Author: Jeff Eveland

Here’s a list of the System z webcasts scheduled for March. Email info@txmq.com if you’re interested in registering for any of these sessions.
March 1 – Increase availability and reduce costs with redesigned OMEGAMON
Highlights
Topics include:
·        Redesigned user interface for an expansive enterprise view
·        Built-in best practices based on problem-solving scenarios
·        Autonomic functions for data synchronization
·        Use of less compute resources and fewer address spaces
·        Monitoring more components of the zEnterprise
Speaker: Mike Goodman, OMEGAMON Product Manager, IBM Software Group
Broadcast date: March 1, 2012 at 11:00 a.m. Eastern Standard Time, 4:00 p.m. GMT / UTC
Developed for: IT and enterprise architects; IT managers; system analysts; system programmers; and, operations managers
Technical level: Intermediate
When operations staff or system programmers have to navigate multiple systems, applications and products to track down and fix problems — your business is losing valuable time and money. This process also introduces the risk of system outages because problems take too long to resolve. Is that the sound of increased costs? Add to that, the prevalent decrease of maintenance windows, and it’s clear that increasing staff productivity can go a long way toward addressing important issues in IT today.
Attend this complimentary webcast, presented by IBM and SHARE, to learn about the redesigned Tivoli® OMEGAMON® family of products with better monitoring, faster problem management, improved maintenance and decreased resource usage. IBM worked with its customers to understand their top mainframe monitoring and management requirements and redesigned it accordingly. Now you can more easily monitor and maintain your entire mainframe environment, with an enhanced 3270 user interface, problem-solving scenarios, self-describing agents, and support for zEnterprise™ and zEnterprise BladeCenter Extension.
Overall, the new OMEGAMON user interface helps subject matter experts better understand what’s happening on their mainframe with information customized to focus on key problems experienced in System z® environments. This redesigned OMEGAMON can help increase mainframe visibility, decrease costs and reduce risks.
Join us after the webcast for a live question-and-answer session. The webcast will also be available for replay after the event.
 
March 6 – Customer experiences in maximizing analytics through query acceleration
Highlights
Topics include:
·        Meeting more requirements of business users
·        Improving price/performance for analytic workloads
·        Minimizing the need to create data marts for performance
·        Creating a highly secure environment for sensitive data analysis
Host: Alan Meyer, Senior Marketing Manager, System z Data Warehousing, IBM Software Group
Speakers: Peter Bendel, Senior Developer, DB2 Analytics Accelerator, IBM Software Group
Jeffrey Feinsmith, Director of Integration, Netezza Technology
Frank Neumann, Data Warehousing on System z, Center of Excellence, IBM Software Group
Broadcast date: 6, 2012 at 11:00 a.m. Eastern Standard Time, 4:00 p.m. GMT / UTC
Developed for: Data center operations and managers; DBAs; IT architects and managers; BI program managers and report authors; BI Competency Center executives
Technical level: Intermediate
With the speed of business today, and the need to make fast, fact-based decisions, organizations are no longer willing to wait on information from slow queries. The new IBM DB2® Analytics Accelerator meets that challenge and is one of the most exciting new products in the IBM Data Warehousing portfolio, creating additional opportunities for analytics on System z®.
The first customer experiences are in and the results are even better than expected. Join us for this complimentary webcast and learn how IBM customers are planning new architectures and new workloads, now possible through the acceleration of their analytic queries. You’ll see how this blending of DB2 for z/OS® and Netezza technologies is simplifying data warehousing environments, facilitating transparent deployment and reduced costs, removing the need to export data off the platform and enabling phenomenal speed. In this one-hour webcast, we’ll review initial analyses from customers, and why they see DB2 Analytics Accelerator as a true game changer.
Join us after the webcast for a live question-and-answer session. The webcast will also be available for replay after the event.
 
