mac and emulators are really fussy on Macs. So this is actually a much better option for me. Absolutely. Now this is this is brought a whole new group of people really to ZOS and even IBM has a program called master the mainframe that they just saw and they integrated Zoe into it just because they knew it was making that connection, which has been fantastic to see and the uptake has been really amazing. And in particular, you know, so it came, you know, we had three initial organizations that did the contribution of the Zoe code between IBM, Broadcom and Rocket software with the aim of getting more organizations, more developers involved and certainly you've seen some growth happen and actually one of the early companies outside of those three to really start working with it has been Viacom Infinity. And I know when you have some folks in your staff that have done some really interesting things with this, maybe tell us a little bit about that and some of the experiences. Oh, yes. Boy, do I appreciate that opening to talk about that. And in my one of my solution architects would love hearing this if he was available to and be on here with me Alex Kim. There is a project that we took advantage of when Zoe came out something we call Viva Viacom Infinity voice assistant. Now everybody's very familiar with Alexa and Google Home, you know, the consumer versions of voice assistants, but when we get this idea to want to command and direct the mainframe, we kind of hesitated to do it with an Alexa type architecture or Google Home type architecture because they're not secure. But Zoe being able to work directly with ZOS and the IBM Z platform does allow Viva to be perfectly secure for enterprise customers who are very conscious of that aspect. And it allows it to interface into the hyper protect virtual services that are available that are FIPS 140 compliant. Not even administrators can access any of the data or anything in the way of voice coming through it, let alone the people who are using the voice assistant. And so now we have gotten the attention of the world in the world of the mainframe. Oh, wow. You mean now we can actually use our voice for. I bet you never thought that would be the day back when you saw these roll off the line back in the day, did you? No, no way, no way. But you know, talk about addressing a skills issue. I mean, as long as you can talk the language, like we're talking right here, you're going to be able to talk to the mainframe. And for those of you that might remember the 2001 Space Odyssey movie when you could talk to the computer was all simulated. And same thing with I'm a Trekkie. So you know, Star Trek, you could talk to the computer on Star Trek. Well, it's here today, you can talk to the mainframe. And, you know, it's fantastic. And it's using Zoe. It's using the Zoe technology. And it's building on that open technology and that open source community that has come together. I mean, none of that would have been possible without that. Yeah. It would have been a lot harder. It would have been a lot harder. And being able to interface that and then use other features like Watts and speech detects and text to speech. And again, that hyper protect capabilities because of Zoe being leveraged here. It's fantastic. Nothing else like this exists. And that's all using the Zoe application programming interface. That's right. It's just phenomenal. That's that I opened up that you could say, hey, you know, instead of saying, hey, Google or Alexa, like, you can actually have that call back to find out any from your mainframe. So you know how you talk to, hey, Alexa or hey, Google, you talk to the mainframe, hey, TJ, TJ Watson, Thomas. Oh, boy, very good. Everything TJ Watson would have thought he would have been the voice of the mainframe, huh? Neither one of them, senior or junior. And, you know, my family knows them. So it feels good to be able to keep their memory alive. Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah, I mean, just seeing this sort of innovations happening. And I don't know, Jen, even from your, from you being out in the field there, I mean, what kind of, what, I mean, I don't know if you're seeing an Alexa for mainframe happening, but what other kind of cool innovations are you seeing now that this ecosystem has been opened up thanks to this open source project? Oh, wow. Gosh. So I have to pick on this for a minute. And so there's been a lot. So I love, so massive mainframe is actually kind of one of the ways that we're really opening up. When you are working with new audiences, instead of having the kind of initial hurdle of adjusting to a green screen, and it's kind of funny, and I say it in like a loose sense of the word funny, but you have to teach people you can't like move your mouse and cursor on a field on a, you know, an emulator when you're in ISPF, you have to, you know, tab and make sure it's in a certain spot. So so much of teaching somebody the mainframe was just these like little nuances of basically how you would interact with it. And then having an interface like Zoey, we basically remove that. You can have them using tools. They already know most people, hopefully have learned how to use a terminal or they're quicker to pick that up. So if you have a CLI setup, they can do that. If they like, you know, GUIs, they could use the web page, or they could use something like the s code to still interact. So it's actually enabled us to work with a lot of audiences and much faster way with a faster learning curve. And then from