IT Social Hour: What It Takes to Be an IBM Champion
Mainframers Reg Harbeck, Craig Mullins, Janet Sun and Sean Rooney explain the responsibilities and perks that come with being an IBM Champion and recount how they earned the distinction.
Andy Wig: Hello everyone. Welcome to episode number two of IT Social Hour. So this is a series where we talked to the technologists behind the world’s critical IT systems, learn about their career journeys and hear what they had to say about their industry. My name is Andy Wig. I’m the senior editor at TechChannel. So if you saw the first episode of IT, social Hour, you saw us feature a couple of TechChannel’s Rising Stars. These are people who are relatively new to their platforms. In this case it was IBM Power Systems and heard about their thoughts on their industry and kind of where they are at in their careers. And so for this episode number two, we thought we would go to the other end of the spectrum and talk to some people who are basically mainframe veterans. And not only that, but these are people who have earned the distinction of IBM Champion.
That’s a title reserved for the top thought leaders in IBM technologies. There’s only about 1,500 of them or so in the world, and we’re honored to have four of them right here. So that lineup, here it is. We got Reg Harbeck from Mainframe Analytics, Craig Mullins from Mullins Consulting, Janet Sun of Sun Coast and Sean Rooney of Broadcom. So to kick it off, just want to learn a little bit about your professional background, how you got to this point in your career and kind of what it is exactly you do. Also, where are you beaming in from in the world? So let’s start with Reg.
Reg Harbeck: Well, hello from southwest Canada. I’ve actually been based in Canada for my entire career, even though I’ve done a great deal of work with rest of the world, including especially the United States. And I’ve been working on the mainframe since 1987. And my company Mainframe Analytics is basically just a vehicle for me to do consulting, writing, presenting. So that’s sort of what I’m about. Anything I forgot to answer?
Wig: I think you got it. Yep. Yep. That’s good. How about you Craig?
Craig Mullins: Hello, Craig Mullins from Mullins Consulting Inc. And I’m coming to you from Sunny Sugarland, Texas, which is right outside of Houston. Most people don’t know Sugarland, but they do know Houston. I’ve been working with the mainframe since my senior year in college, which is 1984, when I was an intern at U.S. Steel. Started out as a COBOL programmer, became an IMS DBA, then a Db2 DBA at various different companies. Eventually worked for a lot of different software companies. Platinum, BMC, Neon. Also was an analyst at Gartner Group for a year covering database administration. And now I’m an independent consultant. I’ve been that full-time since 2010.
Wig: All right, thanks Craig. And how about you, Jen? You want to tell us a little bit about yourself?
Janet Sun: Well, I am in, not today, so sunny southern California, but usually sunny southern California. Lived here all my life and everybody always forgets about the West Coast, but whatever. Anyway, I’ve been working in IT my entire career. When I was going to college and trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life, my father suggested, well, why don’t you go learn computers and get a job? I said, interesting. I didn’t know anything about computers at the time. So I did. And my career has taken off from there. I started off in scientific and engineering programming, moved into systems programming and then at some point try my hand at, well, I stepped out of my comfort zone and I actually got a job with a software vendor, which if, and everybody else is grinning because they know people don’t like software vendors, systems programmers don’t like software vendors most of the time because they’re trying to sell them something. But I went in as a technical person working for software vendors and I’ve had a great time and I’ve moved up from that and I managed software developers and became a director and then product manager, all kinds of stuff. And now I’m independent. I mostly do training actually now. So that’s about it.
Wig: Thank you, Janet. And the last—
Harbeck: I have to say something that Janet is too humble to say, and that is the Janet is also passed president of SHARE, so she’s not going to say people need to know it.
Wig: Yes, that was good to know. Yes, thank you Reg. Thank you.
Sun: Well, I could probably use that in one of the other answers when it says, what do you do? And it’s like, okay, that’s what I do.
Sean Rooney: I thought you were going to say for the part that people don’t like. Hi everyone, Sean Rooney. It’s funny because my background is actually kind of a little bit of a mix of everyone’s answers here. Similar to Craig. I started in college, but it was my senior year summer going into my senior year, I had an internship that started on the mainframe. So my entire 11-plus-year career has been on the mainframe. If you had told me that as a teenager—if you told me it was in IT, I probably would’ve believed you. If you told me mainframe, I probably would not have believed you because I didn’t even know what a mainframe was at that time. Similar to Craig, I started on storage for a bank, for a regional bank, started on storage, went over to Db2, and now I am at Broadcom in the AIOps and automation division dealing with OPS/MVS, which is Broadcom’s automation product. I’ve been at Broadcom for three years now. And kind of the flip side of Janet that I am on the software vendor side that this side is my comfort zone now type of thing compared to just being at the shop. So it’s been great.
