From DBA to CEO: Insights From Jen Nelson of Izzi Software
Jen Nelson, founding CEO of Izzi Software, joins Reg Harbeck on TechTalk Enterprise to talk about her journey in the mainframe world and her work acquiring founder-led companies focused on both IBM Z and i systems
Reg Harbeck: Hi, I’m Reg Harbeck, and today I’m here with Jen Nelson, who is the founding CEO of Izzi Software. Jen, welcome.
Jen Nelson: Thanks, Reg. I appreciate it. Thank you for having me on.
Reg: So let’s start by telling us how did you end up on the mainframe?
Jen: So I actually fell into it by accident. I was coming out of the military and I needed a nighttime job that would enable me to go to school during the day so that I could finish out my college degree. And the continuum company needed a DB2 DBA. And so I came on board, learned everything that I needed to know on the job about DB2, and I was the youngest person in the department by many years and fell in love with maintaining critical company data. And I realized about two years in that if I hung on a little bit longer, I was going to be last man standing. And my degree was nowhere even related to computer sciences. So I was going to school for political science with a minor in the Middle East, had every intention of going into the State Department. And while I was still doing reserve duty on weekends, realized I may want to make a pivot in my career and just stick with mainframe because I was really enjoying it. And that’s how I got into it.
Reg: Now my understanding is the US military is one of the bigger users of mainframes. Did you encounter mainframes at all during your time with the military?
Jen: Yes. Well, yes and no. So yes, there was a lot of mainframe in use, but most of my information was on something called the Combat Intelligence System, which was a Sun system. And so we would do a lot that I can’t get into on that system, but it very closely emulated the environment that I was used to working in at Continuum.
Reg: Interesting.
Jen: Which later became computer sciences today.
Reg: Now I want to ask without hopefully treading into stuff that’s confidential, did you work with airplanes or what sort of thing did you do with the military?
Jen: So I was an intelligence analyst for the Middle East and I was down at Kelly Air Force Base in San Antonio supporting a squadron of C5s. So anytime one would go on a mission, I would brief ’em beforehand. When they came back, I would debrief ’em to learn what intelligence they could give us and then share that with the appropriate parties. But reading message traffic and staying abreast on what was going on across the world where our cargo aircraft we’re flying into was my primary responsibility. So keeping the wing command staff up to date, keeping the pilots up to date and making sure that the missions going back and forth overseas were safe.
Reg: So basically you already had real-time experience dealing with critical real-time data when you moved into taking care of DB2, I assume that transferred rather well.
Jen: Yes, and a lot of critical data that you had to predict and make sure that you could restore it should something occur or that you could access it very quickly and disseminate it to the appropriate personnel. Yeah.
Reg: Now, having started out on DB2, I gathered that you branched out a bit to more than just DB2.
Jen: I did. I did. So my career from just DB2 moved into broader customer support at BMC software. So as a DB2 DBA at Computer Sciences Corporation, I was using the tools that I then moved to BMC Software and used in customer support role, and then later moved into QA. So then I would start QAing the tools that I had used as a DBA, I moved onto Rocket Software supporting and selling in a pre-sales technical manner, those competitive products that customers were interested in as DBAs. And so then that ran the gamut of storage systems and recovery systems. So it spread out a lot at Rocket Software.
Reg: Cool. So now it sounds like you kept a relevance to databases, and I’m going to guess including to relational databases, but did you move on to also non-relational databases at all?
Jen: Yeah, there was some exposure to IMS, but that was never really my sweet spot. It was mostly DB2 and security around DB2 and data integrity around DB2. But yes, I did then start supporting IMS products to make sure that IMS DBAs could do the same thing that I was very familiar with doing on DB two over time. That grew into other types of data sources. So one of the last products that I released as an engineering director at Rocket Software virtualized data across platforms. So that’s taking structured and unstructured data, virtualizing it into a map that you could then take completely disparate data sources and create a bigger picture of what’s in your data lake. So that virtualization software pulls together several platforms and several kinds of data structures both structured and unstructured.