that, having that API platform is allowing so much more integration. You know, we played with different monitoring tools where you could monitor different parts of the US and having the Zoey API interface just basically standardizes that. So now a lot of people can try to do that and basically have better innovation. So we're seeing, you know, throughout the ecosystem, a lot of people leveraging this technology to really drive what they're building for our customers. Awesome. No, that's fantastic. It's definitely getting a resurgence and developer interest, technical interest, and just offerings that are around it. And we're seeing a huge downstream ecosystem growing. I mean, I think today we have over 30 Zoey conformant offerings from five different vendors, which is really a fantastic sign of health and vibrancy in here. So digging into our next question here, and this kind of gets us back to the DevOps top because, I mean, really, one of the drivers with Zoey was how do we unite the data? How do we unite IT? How do we make it so that talking to a mainframe, working with a mainframe, you can bring that data in with all of the rest of the line of business systems, which has really been the driver of, you know, we need, you know, like you mentioned, a CLI, we need REST APIs, we need common frameworks, we've even seen the rise of programming premium language specific frameworks start to come through here. And maybe this is a great question for you, Jen, and maybe it's a little bit of a segue from your last topic there. You know, by looking at these new interfaces and this API mediation layer you spoke about, enterprises now can integrate rich mainframe resources back with the rest of their organization. What are the impacts that you're starting to see? I mean, are you starting to see some interesting success stories or just impacts with the customers you work with? Yeah, so any company, any organization that actually really takes this kind of API first, whether it's for the mainframe or for any platform to heart, it actually really quickly opens up the opportunity for integration to pretty much anything. So one of the things we try to help people think through is when I, it's easy to create an app on your laptop by yourself operating in this like little, you know, my little world. But the reality of it is none of us live just in our little world as much as we might like to some days. We do interact with other things. So having that API first mentality, having a way to expose something like the mainframe that's running, you know, thousands and millions of transactions that has all this rich data, it actually enables a broader set of people to come into you much easier and a very standardized way. If you tell a developer, if you tell a technician, hey, I've got, you know, these API endpoints, they're like, okay, yeah, great, I can, you know, call that real quick. And most of the time, if you say, oh, I want this to integrate, somebody's going to ask you, like, is there an API for that? One is documentation, but then two, it's a standardized way to talk. It's not, okay, I've got to create a JDBC driver, or I've got to set up some other type of driver, I've got to figure out how to format it or I've got to use the specific language. It's just the standard interface that allows us to get what we need, where we need it, and then display that back if we choose to or work with it or whatever we need to do. Definitely, definitely. I mean, it's, you know, every, every enterprise I've ever talked to, you know, the name of the game is that they have a very, you know, diverse set of IT infrastructures, and it's not just cloud or on-prem, but they have edge computing, they have different locations and all of that. And, you know, the nirvana moment for these organizations is how can all of that be leveraged together? Like, how can we have viewpoints into all of that? And mainframe before this was sort of the boxed-off area, like, it was the hard one to get at. You had to sort of go talk to the side of IT that you might not like to talk to very often. And now those walls are coming down and leading in that API-first mentality, you know, it's, it's what we see in every other industry and it's just coming here. Yeah, and it's funny you say that my, if you look at my architecture specialist integration, I spent my whole career working with integration. And, you know, before we were talking about ESPs and you've got to, you know, change how the data is structured. And there's still a place for that. I'm not saying those are going away because you work with specific formats like H11 and all of its subtypes and you definitely still need ESPs. But we can still standardize the interface. We're going to have to use an ESP for every single way we want to, you know, talk and get data. We can actually use APIs to kind of become the standard point of integration. I very, really have somebody ask about, oh, you know, how do I get that through the ESP? Do I need to format or change this data format or anything like that? It's, I'm going to probably get a JSON response back. And it's just made life so much easier. So adopting this kind of API first mentality and Zoey's really opened that door for the ZOS side. Absolutely. Absolutely. And I know, Len, I mean, you've been working with customers for decades now. And I know the concept of, you know, and you've probably had all these customers keep saying to you, you know, Len, how can I, how can I use my mainframe with the rest of my business? Oh, yes. And all of that. How has