Wig: Gotcha. Alright, so getting into the meat of what this episode is all about is what is like being an IBM Champion, what that entails, and we see the title all over the place if you follow this world, but not all of us may have a great idea of really what it is to be an IBM Champion. It is quite the mantle to wear. I know it comes with some responsibilities. And so yeah, that’s the question. Question number two, really just, what it’s like being an IBM Champion and what are the responsibilities of it? And for that one, how about you, Craig? Let’s have you kick that one off.
Mullins: Sure. Well, I would say the responsibilities of it, I look at it like the responsibilities aren’t all that much from my point of view, only because it’s the things that I always have done. Things like creating content about IBM technologies. I’ve done that since the very beginning of my career. I’ve wrote several books on IBM technologies, I blog on it, I write articles on it. So it’s just like keep doing that. There’s speaking at conferences like Sharon, like I, Doug and speaking at user groups used to be a lot more individual user groups that I’d go out to after covid, a lot of them shut down, but they still do things like virtual groups and I speak at them, contribute to social media with LinkedIn and Twitter. I guess I should call it X, but I’m still going to call it Twitter and doing things like that.
There’s a lot of other things that you look at the list of things that they say you can contribute to that sharing feedback on IBM technologies, helping them with marketing and sales references and all those things. But I don’t see those things being onerous because they were what got me into the program to begin with back in 2009. So I think that the benefits of it, you hear a lot of things, they set up presentations on new technologies, you hear about things before they happen and you meet with other champions. And that is, to me, the biggest benefit of the program. Sharing your experiences and hearing what other people are doing within the IBM ecosystem, that’s the biggest benefit of the program to me.
Wig: Okay. So you all know some things about Z next that the rest of us don’t know, then.
Mullins: We could tell you, but we’d have to kill you all.
Rooney: Asking more questions. Have the dot on your forehead on the video recording.
Wig: Yeah, we’ll have to wait, I guess. Okay. And was moving on to, so Janet, we’ll give you a chance to just what’s your experience has been as an IBM Champion?
Sun: Well, to me it’s a great honor that I am deemed worthy to be an IBM champion, but I have advocated for this platform for my entire career. I used to tell people I bleed blue even though I’ve never worked for IBM, but that’s because I believe in it, believe in the platform, and so it’s an honor and it’s just a great chance to advocate and to continue to tell people how great the mainframe is. I’ve written a couple of articles on years ago, okay, this will date me, but I wrote an article about 12 years ago about the misinformation of mainframes because people were saying, oh, you’ve got to get off the mainframe mainframe, you didn’t need to get off the mainframe. And all the things that it said were bad or difficult or hard about the mainframe really weren’t true. And so I got frustrated and I wrote some articles about it, but I just think being an IBM Champion, it’s a great recognition for all the work I’ve put in my whole career and I’m really happy to give back and do more.
Wig: It sounds like similar to Craig, you were already inclined to be doing this stuff before you had the distinction of IBM Champion, huh?
Sun: Yes.
Wig: Alright. Sean, I think you’re first time IBM champion in 2025, right?
Rooney: That is correct, yes. Yes.
Wig: Nice. Yeah. What’s it like? Yeah, congrats. What’s it like so far.
Rooney: Yeah. My favorite thing is it’s an honor like Janet said, to be named an IBM champion. But what I like about it so much is it doesn’t feel like a me award. It feels more of like a we award community type of thing that Craig and Janet touched on. It’s people who, for me, it means so much the advocacy part of it, which is when it comes to advocacy, it’s all stuff that I want to do. It is all stuff that we want to be doing. We want to do this interview right now, we want to spread the word of IBM Z and mainframe, so you’re never across someone who’s a phony IBM Champion. It’s one of those things where it’s infectious. When you become part of this community, it’s like, whoa, these people kind of really care about their jobs. That’s something that’s pretty cool and it’s something that’s apparent right away when you meet an IBM champion. So I kind of hope that I just carry that flag too, that when I talk passionately about my job, people are kind of like, whoa, that’s pretty cool that he passionately cares about his job type of thing.
Wig: Yep. Nice. Yeah, infectious. I like that word Reg. What’s your life as an IBM Champion?
Harbeck: So building on what everybody else has said so far, really when you get recognized as an IBM champion, it’s because you’re already doing this stuff. And I started out, as I mentioned in 1987 as a mainframer and I’d spent my whole career learning everything I could, not just about the technology, but about the ecosystem. And so when I started out, I had a computer science degree, but then back in 2021, I actually graduated 35 years after my computer science degree with a master of arts in interdisciplinary humanities. And I used that to really dig into the humanity of the mainframe. And so I had been spending my whole career and one of the key things that happened in my career in 1999, I went to my first chair and I started to meet people who were more like me than anybody else I had met anywhere.
And so a very large number of my, for example, Facebook friends are people I know through Sharon, through the mainframe. And so this whole thing, as has been suggested, both champions, we all know each other, we’re like friends. We knew each other before we became Champions. It’s this wonderful ecosystem of people who respect each other, who are all working together to make the world a better place. And one of the ways we’re doing that is by helping the world wake up to the fact that there is a platform out there that works better than anyone can believe and that we all rely on it and it’s time for the world to wake up to it and we get to be part of that waking up. So it is just a wonderful opportunity.