Reg: Now of course, when you’re dealing with that kind of data, some of that data is highly confidential and sensitive and subject to regulatory compliance. The consideration both of compliance security must have been a significant part of your job
Jen: Indeed related to European Union laws, California data privacy laws, and even HIPAA laws and PCI financial data laws. So with respect to security, there was a lot that went into consideration for the various products that I was leading teams of in each kind of regulation that those product teams had to consider when developing the software or even making that data visible to users or programs down the pike somewhere.
Reg: Cool. I’m going to nerd out just a tiny bit. Hope you forgive me because one of my areas is security, and I’ve studied DB2 security a little bit. I’m aware there’s a number of different ways to secure DB2, but you’ve secured natively. You have this really interesting thing called the Cascade Effect and secondary Alpha studies. And I’m just kind of curious if you have any war stories from having to deal with that or if you found any effective way to do DB2 security that made it a little bit more intuitive?
Jen: That’s a really good question, and I wouldn’t say that there was anything novel that I came across, but there were some customers over time who needed to post-process DB2 data. And so pieces of DB two data would flow downstream, but not all of it could be visible just depending on which department was going to post-process that data. So we were able to help these customers come up with API wrappers that would only expose the requisite data that they needed to see to be able to process a claim or to be able to simply recognize billing and payments. And so lots of innovation has come from necessity from these various regulations that just one single entity has to dance through. But there have been some interesting innovation. I know that several products are out on the market that help customers maintain data privacy for the different internal departments that have to see it as well as for the external customer when they’re ready to see their own personal data. But back in the day, 15, 20 years ago, yes, things were heavily regulated, but the implication of the fines and the damage to your company’s reputation have become so substantial that there’s a lot more preemptive activity that you see behind the scenes to make sure that your company is not just complying with the lowest common denominator, but the highest common denominator.
Reg: That makes sense. I get a kick out of the fact that among other regulations that Sarbanes Oxley had such a profound effect on the American consciousness that Sarbanes Oxley, whose nickname is Sox, when it became the law within two subsequent rapid years, the two baseball teams made the socks, both won the season. For me, it’s like that’s a really interesting coincidence. Are you a baseball fan at all?
Jen: No, but I’m not surprised that you would know that you have this incredible ability to recall facts from the past as it relates to data or mainframe or z/OS historic facts that I’m not surprised that you tied those two together.
Reg: It’s fun for me, just the humanity of the mainframe, it’s such a big thing for me and to discover that the mainframe has been there throughout so many important things in history and not merely parallel to them, but part of them in so many interesting ways. Now we’re just a little ways along in your journey, of course, but you continued on from there. Tell us what happened next.
Jen: So at my time at Rocket Software, I was closely integrated with IBM as a business partner serving her customer’s needs. And so there was a lot of partnership and a lot of collaboration that took place, but I absolutely loved, and it was really great being able to hear from so many customers what business challenges they were having because you could see trends occurring over time across all different verticals, and the innovation that comes from that business need is just amazing. So knowing what the challenges are of the day, what you might lack to be able to easily address, and then speaking with domain experts to try and create something out of nothing. And that’s what drives the market today. I mean, it’s no different than what happens today, but it was just really neat to be in the midst of that. But as a software engineering director at Rocket Software, pulling together global teams trying to find the talent that had a niche skill for whether it’s security or whether it’s data or whether it’s data recovery, being able to pull those teams together and get the brightest talent on these teams to help drive that innovation was a lot of fun.
Reg: Very cool. But of course you didn’t stay still. You kept on moving. So what happened next?
Jen: I did. I did. So I went to a SaaS company after Rocket Software, which was a real turn. But the reason was because this particular SaaS company called Bazaar Voice had an amazing ecosystem of data, and data had just become my passion and my thing, their usage and the tracking of data across multiple systems and a SaaS type of offering was really unique. So they’re a ratings and review company, and they track product IDs, like actual products that are sold in e-commerce and track the associated ratings and reviews. So the rating is the five star rating. The review is the contextual explanation of a consumer’s like or dislike of it, and they are able to ingest from across a variety of social media platforms, someone’s opinion of a product. And by being able to aggregate all of that data, analyze it, and then provide that manufacturer with or that seller with a type of artificial intelligence produced report was really fascinating.