March 8 – See into the heart of CICS and resolve problems faster across LPAR boundaries
Highlights
Topics include:
• Using problem-solving scenarios designed by customers
• CICS and z/OS® monitors combined in an enhanced 3270 workspace
• Fewer screen interactions to find root cause performance impact in real time
Speaker: Mike Goodman, Tivoli OMEGAMON Product Manager, IBM Software Group
Broadcast date: March 8, 2012, 11 a.m., EST
Developed for: IT and enterprise architects; IT managers; systems analysts; system and CICS programmers; and, operations managers
Technical level: Intermediate
IBM CICS® performance is important to virtually every business that uses it — and it’s critical to quickly find and fix CICS problems before they become outages. IBM has continued to enhance and extend Tivoli® OMEGAMON® XE for CICS capabilities to make its monitoring and management faster, more productive and more effective.
Join us for this complimentary webcast for an overview of OMEGAMON XE for CICS V5.1 — with enhancements based on customer requirements — as we explore its redesigned, problem-solving features. You’ll learn how greater visibility into CICS can help you resolve issues across Parallel Sysplex® and LPAR boundaries with fewer screens and keystrokes.
In this one-hour webcast, we’ll discuss how OMEGAMON XE for CICS 5.1 helps you more easily monitor and maintain your entire mainframe environment to quickly find and fix problems before they become outages. We’ll also show you how you can exploit IBM’s zIIP hardware to help you more easily meet service level agreements and lower the cost of compute time.
Join us after the webcast for a live question-and-answer session. The webcast will also be available for replay after the event.
 
March 13 – Beyond migration — Reduce CPU in DB2 10 using DB2 Utilities and Tools
Highlights
Topics include:
·        Minimize downtime associated with routine DB2 data maintenance
·        Set up recurring utility jobs for conditional and routine maintenance tasks
·        Drive significant savings in elapsed time and CPU during utility sort processing, especially LOAD, REORG and RUNSTATS
·        Customize DB2 utility tasks to meet your business needs
Speakers: Haakon Roberts, IBM Distinguished Engineer, DB2 for z/OS® Development, IBM Software Group
Jennifer Nelson, Product Specialist, Rocket Software
Broadcast date: March 13, 2012 at 11:00 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time, 3:00 p.m. GMT / UTC
Developed for: Database administrators and managers
Technical level: Intermediate
Most DBAs have a list of things they want to improve after migrating to IBM DB2® 10, and reducing CPU is usually at the top of the list. With the latest DB2 Utility enhancements applied in your environment you can accomplish this and reduce elapsed time during utility processing, automate statistics gathering and potentially eliminate some REORGs altogether.
You can always count on DB2 Utilities and Tools to provide Day 1 support for new releases of DB2. But do you know how to maximize their use in your environment? Are you familiar with the most recent performance features delivered in the DB2 Utilities Suite since DB2 10? Join us for this complimentary webcast and learn more. We’ll focus partly on CPU savings and zIIP offload, but also on features that improve availability in the DB2 Utilities and Tools. We’ll show you how you can take advantage of DB2 Tools in the utility management portfolio to maximize the effective use of DB2 10 Utilities. You’ll come away from this session with valuable, cost-savings and best practices information.
Join us after the webcast for a live question-and-answer session. The webcast will also be available for replay after the event.
 
March 14 –  Achieving optimum CICS performance
Highlights
Topics include:
·        Where to focus performance tuning efforts that also meet demanding SLAs
·        Automate monitoring of CICS applications and know when they exceed performance thresholds
·        Quickly identify and dynamically respond to out-of-line business situations
·        Ensure the scalability of your application portfolio
·        Take better advantage of the specialty engines
Speaker: Pete Siddell, CICS Tools Technical Specialist, IBM Software Group
Broadcast date: 14, 2012 at 11:00 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time, 3:00 p.m. GMT / UTC
Developed for: IT and enterprise architects; developers; IT managers; performance specialists; and system programmers
Technical level: Intermediate
With CICS® Transaction Server V4.2, even more optimization opportunities are now available. But with the growing complexity of systems, it can be difficult to take full advantage of them — without the support of powerful monitoring, tuning and reporting utilities. If you use CICS Transaction Server for z/OS®, especially if you use it with IMS Database Manager, attend this webcast to learn how new features in these products can significantly reduce your CPU usage and improve response times.
IBM and SHARE are presenting this complimentary webcast on optimizing the performance of CICS systems and applications. You’ll learn how it not only releases capacity to support new or growing workloads, but also helps to improve response times and increase customer satisfaction. We’ll discuss a powerful set of IBM tools that can work together to support a wide range of performance scenarios, not just threadsafe analysis, but capacity planning, application-level analysis, monitoring and alerting, problem determination, and many others. The webcast will feature extensive demonstrations of key scenarios.
Join us after the webcast for a live question-and-answer session. The webcast will also be available for replay after the event.
 