Sun: Sounds like a family
Wig: Yeah. And there’s only a thousand, or I mean, on the mainframe side, how many would you say? I mean, there’s maybe 1,500 total. I mean there’s like 800 on the mainframe maybe.
Harbeck: Oh, maybe 100 there.
Sun: No, I think it’s more like two or 200 or so, maybe because a lot more than there used to be. I don’t remember the exact numbers.
Mullins: It’s interesting too, I would say because I’m a champion for data and ai, but I do almost everything on the mainframe too. So I think of myself as a mainframe Champion, even though I’m recognized as a data and AI Champion. So to Reg’s point, yeah, maybe there are only a hundred official IBM champions for the mainframe, but there are folks like me focus in another area, but do most of my work on the mainframe and promote the Z platform vigorously.
Sun: It really is a family, a professional family.
Wig: All right. Well, that’s great to hear. I like the family vibes. So getting to our third question, we’ll have Janet be the first one to answer that one. And that question is just tell us about your path to becoming an IBM Champion. And you’ve touched on it a little bit, I think so already, but what made you interested in the program? And I’m also curious what you had to do to earn the distinction. I know there’s stuff you have to submit and continue to submit every year to keep the title. So yeah, Janet, why don’t you tell us how that all came to be?
Sun: Well, so people get nominated to become an IBM Champion, and it turns out you can self-nominate or someone else can nominate you. Now, I probably didn’t even hear about this program when it first started. I mean, because I think the IBM Champion program has been around for 15 years or more, and I didn’t know about it that long, but when I heard about it, it was kind of like, oh, I could do that too. I felt that I should be qualified, but somebody else nominated me, which is good. I don’t like to self-nominate. It just feels weird because why should I submit myself? Because if nobody agrees with my opinion that I’m worthy, then why am I bothering?
But I was nominated to become an IBM champion, and I was surprised because not everybody that gets nominated obviously gets accepted. And I did get accepted in the first year that I was nominated, first time I was nominated. And so then a whole world of new people, some of whom are not new to me, like this group here, this esteemed group that I know from SHARE for the most part, but I met a whole lot of new people and we’ve had the chance to, I don’t know everyone really well, and I don’t know everyone. There’s a lot of Champions and don’t know them all, but I have a chance to meet new people, to learn things from them. And what you have to do to continue to be a champion is you have to one of the terms, they use those acts of advocacy. And so it depends on what kind of acts of advocacy you do.
Now, it turns out a lot of what I do most of the time is I volunteer at SHARE. The SHARE is the original mainframe user group. And as Reg pointed out, I’ve been on the board of directors and have been a president of SHARES. So I’m a past president of SHARE and Share was founded 70 years ago, so I haven’t been into share for 70 years. I’m not that old, but that’s one of the areas where I spend most time, occasionally I write articles, I’ve done mentoring, but you have to continue to do acts of advocacy. I can’t even say that, but you still have to keep, in order to have the chance to retain your membership as an IBM Champion, you have to contribute. And as Craig indicated, it’s like, oh, this is what I do every day. I do all kinds of things that qualify and so, so it’s really pretty fun.
Wig: Yeah, I mean, if you’re already doing these things, might as well get credit for it and get that.
Sun: Sure. Why not.
Wig: Well, yeah. Yeah. Sean, well, what kind of work did you have to put into become a an IBM champion?
Rooney: Yeah. My path to becoming IBM Champion, the story I like to tell is when I had that first internship, so I was 21 at the time, I have that 10-week summer internship at a bank working on mainframe storage. I get there that first week and my coworkers start telling me their mainframes. When you hear as a 21-year-old that all these people being loud and proud, I’m a mainframer. I was like, you guys are losers. What do you mean your mean framers? I’m like, that’s how you define yourself.
Mullins: And then now you’re one of us.
Rooney: 10 years into my career here I am loud and proud being a mainframer and IBM champion type of thing where it’s like, oh my God, I get it now.
Sun: And you’re not a loser. You’re a winner.
Rooney: I don’t think so. Yeah, Jen had touched on earlier, maybe that’s for other people to decide, not for me. But what made me interested in the first place was that the community aspect and what’s been touched on already, these acts of advocacies are defined as things you’re doing outside of your job description that are advocating for the mainframe and things like that. So same as Janet that I didn’t find out until the Champions program until a year or two ago. And once I found out and they’re like, oh, you submit these acts of advocacy, same thing. It’s kind of like I’m already doing these things. All I need to do is type them down and submit it in a form. And I get recognized for it. So that’s really been a big part of it, whether that’s talking at Chair, whether that’s doing interviews like this, whether it’s LinkedIn posts, being involved with IBMZ Day, things like that. It’s things that I want to be doing outside of my job description, but still falls into work I feel like.
