IBM nurtures mainframe workforce with world championship
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Regional competitions engaged 68,000 students in 33 countries who have learned the skills to manage mainframe enterprise platforms.
IBM announced its first-ever “Master the Mainframe” world championship where university students who are winners of regional qualifiers will spend the month of March entrenched in what IBM calls the “Systems of Engagement” concept.
Systems of Engagement are decentralized technologies that encourage collaboration across a variety of hardware and software platforms and often use cloud technologies to enable those interactions.
Today’s enterprise systems are largely “Systems of Record,” said IBM, unconnected systems designed around discrete pieces of information (records) geared towards passively providing information to a set of workers.
Contestants will deploy Systems of Record mainframe business applications written with Java and COBOL using DB2 for z/OS APIs, and they will demonstrate how the Systems of Engagement concept takes full advantage of the platform's capabilities, according to an IBM statement.
As part of IBM's interest in developing the skills of a new generation of mainframe experts, the competition will highlight the modern capabilities of the mainframe in handling complex big data, cloud, security and mobile computing workloads.
The students will demonstrate their applications on April 7, 2014, in New York City, where a panel of judges will determine which student earns the distinction of "Master the Mainframe World Champion."
Since 2005, over 68,000 students have participated in the IBM contest, showcasing their talents while learning the skills to manage enterprise platforms like the IBM zEnterprise mainframe, which can be found in virtually every industry, from banking and transportation to healthcare and government.
"IBM is committed to preparing "Generation z" for the future of business," said Pat Toole, general manager, IBM System z. "Our ongoing collaboration with governments and academia in more than 70 countries to extend mainframe skills through our System z Academic Initiative helps ensure continuous mainframe innovations in areas such as cloud, mobile and big data for decades to come."
For further information on IBM's Master the Mainframe project and System z Academic Initiative, visit: http://www.ibm.com/systems/z/masterthemainframe.