 Hi, this is your host, Subhan Bhatia and welcome to our early series on predictions. Today we have with us, once again, John Murtic, executive director of Open Mainframe Project. John is great to have you back on the show. Likewise, great to talk to you. I will, of course, ask you to grab your Open Mainframe crystal ball and share predictions with us. But before we go there, just quickly remind our viewers what is the Open Mainframe Project all about? The Open Mainframe Project is designed to be like a vendor-neutral home for collaborating on open source technologies, building open source software, and just really bringing the industry together to help produce tooling and products and insights that can benefit the entire industry. And this is similar to a lot of rather Linux Foundation initiatives that just focuses on this distributed collaboration. Our focus is, how can we do that within the context of the mainframe ecosystem? And so we put support at a dozen projects, working groups, a bunch of different efforts, and have a really nice cross-section of the mainframe industry that participates. Now it's time for you to grab your crystal ball and share with us your predictions for 2024. All right. Well, grabbing that crystal ball, and again, I'm always cognizant that I tend not to do a lot of predictions, but I'm going to do it for you here. The one trend that sort of hit us all by storm about this time actually last year was AI. Thanks to our dear friends at OpenAI that got chat GPT out there, and it really took the world by storm. And I think we have seen that pattern. We've seen just like in any other time where we've seen a new technology come out, it grabs everyone's attention, but then it also sort of leads us down all sorts of different paths. And I think we saw that with AI in 2023. Lots of exploration, lots of interesting ideas, lots of fear, lots of big concerns that have came with it. But what I'm seeing sort of under the hood start to happen, and I have a fortune enough of seeing some other industries for what I work with here at the Linux Foundation, is we're seeing them start to think about it within the context of how can it help them as an industry be more effective, scale better, really be able to tackle things that they weren't able to before. AI is not gonna replace anything in the near term. It's not gonna take us all over by robots in the near term. But I heard a presentation earlier this year where they really talked about within the context of artistry and it said, think of AI as a tool in your toolbox that helps you be more creative and helps you produce those results that you're looking for. So with that, I look at the mainframe world and there's tons of opportunities there. There's a growing set of systems administrators and programmers out there that are sort of getting towards the end of their career and there's knowledge that's stuck in their heads of the uniqueness of this platform. How can AI be a tool that can potentially help as we bring that next generation of folks on board? How can it be helping as folks are going back and looking at legacy tools and legacy programs and basically helping do things more efficiently and maybe looking at opportunities to bring in new tooling for different areas there. So I think we're gonna see, just like I think we're gonna see in a lot of different industries and a lot of different, you know, horizontals and verticals where AI is gonna start to really chip away at the block of the possible. I think we're gonna start to see that in the mainframe world and we saw it a little bit with Watson X from IBM back in Q3. And I think we're gonna start to see that here and what I do believe we're going to see is that collaboration happening in open source because if you think about it, biggest challenge with AI right now is the trust and this is where I think open source can come in and is starting to come in of being that area where these models, these data sets can be hosted, it can be transparent, it can be open, it can be collaborative and it can really start to lower those barriers of trust of getting these technologies adopted. On top of AI, like I said, I think that's gonna be one of the ones that we're gonna really see push here. I think another thing that we're really gonna start to see and this connects back to open source is more and more companies within the mainframe world and this is just as the same as we've seen in other industries, they're gonna start to look at their stacks and they're gonna say what are our opportunities to collaborate and what are our opportunities to bring folks together to build, these commodity lower level pieces of the stack which if you've been around cloud, this is something that happened a decade ago. This has happened in tons of industries, tons of horizontals and verticals and we've seen it here with Zoe, frankly. I think we're gonna see that sort of accelerate and mostly as we're sort of coming out of an area where economically there's some stagnation, we're seeing cost cutting happen all over the board, we are seeing sort of that retiring population happening on the mainframe administrator side, there's gonna be a push to be more efficient and that push is gonna mean of how can we collectively build these tools to help us get there, especially around not just legacy technologies but also future facing technology. So I think there's gonna be a huge push there especially as this ecosystem really starts to get their hands wrapped around how can open source truly help them? Like I feel like they're still on that early stage of it and I sense this year is gonna start to be a breakthrough. So yeah, my two big predictions, not AI rule the world but AI is gonna make a dent and we're gonna see more flories of things happening within open source on the mainframe side as these organizations, vendors and customers are really looking to become more efficient. Excellent, thanks for sharing those two predictions. Now, can you also talk about what kind of challenges that you see are going to be there for open mainframe ecosystem next year or opportunities that you see? So I think a combination opportunity and challenge is going to be helping educate and get the decision makers within mainframe shops but also within vendors to better understand how to leverage open source to help accelerate their businesses. I've seen this happen in other industries already so it's not like it's a thing that's not possible but I see one area of really important and this is especially for our projects to take off but also just open source in general is that double down on the education, getting past the fear aspects, helping understand the value to the business, helping understand the security aspects of it and helping understand where their position of investing in open source gets them. Just like we see in other places, what you invest in, you get multipliers back out of and that continues to scale over time. You put a half a million dollars of effort into there, you're getting 10, 20 million dollars back. You put a million, that continues to grow and grow and grow and that's sort of the model that we've seen other industries start to understand and adopt