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Expert Panelists Tackle Questions About Mainframe at IBM Impact

A seven-member panel of System z experts, dubbed “the Big Brains of Big Blue,” answered a slew of mainframe-related questions May 2 at the IBM Impact 2012 conference in Las Vegas. IBM Systems Magazine readers had submitted more than 30 queries for the panel, in advance, but there was no shortage of questions and comments from the session’s audience, which numbered more than 100 people.

The “IBM System z Essential Session: Panel Discussion with the Big Brains of Big Blue” featured:

• Dr. Peter Bahrs, IBM Distinguished Engineer and CTO of WebSphere Services
• Shyh-Mei Ho, an IBM Distinguished Engineer and IMS SOA chief architect
• Ian Mitchell, an IBM Distinguished Engineer responsible for the technical architecture of the CICS Product Portfolio
• Gary Puchkoff, z/OS chief technologist and inventor of the System z Application Assist Processor (zAAP) engine
• Rosalind Radcliffe, an IBM Distinguished Engineer responsible for collaborative development solutions for System z
• Matt Sykes, an IBM senior software development engineer working on the new light-weight profile of WebSphere Application Server for z/OS
• Chris Walker, an IBM Tivoli software developer working in service availability and performance management for System z

The discussion’s co-moderators were Phil Weintraub, vice president of System z Software Sales, North America, and Doug Rock, publisher of IBM Systems Magazine. In his introduction, Rock explained how readers who weren’t able to attend the conference, had submitted a variety of questions. “We got a number of very, very good questions, and the cool thing was the breadth of them and the topics—everything from wanting to know about the naming conventions for the products to the future viability of Assembler,” he said. “They were all over the board.”

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