Wig: Great. Got it. And Reg, how about you? Was it similar story for you? You were kind of already doing a lot of these things and you figured you’d submit to become an IBM champion?
Harbeck: Yes, with some unique texture to it. Basically back at Share in San Antonio in 2016, the folks at Tech Channel approached me and said, look, you’re already known as an author and other stuff in the space. We’d like you to start doing a mainframe podcast. And so I did that and I started interviewing people in the mainframe ecosystem on average about once a month. And one of the people I interviewed, excuse me, back in 2019 or 2020, was an IBM Champion. And I hadn’t heard of the program before. And he talked about it on the interview, and I’m like, oh, that’s such a neat idea. And for me, it’s like I’ve been championing the mainframe all my career and I thought, okay, I should look into this. And so on the one hand, I agree with Janet, it’s an awkward feeling to self nominate, but at the same time I’m like, okay, well, somebody suggested I do it, so maybe that counts as not just be me kind of walking up and saying, oh, I’m special, I deserve this, but rather saying, well, look, I believe in this, and so I would like you to consider whether I’m one of the people that should be with this.
And I’ve been given all kinds of cool opportunities as a champion, including my friend and colleague, Darren Surch, just recently reposted a set of interviews that Jack Ware and he and I did about the humanity of the mainframe. And that recording was there, we did for the Champions program. So every time you do something like that as being said, that becomes another active of advocacy towards you’re continuing to be a champion. Now, my fortunate friend, Darren Surch, got to be an IBM lifetime champion, and there’s only two mainframe lifetime champions here in Dusty Rivers. And I’ve looked into it and it looks like they’ve sort of backed off in that they want to encourage us to keep doing advocacy. But at the same time, what I’ve also done is I’ve made a point of nominating other people who should be Champions. And I’m absolutely ecstatic that one of the people I nominated this year is on, and he’s a local IBM Champion now mainframe champion who’s been leading the IBM New to Z groups here in the southwest Canada, Nick Leon, I think it is.
And so I got to nominate him. I’ve nominated probably about six or seven other people during the time of being a champion. A number of them have actually been accepted. And so that really means a lot to me. As far as renewing my nomination other than just continuing to do what I was already doing as my colleagues have been sitting as well, just letting them know about that you fill out a report to let them know. And also, fortunately, the person in charge of the mainframe champions, Shari Chiara, loves to stalk her Champions and see what we need up to, and she’ll actually keep track of what we’re up to if we’ve not been as good as we should nominating or reporting these things. And so as long as they have enough acts of advocacy recorded for you in a given year, they’ll actually give you a very short form to say, I want to remain in the program. And they’ll say, okay, well, you’ve done your acts of advocacy, we’ve got proof here. And so there’s a very good likelihood that you’ll get renewed even if you’re not a lifetime check. And it’s just a wonderful program and certainly one that it’s nice that it’s expanding so we can get more and more people into it because it’s a really worthy thing to be part of.
Wig: For sure. And Craig, I don’t know if you have much to add in terms of what you had to do to become an IBM Champion. I know that’s kind of what you’re doing already, but what’s the Yeah,
Mullins: I’d add a little flavor to it. I became aware of the program immediately back in 2008 because it was sponsored by the information management software group at IBM and the original champions were called Information Champions, and it was just people who dealt with data and information the first year. They said, you can self-nominate and all that, but there were some rules around it where they didn’t really want vendors, software vendors, and I was working at a vendor at the time to participate in it. So the combination of that, and as Janet says, self-nominating just seemed icky, so I backed off from it. Someone at IBM nominated me the next year, even though I was still at the software vendor, and I’ve been a member of the program ever since, and that’s wonderful. The other thing I’d add is the, well two things, to what Janet was saying about there being so many information, so many Champions, so many IBM Champions, that to me I think is a great way to get to meet people. So it opens doors. If you say to somebody, I’m interested in something that’s maybe not really my expertise, but I see, oh, here’s someone who’s a quantum Champion or an AI Champion just saying, Hey, I’m an IBM Champion too, let’s talk. That opens the door. That’s a great way for sharing these types of things. So that’s kind of stuff I’d add.
Wig: Do you all have a secret handshake or something?
Rooney: Not yet. That’s a good idea.
Craig: No, we can’t tell you.
Harbeck: Let me add a thought here because this is a joke I’ve come up with that feels particularly relevant, especially as Champions because we’re under NDA. I like to state in the world of mainframe, there’s two kinds of people, those who have no idea what’s going on, and those who are under NDA. One of the beauties of being a champion is that they’ve got all kinds of NDAs for you. And although that feels a bit constraining because there’s a whole lot of information, eventually that information becomes public and you’re allowed to talk about it, but it allows you to design your planning and your thinking and to communicate about this stuff with other people who also know this stuff, and that is really cool.
Wig: So yeah, beyond just, yeah, no, go ahead, Greg.
