John Carr Set to Present at IBM’s 2020 Integration Tech Conference

Presentation

One of the Best Events of the year is just around the corner!
IBM’s 2020 Integration Technical Conference is scheduled to be held on March 16th through the 19th this year, at the Renaissance Hotel in Dallas, TX.

What is the Integration Technical Conference? 

The Integration Technical Conference was started in 2019 as a replacement for a previously popular MQ and Integration focused Technical Conference known as MQTC. 
Last year’s inaugural Integration Tech Conference was one of the most highly acclaimed conferences of the year. It was praised for having a strong technical focus, great presentations, and in-depth training opportunities, and not just being another sales conference. 
IBM is working even harder this year to improve on last year’s conference and they have officially confirmed the Partners and Subject Matter Experts that have been chosen to present. 

We are proud to announce TxMQ’s very own John Carr, a Sr. Integration Architect, has been selected to present “Practical IBM MQ Implementations for the Cloud: A Journey of DevOps from an IBM MQ admin”. You may have already caught some of John’s previous presentations including “MQ Upgrade Best Practices” last year at the 2019 conference or through one of our webinars (which you can view here).

This year John will be discussing migrating your IBM MQ network from on-prem to the cloud. For those already undertaking their own modernization efforts, this will be a great topic for discussion. The session will walk through a case where TxMQ helped a Mortgage Services organization migrate their entire self-managed data center into the public cloud. You can learn more from the breakdown of the session abstracts here

If you’re lucky enough to attend your days are going to be full, so plan accordingly! This year John’s presentation will be on Day 3, Wednesday, March 18th at 9:50 AM, and on Thursday, March 19th at 4:40 PM. Both will be held in Salon F/G at the Renaissance Dallas Hotel. Lock it into your calendar so you don’t miss it! 

If you are attending don’t forget to stop by the TxMQ booth for some helpful guides, giveaways, and prizes. Also, please drop us a note at info@txmq.com or give us a call (716.636.0070) to connect at the conference, we’d love to hear from you.

Have a great time! We’ll see you there.

2017 Greater Buffalo Area CIO Roundtable a Success

2017 Greater Buffalo Area CIO Roundtable a Success

On a recent sun filled afternoon, almost 50 area business leaders and technologists gathered in downtown Buffalo to hear a panel of Chief Information Officers (CIOs) present their thoughts on trends and directions in technology, along with concerns and aspirations for their organizations.

The panel included Jeff Crimmins, CIO and CSO of Freed Maxick CPAs, Kerry Kerlin, CIO of Roswell Park Cancer Institute, and Joe McLaughlin, Vice President, Operations and Technology of AAA of Western and Central New York.

After a brief opening, I asked the panelists, in rotation, a series of questions, starting with a broad ranging “what keeps you up at night?”.

Each of the panelists shared a number of concerns, but the common theme was finding adequate talent, and information security.
This led to the next question, Security and Compliance, specifically, how has the increased visibility of cybersecurity in the mainstream media, affected you? Interestingly, all panelists agreed that their greatest concern was for the ‘amazing things users will do’. The primary concern being that no amount of user training, clever videos, and growing awareness of phishing or ransomware schemes could correct for a non-thinking user accidentally opening a dangerous email.
It was widely agreed by the panel, and the audience, that additional training was required.

Chief-Information-Officer-Rountable-Buffalo-New-York-TxMQ-Solutions-2From there, the conversation moved to cloud.

Each organization represented had adopted various components of cloud; Mr. McLaughlin opening by pointing out they had moved to wide-scale adoption of an off site data center some years ago, what today his vendor now calls ‘Cloud’. The other panelists agreed they had varying adoption from moving some critical systems off site to a colocation facility, to adopting various vendor provided packages that are increasingly only available as cloud deployments.
Some attendees added questions, including asking the panelists on how they vet cloud providers. Most panelists agreed, that increasingly, cloud providers have facilities far more robust than in past years, and in nearly every case, far beyond the capabilities any of their organizations could hope to match in their own data centers.

The panelists were asked if the recent shift in the political landscape was having any effect on their businesses.

Notably, Mr. Crimmins of Freed Maxick, a large public accounting firm, pointed out that the increasing uncertainty, especially around the tax code, was causing some angst among their clients. “No one likes uncertainty”, he added. Mr. Kerlin noted that RPCI, as a prominent healthcare research facility, depends on grants like those offered by the National Institute of Health (NIH). The recent funding cuts to that organization may have a negative downstream effect on Roswell.

From there, we moved the conversation to Talent, where each CIO spoke about their challenges in filling roles.

Mr. Kerlin noted their work with the local universities including providing speakers, and educators, but expressed concern that there was still a disconnect in needed curricula to fill current and future STEM related positions. Some attendees questioned the CIOs on the availability of some talent willing to work non-traditionally, in some cases remote, or flex schedules. The panelists admitted they needed to continue to improve in offering this flexibility, but did note there are still systemic challenges to more broadly adopting remote workers.

In concluding, all the panelists acknowledged a dramatic shift in their roles over the past decade, specifically, the movement from a technology centric role, to one more leveraged across business units.

Privately, some panelists admitted a little “be careful what you wish for” sentiment. Noting for years they had lobbied for greater inclusion in business meetings, and input in critical decision making, which has led to a reality today where their days are taken up with nothing but said meetings, leaving little time to get the actual work done.
Feedback from the event was entirely positive, with multiple suggestions for future events. TxMQ intends to take this event on the road to multiple US and Canadian cities over the coming months, and we can only hope for as strong, and positive a reaction as we received in Buffalo.
 

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