the impact of this trend, you know, Zoey coming to the picture, a unified sort of DevOps across the enterprise that's enabled from this and this API first mentality, how have you started to see this sort of change the tune with your customers and sort of open their eyes? Wow, that's a very good question. And I happen to be in the middle of some of these exact discussions with these customers, you know, for those that don't know, we're are located in New York City. Our offices are at Penn Plaza next door to Madison Square Garden. So we're right in the thick of it. You're right in the heart of things. Yeah. And, you know, New York is the financial capital of the world. And we have a lot of financial services clients. Just these last few weeks, to be exact, we've had a number of these financial firms asked me specifically for detailed education about DevOps, how they can bring their mainframes into the DevOps world. And they're, they actually even have specific teams centered around the modernization and transformation of the mainframe, which includes DevOps among a lot of other things just besides DevOps. And the first sessions that they asked me to put together for them in web access, since we can't be together face to face yet, was about Zoe. I kid you not. And when they hear about what Zoe can do and how it can interface to their traditional systems that they have on the mainframe today, they said this by far is one of the top of mind topics that they're going to take forward with their efforts of transforming and modernizing their mainframe environments, as well as, you know, getting it integrated with DevOps, operations that is going on in the systems that surround and connect into the mainframe today. So that's why I said it was such a great question. As you can see, it's just absolutely utilizing these interfaces and APIs of Zoe and the other, you know, there's other restful APIs into other subsystems on the mainframe like the CICS and DP2 and the IMS world. And the young people who I really enjoy working with and watching the light bulbs go off in their minds when they are working on the mainframe and getting to know it and growing into their careers on the mainframe, this is just absolutely a perfect way to help them pave their way and their pathway into this world. Absolutely. Absolutely. No, it's, yeah, it's really game-changing. I mean, this is where Enterprise is going and, you know, Zoe just puts the mainframe back into that conversation and it just, it changes the dynamic. It's not a mainframe or, you know, mainframe versus its mainframe and. And that has, that's been a huge game changer and you're seeing customers and I just hear folks that I talk to that are saying we're increasing our mainframe investment. We're not trying to figure out how we, you know, rationalize it or whatever. We're increasing it just because of the integration capabilities and, you know, how they can now shift workloads really well. I mean, I know we're kind of getting out of the scope of Zoe a little bit, but this is, you know, these are some of the, this sort of conversation is the one that starts to open those doors and then sets up, you know, perfectly with the conversations you're having online. It's probably the same for you, John, as well. Yeah, you know, John and John, and John, I know you were in the group where Meredith is involved and, you know, one of her areas of responsibilities is the IBM academic initiative. And, you know, when you bring this concept to the different colleges, universities where you're trying to get them to, you know, have mainframe in their curriculums, in their courses, this helps with a lot of the faculty getting their arms around this and becoming more comfortable because some of them are from an era way back when they still think the, you know, mainframe fills up a couple of rooms, you know, and they didn't pay attention to it for a while. So it really is helpful in that aspect of, you know, schools, right, right, John? I'm saying, I'm hopefully not going to reel too much about open the master of the mainframe competition, but actually leveraging Zoe this year. And prior years, part one was always, you know, you need to download an emulator, you need to log in or be able to log in. And that was, that was part one of the challenge. And it was, I mean, and that should explain kind of how much of a game changer Zoe is. And this is just kind of the CLI part in the VS Code plugin that doesn't even cover the whole aspect of Zoe. It's just one aspect of it. But we don't have to have, you know, a whole part one just on, please download an emulator, which people struggled with, and then please log in. And let me help you have a log in because you have to tab over and you have to know what commands to put in and everything like that. They're not using tools that they might already have. And they just got to configure it, add in the plugin and things like that. And we've done the back end work for them. And they're ready to go. It's actually quite quick. And we can actually now do a bigger challenge for them or actually cannot encourage them to think and innovate and really leverage what it is that people want a mainframe for. So all this technology that's had so many years of investment in it that's had so many brilliant minds working on it. They are now actually going to get to play with that and use that. And Zoe's been basically a faster enablement to that because we're not having to say, oh, hey, here's a terminal emulator. Go figure that one out. Absolutely. Absolutely. Now, the