Mullins: Yeah, I was just going to say, the other thing as you were talking that popped back into my head is we’re talking about the forms you have to fill out to tell people at IBM about the acts of advocacy. One of the problems I had originally in the program was remembering all of the acts of advocacy because I’d wait for a month or I’d wait for a quarter, and then what all have I done?
Sun: It’s still a problem.
Mullins: The way I’ve solved it is as soon as I do something, I fill out that form immediately. Just one act of advocacy was done this date, here it is done. And if I do it that way, I don’t forget anything.
Wig: Kind of like somebody who’s maybe looking for a job and trying to put their resume together and trying to, they know they do a lot, but it’s like, okay, what is it?
Rooney: And you got to put pen to paper. Yeah, yeah.
Wig: You got to keep track of things. I get that. Okay, so with the next question I really wanted to get into as kind of the why behind it all, kind of what the spirit of the IBM Champions program is, how important is the program to the IBM ecosystem, IBM technologies, your professional community? And then just I’m interested in your thoughts on this kind of community building stuff, how important it is to the health of IT in general, really, and your industry. And so for that question, let’s start off with Sean. You have any thoughts on that? Yeah.
Rooney: I have a lot of thoughts on that actually. Where my main motivation comes from in these acts of advocacies and being an IBM champion is because I remember being that person 10 years ago who forget even if it’s just a mainframe job, if it’s any job, you’re a little directionless. You’re trying to figure everything out. You’re like, is this going to be work for the rest of my life? Am I doing this right? Am I doing this wrong? All of those questions are in your head, and I remember those feelings of uncertainty. So where I try to come from with all of these acts of advocacy, with all of these LinkedIn posts is I hope that I can hypothetically reach out to one single person if this interview reaches one single person who needs a mentor, needs some help, says, Hey, what path should I be following?
That type of thing. And I can personally help them out with that. That’s where my main motivation comes from for this. As for the community aspect, what is so unique about the mainframe is the four of us here doing the interview work at four different companies. We all knew each other before this interview started. I get to talk to friends at different companies all over the world every single day because they work in the mainframe space. A few months ago, I got the chance to go to the IBM campus in Poughkeepsie, and I grew up in New York, so I was getting dinner one of the nights with some friends and they were like, I didn’t know you worked at IBM. And I was like, well, I don’t work at IBM. I kind of work at a competitor, but we work together. So it’s one of those things where the mainframe space is so unique that I feel lucky that I get to take advantage, like we’ve said, this networking, this community that it feels like all one big network where we’re all in this together working for the betterment of the mainframe and of everything that we can kind of within our grasp type of thing.
We’re not trying to save the world, but save the world in the ways we can type of thing. Which sounds a little dramatic, but I don’t know. That’s how I like to view it.
Wig: Yeah, well, kind of a rising tide rises all bones, whatever. Right. Okay. And let’s see next in our order we’ve been going along. I lost it for a second. Let’s go Reg.
Harbeck: So my journey on the mainframe has been really interesting because there’s been a few different threads, and one of those threads is discovering the mainframe. When I went to university for my first degree at the University of Calgary, they apparently had IBM mainframes, but they didn’t teach us about ’em, and I had no clue what a mainframe was. And so my first mainframe job, I got accidentally because I thought I knew mainframe. I thought mainframe was just a big Unix box. And so I had this little business card I was using to apply for jobs that said broad experience from micros to mainframes. We didn’t even talk about mainframes, but on the strength of that, I got hired and then they found out that I had no idea what a mainframe was and they had to train me up, but it was such a difficult process to hire me that they weren’t going to throw me out and get somebody else.
So I kind of accidentally faked it until I made it into the mainframe. And so that realization that here’s the machine, then the more I knew about it, the more I realized incredible importance. And its persistence. This is back in 1987, which is like 38 years ago, and the world didn’t know about it then and didn’t realize it was still running the world economy. And that’s even more so now. And so as I’ve taken that journey and paid attention to all the things that people don’t know, and one of the things I discovered really early on was that the self-esteem of mainframes is constantly struggling for affirmation because you see these little posters, we’re not dead, mainframes aren’t dead. And it’s a real issue because you talk to people and you say, I work on the mainframe. Oh, lot thing’s still around. Nobody gets that.
It’s deep going concerned in the world of computing. And so for me, the opportunity to become more and more involved and aware of the role of the mainframe above and beyond the exit technology has been something that just wove perfectly in with my journey of becoming a Champion because there’s this real need to get the word out about what is the mainframe, what does it do? And part of that also is for us to become sort of more self-aware as a mainframe ecosystem. Forget this, AI becomes self-aware. We as a mainframes need to become self-aware and realize that we have this incredible value that we already bring to the world, that we need to be proud of it and be ready to share it because there’s so many workloads that will be so much better on the mainframe and so many companies that have really bad decision making happening was “let’s move off that old mainframe,” not realizing that it’s the only platform that’s capable of doing needs to be done.