March 15 – The critical role of Service Management in moving to cloud on System z
Highlights
Topics include:
• Detect and recover potential problems in essential system resources automatically
• Quickly isolate and take action automatically to resolve issues
• Automate best practices for common data center provisioning activities
• Understand the structure of interdependent and complex applications
Speaker: Mike Baskey, Integration Architect and Chief Architect, Management Standards, IBM Software Group
Broadcast date: March 15, 2012, 11 a.m., EDT
Developed for: IT and enterprise architects; IT managers; systems analysts; system programmers; and, operations managers
Technical level: Intermediate
The move to cloud computing is being driven by several problems familiar to most IT professionals:
• Infrastructures that are slow to adapt and hinder business agility
• Software costs that consume a disproportionate share of IT budget
• Security management weaknesses that expose the business
• Inability to respond to peak demand that limits competitiveness
Cloud is all about making it easier to manage resources, and if you’re thinking about moving to cloud on System z®, or zEnterprise™, good Service Management will be key to your success.
In this complimentary webcast, we’ll discuss how to tie discovery and monitoring to performance and workload management, while considering capacity planning of your cloud environment on System z. We’ll show you how you can look across virtual servers — System z, System p® and System x® — and associated workload performance goals, to manage your System z, or zEnterprise, resources. We’ll also discuss how Tivoli™ monitoring can leverage Unified Resource Manager insight at the virtual server and operating system levels. This gives you the Service Management needed to begin a successful cloud implementation.
Join us after the webcast for a live question-and-answer session. The webcast will also be available for replay after the event.
 
March 20 – What’s new from the Optimizer in IBM DB2 10 for z/OS?
Highlights
Topics include:
·        Enhanced plan management
·        “Safe” query optimization
·        Improvements to complex OR and IN list processing
·        RUNSTATS management and performance improvements
Speaker: Terry Purcell, Senior Technical Staff Member, DB2 for z/OS Optimizer Development, IBM Software Group
Broadcast date: March 20, 2012 at 11:00 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time, 3:00 p.m. GMT / UTC
Developed for: IT managers; IT and enterprise architects; database administrators and managers; system programmers; and, operations managers
Technical level: Intermediate
One of the most significant benefits of query optimization is reducing the total cost of ownership. Since its initial inception in DB2® for z/OS®, the cost-based Optimizer has continually evolved to deliver expert-based query and workload analysis and many other performance-enhancing functions. In DB2 10, it’s proving to deliver even more.
Join us for a complimentary webcast and learn how the latest enhancements to IBM’s Optimizer are helping customers worldwide. For example, you’ll see how with critical tested selects statements, the DB2 10 Optimizer chose the optimal access path, sometimes even improving previous access path choices in DB2 9. In this presentation we’ll share the insight uncovered during early usage, provide the motivation for each enhancement, and delve into highlights of the actual enhancements.
Join us after the webcast for a live question-and-answer session. The webcast will also be available for replay after the event.
 