power of bringing this development together, the power of driving it through open source and open innovation and how quickly there's been building on top of it is what reaches out and hooks all the rest of these tools. VS Code is a great example of there. And I know Eclipse Che and there's others that have built similar integrations. It's just really opening things up quite a bit and really changing that mindset and getting mainframe aligned with the DevOps world. So we have one last question here and I'll remind everyone who's listening. We all are, even though we're recorded, we are all in the chat. So we're going to be answering your questions. We're keen to start answering them now, but we really want you to listen to us. But we're going to be sticking around here. You can talk with us in the chat, ask questions. We're happy to chime in and we'll be on the back end Slack channels also. But really to close things out for today, here's my last topic. Look at the crystal ball. Both of you have been around this space for a while and are going to be around this space for a long time more. What do you see the future of DevOps in the mainframe looking like and why maybe we'll start with you here and then we'll go to Jen. Sure. Well, again, one of the things of being able to work with these financial services firms a lot. You know, they're usually pretty leading edge and they really lean on and depend on technology a lot. And I see that the future of DevOps and the mainframe are starting to become a reality for them. And I would say over the next four or five years, they're going to have some major changes in the way they have their mainframe development staff working really following the concepts of DevOps. And I really feel that it's making the mainframes future very, very bright as indicated by this bright sunshine through this crystal ball that everybody sees here in the picture. So it's very exciting for me to see this at this point of my career, you know, been doing this since the early 70s. So to really see this kind of transformation taking effect and becoming more part of these firms way of thinking and mode of operation is just fantastic. I can really see it and feel it taking place. That's great to hear. That's great perspective. Jen, how about you? Yeah, so Lynn hinted at this a little bit ago. I don't, I can't have a conversation about DevOps and ZOS or DevOps and Linux one and not have the broader conversation of how does this integrate with my just developer pipeline in general. So what does DevOps being done in the broader organization? What open source tools are being used? How can we all leverage a single set of tooling to get done what we need to and just point out our various destinations? And that's really where I see the future going. It's not, you know, how it's been prior, particularly with the mainframe with ZOS has been I've got a IDE for ZOS. I've got, you know, code repositories specifically for ZOS and maybe it's got version control. Maybe it doesn't, but I had all these unique tools for ZOS and it's no longer the mainframes this box over here. You don't touch, don't ask. It just is it's a we're still going to keep all the safety protocols in place. We're still going to keep it secure, but we're actually going to use the tooling that everybody else is using to enable better collaboration and better use of the platform. I think we've learned by kind of shutting that behind the door, putting it making it the wizard behind the curtain and actually kind of hinders that kind of innovation and the collaboration and the ability for people to use it. So we actually really want to open those doors and open source in particular and the open mainframe project are really kind of busting down that door, pulling back that curtain. You mentioned at the beginning there's 15 projects and I just want to highlight them because there's some really cool ones out there. So if you haven't taken a look, there is the software discovery tool. It's one of the ones some of my teammates are working on. It's one of the ones I'm really interested in that can help people find, you know, what they need a software, what open source software is out there. There's another project. I think it's starts with an A that's actually going to list all the different open source technologies that are say it again. Ambitus. Yeah, that's listing all of the different open source projects that are out there. That's a massive challenge. And I mentioned earlier on, you know, we have open source that runs on the mainframe on Z or Linux one. And then we have actually projects you can contribute to you. So I'm really interested in this specific open mainframe project because it's really hard to keep track of that and to know what states things are in. You know, are they incubation? Are they active? Where are they? So I am a member of that one. I want to know what's happening because I have a really huge vested interest in that. Awesome. No, that's a that is a great project. And it's really where I see that role is it's there's, you know, just just, you know, as you say, before the time before open mainframe project, tons of pockets, innovation, tons of pockets of effort, all these individuals porting these things over, bringing this together as a collective front, you know, not only, you know, just helps, you know, from a resource aspect, but also helps make sure that, you know, the mainframe community is making positive impacts back into those communities and making sure that those communities can