And a big part of that is getting to know our culture, our ecosystem. And so I’ve really dug into understanding things like how the different countries pronounce CICS or “kicks” in Italy or “six” in Brazil, or when we talk hexa decimal numbers, use letters A through F, use phonetic words for those that we don’t tend to use. The standard words we all know. Alpha Bravo, Charlie, Delta, Echo, Foxtrot. I was so shocked when I became mainframe that everybody was using the wrong words. And it took me decades to realize, first of all, they’re all using the same wrong words, able Baker, Charlie, Dog, EZ Fox, and second, that those words were actually the right words back when the mainframe culture was initially formed, that the new international set of phonetic words came into place after the people who became the original mainframers had already begun to form in their careers.
There’s all this amazing stuff, this depth of stuff. And as everybody here, certainly past president, Janet will tell you the SHARE is such an amazing keeper of that. One of the cool things that happened to me is Helen Sarah, who had been the keeper of the mainframe, SHARE Songbook, retired from SHARE and passed that on to me. And we used to have a singalong the Thursday of every share where we sang all these wonderful mainframe songs. And so again, it’s deeply nerdy, and yet that’s a big part of it. That’s whole part of the culture that stands out a bit like a sore thumb except that thumb is sore because it’s the one that does all the hard work. And so for me just to be able to take the best of who I am, not just technologically, but in every other way, including my master’s degree, focused on the humanity and get involved and make that, drive that forward and make the awareness increase to all the nominating frame people, the opportunity to do that as part of the Mainframe Champion program is just really, as you can tell, very exciting to me.
Wig: I want to hear some of these mainframe songs. Sorry, Sean.
Rooney: Believe me. I do too. But Fred me think of two things that I hear a lot, especially at the share conferences at the Broadcom MTEs that these conferences, things like that. One of them is like Reg touched on, if you ask someone, how did you find the mainframe greater than 50%, probably closer to 90%, of people will say the mainframe found me. So that’s where a lot of my motivation comes from too, that there are main framers out there who do not know that they would be perfect mainframers. So if I can help with these acts of advocacy and steer someone towards being a mainframer, that’s what’s cool about the IBM Champion program too. Another one is at these conferences, the amount of times, multiple times per conference, I hear the sentence, I can retire, but I don’t want to yet. Do you realize how insane that sounds? Only ever have I heard that sentence from a mainframer and I hear it multiple times from multiple mainframers. I don’t think in any other career in any other industry people could go, yeah, I could retire, but I don’t want to yet. That’s so crazy. So I love being that flag bearer of all of these people feel this way for a reason. Clearly it’s a career that has treated them well. They’re happy with their life choices that has led to them being here that they still want to work. So that’s a big part of being a champion and something that I think about a lot too
Mullins: I was just going to say to add on to what you just said there, Sean, I’m working at a client right now and the mainframe systems programmer is 75 years old and he is nowhere near retirement according to him. So probably someday they’ll walk in and he’ll be dead at his desk, but with a smile on his face, he was doing what he wanted to do.
Harbeck: So I wrote a white paper in 2004. I wrote a white paper in 2004 about the need to get a new generation on the mainframe, which was soundly ignored by many, many people, fortunately not everybody. But as a result, we’re just now we’re finally getting a new generation of people like Sean. And so the mainframe bell curve is weird because it’s upside down. So you’ve got all these new people finally, and you’ve got all of us who are somewhat over 50 in a lot of cases. And the funny thing is that this was the one prediction I made that was completely wrong. As I said, all these old people are going to go away, and I was wrong because we love the mainframe so much that we’re just sticking around to the bitter end. And the thing is that a job of the mainframe does not use up your body. And so as a result, if you say reasonably healthy, you can be a mainframer, and a lot of that’s going on and it’s so funny. But back to the next person.
Wig: Yeah, Craig, we’ll give you a formal chance to answer that question about yeah, your thoughts on the community spirit, the fellowship, the importance of that to the ecosystem and your whole industry.
Mullins: Yeah. Other than to say I agree with everything Sean and Reg said about what’s going on in the ability to have fellowship among main framers as guys were talking, one of the things that popped into my mind is as I sit around at night and I’ll watch a movie or watch TV with my wife, inevitably it’ll be like a lot of science fiction and someone will say, oh, we got to load this up to the mainframe and they pull out a USB stick and my wife cringes because she knows I’m going to start yelling about it. That’s not the way. Most people who are not conversant with the mainframe think about it. They hear from popular culture and popular culture is ridiculous when it comes to the mainframe. It’s not Jeff Goldblum in a spaceship uploading a virus to an alien mainframe. It is just not the case, it’s what runs the world. And people say, I’ve never interfaced with a mainframe. And I say, have you ever used an ATM card? Have you ever taken a flight? Have you ever paid a bill? Then you’ve interfaced with a mainframe, you just didn’t know it.