March 22 – Shave time off application and service delivery with enhanced event management
Highlights
Topics include:
• Proactive discovery capabilities for faster time to resolution
• Asynchronous discovery to ensure that discovered data is accurate and business service views are current
• Multiple, concurrent discovery jobs supported on a single discovery server
Speaker: James Moore, Product Manager, Tivoli Application Dependency Discovery Manager, IBM Software Group
Broadcast date: March 22, 2012, 11 a.m., EDT
Developed for: IT and enterprise architects; IT managers; systems analysts; system programmers; and, operations managers
Technical level: Intermediate
To get full value out of IBM zEnterprise™, it should be used to manage mainframe and distributed environments. This requires seeing detailed views of infrastructure, including configurations and seeing the relationships of various components, such as applications and hardware. This information can help you manage events and event results by understanding relationships before the events occur. Are you able to track changes being made to the infrastructure and the change dependencies across software and hardware? By improving application and event visibility with discovery, you can understand the impact of changes, and application or event outages.
If you’re wasting time with manual efforts in trying to find and track all components, infrastructure and their interactions, including application and events — you’re wasting your investment. With the size and complexity of most zEnterprise environments, automated discovery provides a level of event management needed to meet SLAs.
If you’re already on System z® or you’re moving to zEnterprise, you’ve taken the most important step. Now it’s time to make sure you’re taking advantage of recent improvements in performance. The best place to start is by quickly discovering all the applications and events on your mainframe. In this complimentary webcast, we’ll show you how to improve event visibility using Tivoli® Discovery and Integration, enabling big savings in time and cost for application and service discovery across zEnterprise, including Linux® on System z and zEnterprise BladeCenter Extension.
Join us after the webcast for a live question-and-answer session. The webcast will also be available for replay after the event.
March 27 – IMS database replication for enhanced system resiliency
Highlights
Topics include:
·        Native IMS-to-IMS software replication for high-availability IMS data environments
·        Synchronizing the contents of IMS databases in near real-time with full recovery
·        Hot standby environmental support to reduce recovery time
Speaker: Greg Vance, IMS Replication Development for System z, IBM Software Group
Broadcast date: March 27, 2012 at 11:00 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time, 3:00 p.m. GMT / UTC
Developed for: IT and enterprise architects; IT managers; database administrators and managers; systems analysts; system programmers; security managers, and, operations managers
Technical level: Intermediate
IBM® IMS™ clients on System z® are always on the lookout for ways to improve system resiliency and availability, especially because IMS remains the lowest cost-per-transaction DBMS. Now there’s a new option. IBM InfoSphere® IMS Replication for z/OS® enables IMS as a source for IBM’s InfoSphere Change Data Capture solutions. This helps increase the availability of IMS data, whether it is for a continuous availability strategy or to ensure the timely distribution of critical enterprise information.
Join Greg Vance, IMS replication subject matter expert, in this complimentary teleconference as he shows how IMS and IBM InfoSphere IMS Replication for z/OS can help improve system resiliency and availability by enabling IMS as a source for IBM’s InfoSphere Change Data Capture solutions. Now, one IMS data replication solution, InfoSphere IMS Replication for z/OS, enables both homogeneous IMS database replication (IMS-to-IMS) and IMS database sourcing for heterogeneous replication. Greg will share details about implementing this solution, as well as an overview of the GDPS® Active/Active sites solution.
Join us after the teleconference for a live question-and-answer session. The teleconference will also be available for replay after the event.

By Wendy Sanacore
It’s official. Apple is kicking Android device’s butt when it comes to use in the enterprise sector.
Why? Because for some companies, Android phones and devices are just not an option. Bruce Poon Tip from G Adventures only uses Apple iPhone and iPad. According to Poon Tip, Android devices and the Blackberry just can’t keep up in their environment.
According to a new study recently published, iPhones represented 53 percent of new device activations in the fourth quarter of 2011 for its enterprise customers as opposed to 28 percent for Android based phones.
However in the consumer space, Android phones out-sell iPhones, 52 percent to 37 percent.
The chief complaint on the enterprise level is security. Android is an open platform and users can download from sites that aren’t associated with Google’s Android market.
Without actively monitoring the security of these third party sites, it’s impossible to know the security of the apps.
What technology does your company rely on? All of TxMQ’s computers are Apple and we are split within the office about half and half, iPhone vs Android.
Do you trust Apps from open markets? How do you know what’s safe and what isn’t?