be successful on the mainframe and bringing their projects to the mainframe. And I think to me that's like really one of the huge aha moments that happens of this. I mean, there's there's the one of just the visibility, but then the other is of just showcasing the rich heritage that is around here. Like, and I think you sort of, you touched on it well is like so often the mainframe is stuck behind a curtain. You lose so much with that. I mean, not just the mainframe itself, but decades and decades of expertise of innovation. I mean, I joked at the beginning, but it's it's so true. And you can ask anybody who's been around the mainframe for a while, named today's technology trend, and it was on the mainframe two decades ago or more. And, you know, there's so much been lost by not by having that behind the curtain, I think bringing so much of that forward. You know, we even hear as, you know, IBM had made some of the initial contributions to the Linux kernel around S390 support, how so impressed that the Linux kernel maintainers were of the high quality of code contributions that were coming from there. And they always knew that anything coming that was from the mainframe community, they knew it was going to be really good. So they're just there's just so much that has been stuck in hidden back there. How we're pulling that forward, we're pulling together all innovation, we're opening up, you know, we're discovering what all this new and really opening folks eyes. Absolutely. Awesome. You know, you know, and I encourage any mainframe clients out there today. All of them should very seriously consider becoming a member of this Linux foundation open mainframe project. More than anyone, any other time before this project has matured to the point where it's really going to be around for a long time. And there are so many things every mainframe client can benefit from being a member in one way or another, whether it be the code, whether it be the contacts, whether it be innovating something new they want to bring to the table and start off as a brand new project. This disguise the limit. And there's never been a better time to be on the mainframe and never been a better time to be a member of the Linux foundation open mainframe project. Yeah. And I really want to echo what Lynn just said there. I typically work with customers and try to help them be the disruptor of the disruptor that's coming. And if you are not a member of open mainframe project, if you have an IBM zero, you have an IBM Linux one platform, you definitely should be because paying attention to what's coming in open source and that collaboration there. That is what enables you to be resilient and be quick and be leading the edge to be the disruptor for whatever other disruptors might be coming in your industry, in your sector, wherever you are. This year it was COVID and we saw COBOL and what do you know? Open mainframe project already had a project. They had content coming out for a COBOL course. How did you know that you were ready for the disruption? COBOL is the hot topic of 2020. Who would have ever thought that, right? We'll be back on the OpenStack survey for the year. Yeah. Yeah. It's amazing. Yeah. And so we were in... John, when we did the... What was it? The recruiting for COBOL programmers? How many signed up? Over 1,700. And I think we had over 1,000 that just came in the first week. And so those that said they couldn't find any are full of baloney. Yeah. I've got a whole bunch of folks. We've got a whole bunch of folks. They're out there. No, it's really fantastic. I think that's just a great example of where these foundations can come together and make an amazing difference. And I think that is a great segue into learning more about the Open Mainframe project. Here's some great links. Definitely go check it out. Open Mainframe project.org. We have a newsletter. We give you really nice updates, what's happening in our community, events we're going to be at, initiatives that are coming. It's a great way to stay on top of things. As we mentioned, 15 hosted projects and growing. Hopefully by the time of this... We actually hear this, it will be growing. You can check them all out. Open Mainframe project.org slash projects. And all of them have some really great stuff going on. And as Len and Jen both alluded to here, if you're an organization that this is an important space for you and sustainability, this mainframe platform that has been around for 50, 60 years. If you wanted to be around for another 50, 60 years, this is the way to show that sustainability and show that you're committed to driving what the future is. And you can learn more about it on our join page. You can email us at membership at openmainframeproject.org. And you can also complete the membership application online. Without that, I know we're kind of wrapping up to the end. Like I said, we are all going to be on the chat here. We can answer more questions when they kick us out. We will be in the Slack channels. I just want to thank you all. Thank you, Len and Jen. You have been amazing panelists and great insight and experience around this space. And both just also just great stewards of the open mainframe project. So thank you both. Thank you. Jen, it was a pleasure being on the panel with you and it's always the same with you, Jen. And looking forward to hear some very nice feedback from what you've heard today on our panel. Can I go that more? Thank you both. Absolutely. Thank you all and hope you enjoy the rest of Open Source Summit Europe.