Wig: It’s not just science fiction. Yeah, there’s a whole kind of mythic idea of the mainframe in popular culture, and then you have what you all do. All right. Well, I think we have time for one final question, and we’ve got this collection of wisdom here in this virtual room. So I don’t want to waste the opportunity to ask about, well, really what gets you excited about the technologies you work on, the IBM technologies you work on, but also just what your thoughts are as on the future of the mainframe and it in general. And if you don’t have anything in particular to prognosticate on, that’s okay too, but I’m just curious to, I’d love to just pick your brains on that one a little bit. Reg, do you have any thoughts in that direction?
Harbeck: I have lots of thoughts on that. One of the questions that has occurred to me and my caring colleagues at IBM has sort of reassured me, I don’t need to know the answer is when is the millionth mainframe going to be made? And I actually, I didn’t say off the record when I asked Ross Mauri this so I can kind of feel comfortable telling you his answer was, it doesn’t matter because it’s the number of MIPS, it’s the amount of work that people are doing. And that’s the thing is that the mainframe is getting more and more powerful. And so the number of integer mainframes out there really is irrelevant, but my attitude has been for quite a long time that whatever is out there doing the world’s computing a thousand years from now is going to be in some way related to the IBM mainframe.
That was first announced on April 7th, 1964 that what IBM announced, System/360, which was intended to refer to 360 degrees of functionality. They really did invent the wheel. Yes, there was computing before the mainframe. Absolutely there was, but they brought it all together. This is the computer that got us on the moon. This is the computer that became the workhorse of the world economy and the system of reference. And over and over again, people have predicted this demise. Even the people who created mainframe thought it was only going to last 10 years, but they got it right. And what do you do? They’re victims of success. Poor IBM, they made a promise that they’ve been forced to keep. Back in 1964, they said, anything you run on any one of our mainframes will run on all of our mainframes. And they kept that promise and that became something that stuck them in the place of being the platform of reference because that’s exactly what everybody needed.
And it still is. As we move toward the future, all these other platforms that have now become legacy platforms, stuff that didn’t even exist when they started calling mainframe legacy is now legacy, and yet the mainframe is legacy in the best way. It’s something of value passed on from the predecessors and it’s going to be the system of the future. When I tell people, when you write code on the mainframe, understand your great, great, great grandkids are going to inherit the maintenance and stuff, take it seriously. This is the platform. This is the computing platform for all of human history. We got it right. And all these other platforms are great. They do this stuff around the edges and sometimes it’ll put you on edge the way they do it, but if you want to do it properly, the mainframe is going to continue to be the place for that. Craig.
Mullins: Yeah, I just wanted to add on one thing to what you said. You’re talking about legacy systems. Run a COBOL program that was written in 1965 on the mainframe today, and it’ll run, what about that Windows 3.1 application? Can you run that on Windows 11? Give it a try?
Harbeck: Exactly. So that’s my future. Oh, and of course, lemme just add this, this one, the future of the mainframe absolutely includes all the most relevant, important leading edge technology. It includes AI, it includes quantum, it includes all the stuff we haven’t even thought of yet because this is the platform where we take stuff seriously and if there is a technological innovation that impacts how we do business in the world, the mainframe is going to be relevant to it. So back to the next person.
Wig: All right, well, next person can be. Craig, do you have any other thoughts on the future of the mainframe? Are you like Reg, you think it’s going to be around in some form in a thousand years?
Mullins: Yeah, absolutely. I don’t know, a thousand years, maybe 10,000, who knows. Then we’ll be dealing with a different form of the Y2K problem, right? Adding five digits to the year. Anyway, the mainframe, I think has a solid foundation. When everyone kind of questions the mainframe, I say, all right, you’ve got a significant task ahead of you. Let’s compare it to farming and you want to plow a field, are you going to use an ox or 64 chickens? The mainframe is the ox, the 64 chickens are those distributed systems. One’s going to do the job and costs less, and it’s the same type of thing.
Okay, enough about that. That’s my thoughts after, Reg always gets me thinking about things. Anyway, what I would say too about what excites me the most is data, and data always excites me. Data is what’s going to drive the future of everything that is new that we know today and new into the future. You talk about ai, you talk about quantum AI is based on data. You create machine learning models based on data, and the old maxim, garbage in, garbage out applies. So to me, if you are serious about AI, you better get serious about data and not just grabbing as much data as you can, but making sure that it’s accurate data. There are a lot of studies that show that there are data quality problems in every significant application that’s running today.
Rooney: I googled it, I remember I heard the stat during GS, the uk, but I didn’t want to give out the wrong stat, but I finally found it. The average person touches a mainframe 12 to 14 times a day just going throughout the day. Whether that’s Amazon, whether that’s going to target, whether that’s logging into whatever apps they’re logging into. So double digit times a day, the average person is touching a mainframe and they don’t even know it.
Wig: Yeah, I mean that’s believable when, I mean, it’s crazy that 70% figure has been drilled into my head since I’ve been doing this.