By Wendy Sanacore
You never know when a great idea is going to pop out of thin air. I’m currently working on TxMQ’s 2012 marketing campaign. We’ve never really done any official paid advertising, so it is an interesting process. I love speaking with all the different sales people at various publications as they try to separate their particular publication aside from the competition. I’ve heard all sorts of interesting demographic, readership and subscriber facts. Honestly, the reality is, they all have pretty much the same offer, the same target audience, etc. So wherever we do decide to advertise, I am confident that we can see a return on our investment.
But then came the twist; a new idea of where to spend some marketing dollars…the airports.
My colleague, Miles Roty, was traveling to LegalTech, a conference in the Big Apple this weekend and he spent some time in the airports on Saturday afternoon. I was going about my business at home when my cell phone notified me of a text message. It said, “Hey Wend – we should advertise in the airports” and with it was a picture of a competitor’s ad in the airport terminal.
What a GREAT idea! And it’s something I would never have thought about. But someone who works with me did.
So at this point, it’s not a matter of whether we do or don’t advertise in airports (though this morning I started the process of getting more information on it), it’s about listening to what the people around me have to say and allowing them to input suggestions and solutions to my questions.
Listen to those around you. You work in a group environment for a reason. I urge you to try it today, run something by a colleague or a friend. I bet they have a different, fresh take on it!
Sometimes two heads are truly better than one.
 

By Wendy Sanacore
Looks like Apple is doing it again. News today has it that Apple plans to re-invent the old fashioned textbook. Apple is preparing to offer a series of software tools to make it possible to move education from textbooks to interactive digital lessons. These lessons will be interactive, colorful and engaging for student.
According to a Yahoo! news article:

Jobs is cited by his biographer, Walter Isaacson, as saying textbooks were just waiting to be transformed. Not only were they dull and sometimes outdated, they were heavy (just ask any seventh-grader with a backpack full of them).

In “Steve Jobs,” Isaacson wrote, “His idea was to hire great textbook writers to create digital versions, and make them a feature of the iPad. In addition, he held meetings with the major publishers, such as Pearson Education, about partnering with Apple. ‘The process by which states certify textbooks is corrupt,’ he said. ‘But if we can make the textbooks free, and they come with the iPad, then they don’t have to be certified. The crappy economy at the state level will last for a decade, and we can give them an opportunity to circumvent that whole process and save money.'”

I read an article about the announcement in the Wall Street Journal citing Philip Schiller, Apple Senior Vice President of Worldwide Marketing as saying that educational institutions already use more than 1.5 million iPads with access to more than 20,000 educational apps.
According to the article, 6% of education textbook sales will be digital this year, which is up from 3% in 2011. That number is expected to rise more than 50% by the year 2020.
One technology analyst stated that the only people that would be threatened by the change would be book publishers who don’t embrace the change and backpack makers because the textbooks are so heavy right now.
But my question is, who is then responsible for purchasing the iPads that the kids are going to use to learn on? Is it going to be a parent’s responsibility to purchase the $500 product for each child they have in school? And at what age is this going to begin? I’m not quite sure you can really trust an elementary or middle-schooler with a piece of technology that is so expensive.
I can only assume the schools won’t be absorbing this cost. We’re already cutting music and arts because the fundamentals can’t be funded, how can it be expected that iPads are going to be given to every child?
Technology has a place in classrooms right now. Teachers use digital tools to teach every day and students are already completing homework and accessing pertinent information online.
I just can’t see the total logistics of this initiative and how this isn’t going to be just one more burden for parents. Do you think this will truly improve our educational system?

On February 8, 2012, IBM is holdng a complimentary event designed to offer flexible, hands-on opportunities to experience IBM WebSphere SOA software.
The one-day event held at IBM Canada, 3600 Steeles Avenue, East, Markham (near Steeles & Warden) will increase your understanding of the capabilities of the WebSphere product family with hands-on exercises and discussions.
For more information, email info@txmq.com.

