Cheryl and I just finished taking part in the 2.5-day Nordic GSE 2016 conference in Reykjavik. We really enjoyed the conference. Everyone made us feel so welcome, and it was great to have a chance to finally meet people that have subscribed to the Tuning Letter for many years. The organization was flawless, and they had dinners organized every night and tours this weekend for those that were able to stay for the weekend. There were loads of excellent presentations, great support from many of IBM’s leading mainframe experts, and it was nice to see that the attendance increased 20% from last year. It is great to see that after so many years of cutbacks, companies are finally starting to invest in education and conferences again. We can highly recommend the 2017 conference that will be held in Oslo, Norway on May 2-4th next year.
One of our hot topics at the moment is IBM’s recent Continuous Delivery announcement. Because the announcement covers a wide range of products, it isn’t terribly specific. Therefore, it was very helpful to be able to attend Jamie Squib’s ‘IBM MQ for zOS Latest Features’ presentation, where he went into a fair degree of detail about how MQ will implement this. We believe that this topic of Continuous Delivery is going to impact just about every z/OS customer in some way, so we will be getting into a lot more detail about it in the next Tuning Letter.
We also want to especially call out Michael Erichsen’s excellent conference opening keynote presentation. It was both very interesting, AND thought provoking. This era of cognitive computing is really going to challenge experienced computer professionals (like most of our readers) to step up and offer advice to our employers about the implications of exploiting all the capabilities that are going to be at our disposal. Michael kindly loaded his presentation up to Youtube so anyone can view it. The whole presentation is worth viewing, but if you only have a few minutes, you should at least have a look at the last video in his presentation – you can access it at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K-4mp_e5v4A. The use of cognitive computing technologies is a topic that we hope to explore in the upcoming Tuning Letter.
That’s all for now. Stay tuned.