Enterprise Platform Software, CICS, COBOL and other System z tooling
Kevin J. Cummings is the Team Leader for Enterprise Platform Software Sales Enablement within IBM. This team focuses on encouraging and enabling WW Sales, Technical Sales, Architects and our global Business Partners to promote the value of a large software portfolio to customers and developers. Working closely with product development teams, marketing leads and sales, Kevin's team is responsible for raising awareness, developing skills training, and providing educational content to promote the Enterprise Platform Software (EPS) portfolio of products for System z. Kevin started working with Information Technology in 1980 and has been a developer, business analyst, architect, systems programmer and supported and researched tools and techniques for developers through most of his career. He has also led or managed individuals consistently during this time. Kevin has significant experience across multiple industries including Transportation, Manufacturing, Finance and been exposed to a myriad of customer environments working as a manager of customer advocates over the past 10 years at IBM. Traveling all over the world to various customer and training locations to promote the advantage of System z software reflects Kevin's perspective that “he works for the customer but is paid by IBM”!
Tuesday January 30, 2007
An update from Mumbai
Title/Subject
So, here I am back again with a short update from Mumbai India.This is actually my first travel trip of
the year and as always, it’s interesting.I recently acquired an IPOD for Christmas (thanks family) and likely you
will hear lots of what I listen to.
In this case, there is a lyric by the Barenaked
Ladies that goes “Haven’t you always wanted a Monkey….”.Well, other than zoo’s,
this is really the first time I have seen them live and for a few short hours,
I was surrounded.Walking free like
cat’s on an island sort of surprised me.This shot I took really grabbed my attention:
Sitting on a fencepost looking kinda
cool!Short answer is I no more want a
monkey than I do a cat (at least at this point in my life).But I have to say, this shot made my mind
wander some……
I think I mentioned earlier that I am lucky to be surrounded
by smart folks.This week was no
exception.I will be offering another
post on what it means to me to be in the IBM Sales Enablement business, but
suffice to say, I think I learn more than I teach most days.But I was surprised about how large the
COBOL population is here in this country.I have no real numbers for you, but it is quite large.Interesting and not surprising, a lot of
these folks are performing Service work for offshore companies throughout the
world.Thousands of
them, so I feel quite at home amongst these folks.And, I expect that there is a reciprocated
appreciation for the things we are doing with COBOL these days.(I know the notion of WDz
was well received.)
So, while I am still learning a bit about posting on this
site (I plan to try and format things a little better on this post – you can be
my judge).Hopefully I can do some
HTML formatting for the Web here.
Enterprise Platform Software – focused on Developers and Business systems for IBM System z
It was recently suggested that I should consider starting a blog for Developers and “my clients” that would assist in getting the word out on my team’s efforts. At first I had to consider the type of commitment this may require. In 2006, I managed to fly over 150,000 miles with work and I was thinking there were a number of times it would be hard to even think of “posting” information in a log of this nature.
But, I looked through some of the materials and postings here on Developerworks and thought maybe some of the travels I have and opinions I gather along these journeys may be worth sharing with an audience. If nothing else, I can certainly share some of the stranger moments in these travels.
I figure there are lots of ways that folks learn. The traditional methods are books, courses, classrooms and the like. While I have gained a lot of experience that way, I tend to learn more from my personal experiences. And if I am right, perhaps I can share some of these with you to allow you to grow a little too.
Its important that folks don’t consider me an expert on any given topic. Of course, some thing I know well and others I clearly don’t know well. But as a generalist and someone who is lucky to be surrounded by very clever and intelligent folks, I can look fairly clever some days myself. But I will leave it to you to judge the value of these musings.
I should start by telling you a bit about EPS. This software portfolio covers a wide range of offerings including CICS and some of the programming languages like COBOL, PL/1 and Assembler. We have strong affiliations with the WebSphere family (particularly on System z) and I certainly favour the System z machines. I plan to talk of “gateways” , “queues” and lots of tools surrounding these family members. My business interest is seeing the success and continuity of our Customers whom I value greatly. While not every EPS product runs on System z (remember OS/2 folks), our portfolio of over 130 products tend to encourage this platform as the best for Enterprise companies. Our WebSphere Developer for System z product is an excellent example of something that runs on Intel, but targets System z. (Also note, that I consider this the “desktop” of the Enterprise Developer and you are likely to hear plenty of this in future.)
From time to time, expect examples of this technology as well. As a rule, I am famous on my team for demanding Live Demonstrations. Its not just that I feel they are more interesting, its more that I want to prove to the world that our technology works and works well. We tend to keep our examples simple and easy to understand and apply.
So, expect updates here every couple of weeks and remember that Travel is my friend and enemy throughout this dialog. If you have questions of me, contact my IBM e-mail (kcumming@ca.ibm.com). But if it’s the portfolio you are curious about try epssales@ca.ibm.com and we will see if my team or myself can get you answers.
Enterprise Platform Software, CICS, COBOL and other System z tooling