So they could tell from thousands of reviews that, for example, a particular jean manufacturer that a new denim had come out that was a four-way stretch instead of a two-way stretch, and there was concerns about quality. So that particular manufacturer said, Hey, we would like to have you guys run a port for us on these reviews and tell us what you are hearing about the quality because we thought the sales would be great. They look a little flat. And our voice was able to determine that the feedback was that the fit was not a true fit. And so they were able to provide some suggestions. The manufacturer did make some changes and sales began to increase for that particular style of gene that had just come out. So doing the analysis very quickly in a SaaS environment with of course, elastics storage and producing a report that helped the seller and the manufacturer figure out what was wrong was just a beautiful example of what knowing your data does for you. And I’ve always said he who knows his data best wins because here we are aggregating lots of it. So if you know what it says and you know what it says about your consumer, then you can predict buying trends. You can predict lifestyle habits and therefore cater to them and boost your sales.
Reg: Now, one of the fascinating overlaps with mainframe here is the fact that SaaS has two unrelated meanings because in the world of mainframe, as you probably know, SAS is this massive data management environment. But then of course, in the world of including mainframes as software as a service. And so I’m going to guess you’re probably referring to software as a service, even though I can easily imagine software as a service, using the SaaS software to actually do what you’re doing. But you probably weren’t based in the Carolinas either at that time, but that’s really cool. So that said, I gather that this sort of ramped you back into the mainframe space at some point. Was that right away or were there a few additional steps first?
Jen: There was another step. It did make me miss the mainframe because the data lake was just different at Bizarre Voice, although the concept is still the same. So I landed at Diebold Nixdorf, which is a manufacturer of retail kiosks and ATMs, and there’s a very large software engineering department that develops the software that brings these things to life and makes them useful, but also makes them wonderful little ingestion points of data that Diebold could then use and Diebold customers could then use to understand their consumer base better. But when the opportunity came open to get back into mainframe, I thought, you know what? It’s been five years. I miss it. That’s really where my background lies. So I’m going to go all in. So I began working for a private equity company who knew that the mainframe was still strategic to the Western world, knows that over the years it’s ebbed and flowed with different players, but there’s still a vibrant ecosystem of vendors, still a very large consumer base that needs the mainframe and has to rely on the processing power and wanted to put together a small company of founder led companies who have been around for a while.
And so I moved to Izzi Software and it’s been probably a few months as Izzi, but I’ve been working with this private equity firm for about a year now, and it’s been great fun and I’m really glad to be back in the mainframe space.
Reg: Cool. Now, I understand from talking to one of your colleagues that Izzi is a cheekily named company because System i and System Z, as I like to say, zed, are big focuses for you. So you built those right into the name of the company. So tell us what kind of acquisitions, I mean obviously you’re looking at acquiring, I guess small founder led system ion systems zed or Systems Z companies. Maybe if you can elaborate a little bit because the mainframe ecosystem, for example, is obviously very personal to those who are part of it, and they really notice when a company transitions from what people expect. So what’s that all about?
Jen: Yeah, really good question. And more succinctly your point about people notice the transition. So our goal is to bring together founder-led companies that have great products but might struggle to get into a customer because they might only have a couple of offerings, and therefore it’s difficult to displace entire solution sets or suites of products when you only have a few point products. But it’s really good technology and has tremendous appeal to many customers today and great growth potential. But we also want to protect those companies whose legacies have been around for so long that we want to protect that IP, we want to protect the people, we want to be there and serving the customers who really rely on that technology. And we actually don’t want the founder to go anywhere. If the founder wants to stay great, because quite frankly, the industry knows who they are and they’ve built their name with the few great things that they have to sell. So having them on board we feel like is a really big benefit, but we want to bring a few together, create a bigger portfolio that has a better opportunity to compete and then grow by introducing new IP or integrating the IP or coming up with some new fun stuff.
Reg: So you’re going to look at some development as well as acquisitions then.
Jen: Right, right. Continue hiring some good developers, continue growing the products organically and see what magic we can make happen.
Reg: Cool. Now, obviously this is part of a career path, unless you’re planning to retire really young. You’ve obviously got a lot of decades ahead of you doing this, and so I’m curious if you have sort of a vision for where you with that optionally without your current company that you’re the founding CEO at, where are you’re going to go over the coming, five, 10 years, and then we’ll dig further into the future beyond that shortly.
