IBM finds new Masters for its Birthday Mainframe

Happy Birthday! – IBM’s mainframe is 50 today and maintaining a strong position (see Figure for the evolving revenues and MIPS of System z since 2003). But it’s more than that – it looks forward as well as back.
I was lucky to be able to talk about computers with the UK regional winners of the Master the Mainframe competition in the UK recently as well as a number of recent graduates working on mainframes.

The UK regional competition

IBM began the competition in the US in 2005 with the aim of coaxing students to look at the mainframe against the background of the need for programmers with mainframe skills. The competition expanded internationally, coming to the UK in 2006 and is open to all University students. No prior knowledge of computing is necessary. It has 3 rounds. In particular:

• 500 students entered this year (making 5k since inception); the initial test involved signing on, navigating the site and submitting a file;
• 170 in the second phase which took 6-8 hours involving adjusting sample customer information using DB2, JCL, MQ and CICS[1];
• The 3 winners then went through to further Web site work taking 8-10 hours and were rewarded with Samsung Galaxy tablet prizes and a trip to visit IBM’s Hursley laboratory

2 of the UK winners are also going forward to the finals in the US, adding to a total of 43 from 22 countries. One of the UK winners I spoke to is currently ranked fourth overall.

What have the contestants learnt?

The three students are postgraduates in Physics, Computer Science and Information Systems respectively, having started with science subjects. Two of them used computers quite a bit while the other didn’t like their ‘magic box’ status and so avoided using them in his first degree. They had little or no knowledge of the mainframe before entering the competition – one linking them to the breaking of the Enigma code at Bletchley Park in the 1940s. In the event they were each able to access the mainframe via the Web and noticed the different architecture. One noticed a bit of ‘awkwardness – implying there was something extra going on behind the scenes’, but that he had learnt enough to want to find out more. Another finds it is easier to do some coding on his laptop and now sees the mainframe as another interesting avenue to explore.
Awareness is one thing, but the winning contestants haven’t sided for a career in mainframes – or even necessarily computing – just yet. Quite rightly they want to finish their further degrees before looking round and committing themselves. Needless to say a CV including being a competition winner will inevitably help them gain employment in future.

What are the new employees’ experiences?

The three IBM employees I spoke with also had little knowledge of the mainframe before being employed at Hursley to work on CICS, MQ Series and other software, although one had done an industrial placement as part of his degree. One noted that the system was quite difficult to understand at first, but that then realised it was quite a graceful and useful system; in fact it becomes as intuitive as Linux or Windows systems once you learn the short cuts. Another noted that mainframes hadn’t been on the curriculum of his University’s Computer Science course, but that he’d been able to pick up the training at IBM. The third spoke about the mainframe as ‘just another platform’. He compared it with the background experience he had in HPC where you just resubmit a job if you don’t get the right answer; with mainframes you have to keep the integrity of the systems in order not to lose transactions.
They are convinced of the relevance of the mainframe in the modern world. One noted that transactions almost always run on back-end mainframes, although often accessed from laptop or tablet browsers – ‘mainframes will be around for as long as we’re alive’. Another pointed out that the mainframe is relevant to Security and Mobility issues and that MQ Series is being used for connecting all sorts of devices back to a central location.
Nor do they feel boxed in by working on the mainframe. IBM’s training is good and the skills learnt are very transferable to other platforms, not least because the mainframe has to speak to the outside world. One noted that working in this area teaches you about computer architectures in general.

Campus Teams and British Universities

IBM’s wider mainframe educational activities involve Campus Teams for 30 of the country’s Universities. Employees (including at least one of the 3 we talked with) visit Career Fairs to talk up IBM, the mainframe, potential employment and the competition itself. It also has a recruitment page on Facebook of course.

Some conclusions – some technology needs new awareness

This all reminds me that old folks like me have lived through a lot of technical changes over the years; no Internet, email or mobile phone when I started work. Some talk about difference between my generation and my children’s as that between learning technology and being born into it, but in the case of the mainframe it’s the other way round. No one’s going to know about it if we don’t tell them – smart phones, PCs, Android and Windows are so much more accessible.
The mainframe is the most widely used server still for transaction processing (not just in the financial sector) and has built a strong reputation for Open Source Linux applications (which hasn’t yet featured in the competition but may do next year). The discussion was useful in countering the mainframe misconceptions that they’re difficult to use, hard to deploy and skills are non-transferable. We could add that their entry price is also a lot less than many imagine – a fully functional system can be purchased for as little as $75k – and that they don’t always take a long time to deploy (the White Cube art gallery got their’s up and running in a day and a half).
This competition is just one way IBM is using to raise awareness: one winner summarised it as a ‘fun and an interesting experience, exposing me to business standard computing’. For me the same can be said of studying the mainframe throughout my career. Happy Birthday!