By Wendy Sanacore
I was catching up on my email and the news of the world this morning, and I happened across a story with the headline: “Leopard Kills Man, Scalps Another.” Of course, I clicked on it to read it. There’s not a lot that surprises me that I find online, any and all information you should ever want is out there with the right amount of searching, but what came up when I clicked on this article really did surprise and revolt me…(I didn’t post the article here, but I am sure if you wanted to, you could find it.)
A photographer on the scene had captured the attack and there were three photos, the second showing a flap of the man’s head being torn off and the third showing the man walking away from the attack covered in blood, the side of his face ripped off.
If we were to watch a movie with those images, the movie would be rated “R”. But it’s not a movie, it’s the Internet…and it’s real life. And it’s scarily accessible. How much of what we see on both television and the Internet is desensitizing us to reality?
I remember a while ago I watched real time footage on the news of someone being shot. And when it was all over and the story was complete, I had to remind myself that the incident I had just witnessed was not a movie. It was a real person, gunned down and killed. It almost didn’t ring to me because of all we see in the movies.
So what, if anything, is there that we can do about the content online? How outrageous do we allow stories and posts to get and do we truly have any control over it whatsoever?
What are your thoughts?
 
 

The 2012 IBM System z Technology Summit includes 30 sessions grouped under five unique tracks based on job responsibilities and interests.
This is an annual event that gathers IT professionals and brings them up to speed on new mainframe technology and helps them make better use of existing hardware and software resources.
This year you’ll learn how IBM Mainframes – System Z(R) and zEnterpriseTM – are changing the way businesses solve problems by helping to optimize workload deployment infrastructure that also helps drive down costs.
Choose from five unique tracks
Our sessions are based on your interests and job responsibilities, with a full day of complimentary sessions under each track. Subject matter experts will cover topics ranging from deep analytics and collaborative application development, to using Decision Management so you can adapt to changes faster   and with more flexibility. You select the track and sessions that fit your requirements:
Track 1
zEnterprise – The ideal basis for Smarter Computing for IT managers, IT enterprise architects
Track 2
DB2® for z/OS® Technical Update for database administrators, database managers
Track 3
Smarter Development and Deployment for IT application architects and developers
Track 4
Application Infrastructure Modernization for Business Agility for system analysts, IT architects, application architects, CICS® application developers
Track 5
Data Center Operations and Systems Management Update for IT operations and system programmers
Dates:
January 26, 2012 – Toronto, Ontario
February 2, 2012 – Dallas, TX
February 7, 2012 – Washington, DC
February 21, 2012 – Atlanta
February 23, 2012 -Los Angeles
February 28, 2012 – New York City
For more information or if you’d like to attend, please email info@txmq.com.
 

By Wendy Sanacore
Warren Buffet has a history of letting his disdain towards technology be noted. Bu this shifted dramatically last Monday when it was announced that Buffett has been slowly building up his stake in the technology giant over the past 8 months. He now owns about a 5.5% stake in the company which could easily make him the largest shareholder.
So what made the mogul change his mind in regards to investing in the IBM stock?
Buffett examined the way IBM conducts its business and liked what he saw. The services IBM provides allows them to be indispensable to their corporate clients in a way that many companies just aren’t anymore.
I have often spoken in my blog about the way to do business and make your company indispensable to your clients. You want to be provide services in a manner that make you a strategic business partner, not simply a vendor.
This is the nugget of gold that Buffett apparently sees in IBM. He was quoted as saying, “It’s a company that helps IT departments do their jobs better….I don’t know of any large company that really has been as specific about what they intend to do and how they intend to do it as IBM.”
Here at TxMQ, we like this news a lot! We support the IBM spectrum of Middleware and Software products. Any good news for IBM is good news for us. Buffet backing IBM proves to us that our niche market is going to be one to stand the test of time, which just means we have more and more time to get even better at doing what we already do great!