Jen: Well, domination. No, I’m teasing. I’m not teasing. Where we see ourselves in about five years is at least five acquisitions under our belt and good core solid products that have already been out there that are tried and tested and customers know and love, but then also build out a few new pieces of software. So in five years, we want to have a really nice portfolio of things to sell that are all integrated and all work well together, but might even have some integrations with other offerings like the Open Mainframe Project and contribute to that. But at five years, we at least want to have five good companies where we’ve got some of the great pieces of software that are for sale today, but some good stuff as well.
Reg: This is really interesting to know about your company of course, but I really am curious also to know about you personally as you take a look at your company at the mainframe and enterprise software context. What would you say are some of the important issues that we as people who are going to be here for a while should be thinking of as we look to the future of our favorite platform or platforms?
Jen: So z NextGen and i NextGen. So these technologies that are in our portfolio right now are in use by very experienced developers. And what we want to do is try and create a scaled down UI for the younger generation who might need to know the fundamentals of how to use this tool, but then leave the expert mode there as well so that those who are very familiar with the technology today can continue using commands to very quickly jump around and do what they need to do. But for the next generation, we feel like it’s important to go in a direction that automates things under the covers, creates better analytics so that newer folks coming into i or Z don’t need to know the platform at such an intimate level, but can still be as productive and as efficient in doing what they do as software engineers. But I think it’s exciting times. If we can help with the next generation of software engineers come on board, learn the platform as deeply as they can with the technology that we have, I think that’s a big win.
Reg: So now Jen, I need get you to put your thinking cap on. You’ve been a good number of places and you’re in a really key role in the ecosystem now. And so one of the things that I consistently assert is that the mainframe is going to be around and some are incarnation for our great, great, great, great, great grandkids to inherit it. And so if you just sort of put your prognosticator’s cap on and think way into the future, a hundred years after both of us are long gone, how do you see the mainframe looking and what do you see happening between now and then that’s going to be relevant to its role in humanity?
Jen: Really good question. Wow. So if we pontificate and put the sky is the limit hat on, I still believe people are going to continue leaning on the mainframe. There’s a big push to modernize. That means different things to different companies, and different companies are taking very different routes, but how much AI gets built into the platform so that when it sees certain behaviors occur on the processor, that it takes certain actions on behalf of the business. That could be one area, but I also feel like people are starting to balance workloads and where those workloads take place. So maybe not all of the processing and all of the business-critical data relies on the mainframe, but maybe there’s some that gets processed on AWS. Maybe there’s some that gets processed elsewhere. But maybe there’s just a tighter integration where to the user, these systems talk to each other more seamlessly. The data might flow from one system to another a little bit more seamlessly depending on the end user and where they need that data for later consumption. But it feels like to me, the artificial intelligence and the actual activity will take place on the mainframe but just be orchestrated out to different platforms depending on the business case.
Reg: Cool. Well, Jen, this has been really interesting. I don’t want to conclude until I’ve got any other thoughts you had in mind to share with us. Anything you want people to take away from this call or be thinking about or doing in their role of helping the world move forward with the mainframe is such a valuable part of it?
Jen: There is something that I, being a part of the mainframe community, are aware of when there’s a new player in the mainframe space, everybody’s really skeptical, why are you here? But part of the beauty is I see the value of the mainframe. We all see the value of the mainframe. So it should be obvious. Aha, there are new players showing up in the mainframe because we all see the value, they must as well. It feels a little bit backwards for all of us to understand how critical the system is today and how much it will be going forward to all of a sudden cock and eye brow go who are you and what is your business on the mainframe? Well, it should be obvious because we all believe in it so much. But I really look forward to working with the next generation of folks that are going to take this forward because at some point I will pass the torch on to the next generation to take forward, and I’m very excited to see where it goes just beyond our imaginations, but into the next generation’s imagination.
Reg: Cool. Well, Jen, thank you so much. This has been absolutely fascinating.
Jen: Thanks, Reg. It’s been a lot of fun. Thanks so much.
Reg: So I’ll be back with another podcast next month or so. But in the meantime, check out the other content on Tech Channel. You can also subscribe to their weekly newsletters, webinars, eBooks, solutions directory and more on the subscription page. I’m Reg Harbeck.