Rooney: Oh god, yeah. I start the conversation with the 70% and then the 90% of credit card transactions too that. Put it on my tombstone the amount of times I say it. Yeah, those two. Alright,
Wig: Craig. Craig, sorry about that. Lost you, Craig. Yeah, I wish I could repeat where exactly you were when you got cut off, but I don’t know.
Mullins: I think I was just pontificating about quantum and database systems and really my point was that quantum will have practical applications to things. You’re not going to see quantum computers replace the mainframe or quantum database replace Db2, but you’ll see quantum technologies augment things where you have potentially faster query processing because you’ve got quantum optimization that has a lot more data points, quantum building machine learning models based on large amounts of data. So quantum is an add-to, not a replace when it comes to mainframes of the future.
Wig: Okay. Janet, do you have anything to add about the future of the mainframe or of, I mean IT in general.
Sun: In addition to everything that everybody else has talked about, which I’m kind of in agreement with, but I’m excited about the fact that after decades of trying to eliminate, unsuccessfully eliminate the mainframe frame industries, finally recognizing that the mainframe is there has value and is the most important platform out there. And so I’m excited to promote the mainframe again and see it be not relegated to a, oh, you’re still running that old system and being able to be recognized for the capable, wonderful system that it is.
Wig:
Yeah. So you’re excited for that recognition to continue and maybe even grow, it sounds like.
Sun:
Yep. Well, because mainframe, as everybody else has said, mainframe will be here for a long time. Everybody uses it every day. I like, thank you for the stats, Sean. That was great. But I think that for so long the industry was out there saying, oh, you don’t have to should get rid of the mainframe because we have all these little distributed computers. Everybody can have their own. And it’s like, yeah, but they don’t scale. They can’t do all the same things. It doesn’t support all the same workloads the same way. And in order to do the big data processing like Craig was talking about, you need a big, capable processor like a mainframe. So I’m just thinking we’re almost in a renaissance of the mainframe.
Wig: It’s exciting time then to be working with the mainframe and covering the mainframe. Yes. Yeah.
Mullins: One of the additional trends that I think lends right into what Janet is saying is cloud repatriation. There was this period of time where everyone said, everything’s going to the cloud, everything’s going away and it’s all going to be up in the cloud. And that was ridiculous to begin with, but now people are seeing that there are benefits to having on-premises computing, benefits to running that on the mainframe, and we’re seeing workload come back that was in the cloud now running on-premises.
Wig: And so Sean, what do you picture when you think about the future of the mainframe?
Rooney: Yeah, I’m going to tack onto what Craig just said too, where it seems like in technology there’s always this hot new thing where maybe 10 years ago it was cloud, then it was blockchain, now it’s ai and it’s kind of like where mainframe is the one that is standing the test of time. But to answer this question, I wanted to speak to it in general space instead of the mainframe. I agree with everything everyone said and don’t have much to add there. This past weekend we were at a friend’s house and they have a three-and-a-half-year-old and he goes to preschool three days a week right now. So we were just sitting there watching tv, we were watching Moana and he can’t read yet. He can memorize some of the pages of the books that he hears multiple times a day, but I just had the thought.
I was like, I know he can’t read yet, but have you read anything about maybe turning on subtitles to maybe get him familiar words, things like that. They said, no, he’s not there yet. What’s interesting is his name is Boden, he can read his name B-O-D-E-N. He can type his name, but he doesn’t know how to write his name yet. So kids now are at a point where they’re learning to type before they can write. That’s something that really excites me about technology is if they’re already typing. I graduated high school 2010, we didn’t have any coding class. There were no coding classes K through 12, and they’re already starting them. In elementary school we were playing Oregon Trail and Carmen San Diego and things like that. So I’m really excited to see where technology goes from there. If they’re in preschool and they already know how to type Craig.
Mullins: Yeah, the one thing I’d add to that is my wife is in the school system and they don’t teach cursive anymore. It’s all keyboard. So we’re going to have a generation of kids coming up who may not even know how to sign their own name because they never were taught cursive.
Sun: I think we already have that generation, that generation already here. No, seriously.
Rooney: If you look at my signature, it looks exactly the same as when I learned cursive in third grade. It is a very ugly signature because I don’t use cursive.
Wig: Alright, this has been a real privilege to just hear you share your wealth of knowledge. Got many decades of mainframe experience and IBM champion experience in this room and it’s been a great conversation. I shouldn’t be surprised since you are all IBBM champions, you’re all obviously very good at evangelizing and sharing your enthusiasm for your platform, so just thanks for being here. Yeah, and so that about does it. We’re at about an hour. I think we’ve learned a lot here. I think we have a lot to be excited about going forward and to close it out, I just want to let everybody know that you can get all the latest on all things tech by going to tech channel.com/subscribe. There. You can sign up for our newsletter, get content like this in your inbox every week. And to our audience, thanks for tuning in for episode number two of It Social Hour. We’re going to keep doing this and we will see you next time. Bye
Sun: Bye.