and this is why they continue to invest. This is an area that's starting to take hold in some areas of mainframe but to really help it grow that's gonna be where we need to be. So I would say that's gonna be probably one I would say is it's gonna be a challenge, it's not easy but I think it's also an area for opportunity for sure. I think the other thing that we're sort of keeping an eye on is the continual where we're seeing on tech trends spending. We've seen a lot of tech organizations that are downsizing, laying people off, right sizing, a lot of coming out of COVID, a lot of it with just some of the interest rates and things like that, techno nationalism that's happening out there. I mean, it's definitely an uneasy environment. It's something that we're really keeping an eye out on. I never wanna say open sources is recession proof but it does have really interesting ways of being able to be an asset in recessions, meaning as companies are looking to go look back at their portfolios, they can take a hard look and say, hey, maybe these are pieces here, we don't need to be maintaining this all by ourselves. We can be out there collaborating with companies and building this up. I mean, if you think about some of the major tech companies of our time, they were born out of the times of recessions. That's, and so you see those seeds that are early planted on at these stages are the ones that when things really take off, these companies are well positioned. So it's something we're thinking about. It's something we're keeping an eye on. It's obviously these things are not unique to mainframe. I think it's a cross-tech is a piece in there but I think that's one in there. And then I think probably third is gonna be on the security front. We're really, we know that, you know, the applications that run on mainframes have the utmost highest security requirements. I think one of the things that's on us as a project is how can we best position our projects to be able to be proactive in a security front? I mean, you're never gonna make anything 100% secure. It's just a security vulnerability waiting to happen. I mean, I've been saying that for years and years and years but to me the most important part is how are the processes and structures you have so that way you're able to react to those appropriately and be proactive in many cases. So I see that for the project as, and I see that just for open source in general and I think it's very unique to us as an opportunity for investment but I also see it as a challenge of there's work to be done. And, you know, Zoe's taking a huge emphasis on security. They have been for the last year and I think there can be a lot looked at as an example. That's stuff that I think we're gonna need to see penetrated into many other of our projects and other areas in open source and in the mainframe world to really start to take off. And the good thing is, is there's work that's happening in the open SSF that I think is all things that we can pull from and learn from and derive. But that's really, I think we're a lot we're going. And I think another thing that we're really hoping and this I think kind of ties a lot of these pieces together is helping some of these mainframe vendors along with customers get a stronger open source, you know, program that they're going in with. We see really strong, it's actually interesting the financial services industry which is one of the stronger industries for mainframe has a lot of deep investments and they're doing a ton in building open source program offices. I'd say they're probably outside of the tech sector. There's some of the strongest for open source program offices that are out there. You know, Citi, JP Morgan Chase, Fidelity, a number of others are really, really building that out strong. We need to also help in the mainframe vendor area. Well, I guess twofold. One is we need to help make sure that we can connect the mainframe efforts back into that cause it's a great way to help sort of unify that story. But then secondarily, well, probably even secondarily, I would say probably equally as important is helping the mainframe vendors recognize the value that open source can provide on their product lines and you know, helping them get to market even faster. And you know, I think we, again, that's a challenge out there. I think there's some vendors that are doing a really, really, really good job of that. IBM has been for decades. I see Broadcom has a really strong open source, you know, program office and in way that they're approaching things at least on the mainframe side. Rocket's been doing a good job of it. There's a lot of companies that I don't think quite are there yet. And that's a challenge because if you don't have that, it's hard for these projects to get adopted. But it's also an opportunity as we're able to sort of go in there and help and help cultivate that and build off of the shoulders of giants that are already doing it. So yeah, it seems like every single one of my predictions is connected to an opportunity or I'm sorry, when I challenge the connected opportunity but it's sort of how I see a lot of this laying out. There's a lot of the head of us but it creates opportunities as we go forward. Can you also talk about what is going to be the focus of the foundation, the project in 2024? Yeah, so the biggest focus is getting this mainframe on board. We are a little bit behind of where we wanted to be. We hit a lot of roadblocks and just bumps along the road to get us there. We're moving really, really fast. We're getting a lot closer. So we're expecting that to be our number one focus. That's the number one focus our governing board has our technical communities have is getting that mainframe resource online. I think secondarily, it's going to be how do we better educate the mainframe world on open source? We're seeing that as I talked about in the opportunities and challenges. That's I think we're seeing a lot of the friction starting to happen. Our projects are getting more mature. They're getting more feature complete. They're getting to a place where they're adding a lot of value, but they're hitting that ceiling of uncomfortability with open source within the organization. That is going to be another huge area focus for us. I would say a third and we've done a really good job of this and I expect this to more is pulling out and telling the story of the mainframeer today. It's not to be direct here. It's not a white dude in his 60s out there banging away at a keyboard. It's people of all ages, all races, all colors, all backgrounds all over that are doing that. I think we've been doing a really good job of telling that story and a focus is going to be continuing that because I think it is lowering that it's taking away those misconceptions and it's making this industry is one that's more approachable by others. John, thank you so much for taking time out today and share your predictions with us. As usual, we'd love to have you back on the show next year. Not only see how many of these two predictions turn out to be true, but also to get the set of next prediction for next year. Thanks so much and have a great day. Thank you. You too. Thank you.