In this episode of the “I Am a Mainframer” podcast, Steven Dickens is joined by David Jeffries, VP, Development, IBM z/OS Software at IBM. Their conversation explores how David’s extensive career has grown and developed, the importance of mentoring, and the bright future he sees continuing to take shape in the mainframe world. This is a conversation you won’t want to miss!
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TRANSCRIPT
Voiceover
This is the “I Am A Mainframer” podcast, brought to you by the Linux Foundations Open Mainframe Project. Episodes explore the careers of mainframe professionals and offer insights into the industry and technology. Now your host, senior analyst and vice president of sales and business development at Futurum Research, Steven Dickens.
Steven Dickens:
Hello and welcome. My name’s Steven Dickens and I’m your host for the “I am a Mainframer” podcast. I’m joined today by dear friend and former colleague David Jeffries. Welcome to the show.
David Jeffries:
Thank you, Steve. It’s great to be here.
Steven Dickens:
So, we always start… Let’s get the listeners and the viewers orientated. What do you do for IBM? What’s your current role? And then we’ll go back and we’ll talk a little bit about your career etc.
David Jeffries:
Yeah. So right now, I’m the vice president of z/OS Development. So really, it’s the main operating system that drives the main transactional workload for the platform. It’s an operating system that’s been around for quite a few years, but I’d argue it’s as modern now as it’s ever been. It’s a fantastic platform with a fantastic team of people that I work with across the world that drives this platform for us.
Steven Dickens:
So is that everything from development, product management, and moving into support a little? Just maybe expand.
David Jeffries:
Yeah, absolutely. So, clearly we’ve got the product management now. With operating systems, it’s very different how you look at the product management aspects of it. We’re transforming that part of the organization. But yes, we’ve got all the development activity for it. And for certain areas of the product, we’ve got some of the level two activity, which is the support. But traditionally and typically, a lot of that is done by one of the teams that works with us, which is part of the main support network for IBM clients. So yeah, we do pretty much all the developments and we get involved with clients all the way through though, whether it’s on the good side or it’s on the not so good side when things don’t necessarily go as well as they should, but we wrap ourselves around all those things.
Steven Dickens:
So I know you’ve got a long standing career in IBM. You obviously started at age five or six. [inaudible 00:02:12]
David Jeffries:
Absolutely.
Steven Dickens:
… to have worked there as many years as you have. But joking aside, maybe just give us a bit of a career arc. When did you join IBM? What are some of the roles that you’ve done? I think there’s some really interesting nuggets there.
David Jeffries:
Oh, I’ve been around a bit. So, I started my… Gosh, it goes back to when I was actually at college. In the UK, we had things like placement years. Okay. So I think over here in the US that’s internships and various things like that. But I started with IBM down in Hursley, which is the development lab for CICS, or CICS as we call it in the UK. And I started there ’88, gosh, 34 years ago.
Steven Dickens:
I was going to say, were you five or six years old when you started?
David Jeffries:
It feels like that.
Steven Dickens:
Yeah, obviously.
David Jeffries:
It feels like that. But I started down there and then I went back down there after finishing at college. So, I run around with CICS. So, I started in tests. So I didn’t really start as a developer. I started as a test, functional verification test, which actually was a fantastic role for me, because it got me involved in not only CICS, but also DB2 QMF for a whole bunch of products that worked with the platform and with the transactional systems that we had. Then I actually got a fantastic opportunity to go to Montpellier, which was our large system briefing center at the time.
Steven Dickens:
Tough place to have [inaudible 00:03:30].
David Jeffries:
It was harsh. It was harsh.
Steven Dickens:
Southern France, I mean, that’s going to be really a tough [inaudible 00:03:34].
David Jeffries:
Southern France for two and a half years. And Dave, do you want to stay down there or do you want to come back to the… That was the toughest decision.
Steven Dickens:
Do you want to stay?
David Jeffries:
What I really want to do? But the timing was fantastic because the timing was really all about… When we came out with our CMOS technology, where we started to move away from the bipolar technology and we came to CMOS, and we created things like Sysplexs and kicks CICSPlex, my role was very much around something called CICSPlex System Manager, which was the dynamic allocation and dynamic rooting of transactions around a very complex network of CICS and DB2 subsystems. So, that then took me back to the UK. I did MQ series for a period of time. I did presales, I did services and lab-based services there. And then I got an opportunity, but the lab director at the time was a guy called Graham Spittle. And he said, “Dave, how do you fancy a role deeper in MQ but MQ development and MQ SI?” The systems integrator product then became Message Broker. Hey, I was there for three years. I changed the product named three different times. All right. I’m not sure if that was my fault or is-
Steven Dickens:
It’s like the other game we’ve got to play.
David Jeffries:
Yeah, it was all down to me. And then I think a really interesting time in my life and my family’s life really kicked in because we got another opportunity to do an assignment. And you think that Montpellier was nice. So then they get to ask me, “Dave, do you fancy going to California for a couple of years?” Well, California for a couple of years, turned into 11 years and I was able to do WebSphere Application Server. I was able to do WebSphere InterChange developer and the whole process server activity that we brought a company in to IBM in the Bay Area and we’re integrated that technology in. And then I spent a bit of time in DB2. So, I’ve done DB2 z/OS. Then I took another bit of a journey into… IBM bought Cognos. And at the time it was the biggest acquisition IBM had ever made. And we helped to integrate Cognos, which was a team that was really based out of Ottawa in Canada. And we integrated them in around business intelligence and business analytics. Then cut a long story short, another opportunity to go back to Hursley where I started to be the director for CICS, the director for the CICS team. That was supposed to be a couple years that became four years doing z/OS Connect. We started z/OS Connect, fantastic team of individuals. You’ve been to Hursley, you know Hursley, you know what it’s like.
Steven Dickens:
Tough place. It’s still the UK.
David Jeffries:
It’s again, its hard.
Steven Dickens:
It’s not Montpellier but it’s probably the nicest after [inaudible 00:06:05].
David Jeffries:
But you’re not looking out of your window to freeways and motorways, et cetera. You’re looking out of your window and you’ve got cows and trees and sheep and you got-
Steven Dickens:
And cricket pitch.
David Jeffries:
And a cricket pitch and a pub down the right. All right. I mean what…
Steven Dickens:
It’s not a bad place to go spend a bit of time.
David Jeffries:
It’s so much design of the CICS. The CICS product, et cetera, has been done down at the pub on the back of a beer mat. You shouldn’t say that at the camera. But I mean, it’s a fantastic thing. It’s a fantastic place.
Steven Dickens:
So, I think one thing that comes out… I get a wonderful opportunity with these types of interviews to speak to execs like you. We just had a session with Jose Castano, and I think from the outside, looking in, you would look at it and go, “How do you build a career on one platform for 34 years?” And I think just listening to you describing that you’ve been able to do so much, different parts of the world, IBM’s taking you around the world, they’ve taken you through multiple different products, what would you be saying… Looking to… sort of you have the chance to go back to that kid who’s just finishing sort of college, what would you be saying? What would the advice be?
David Jeffries:
That’s a good question. I think if I had the ability to go back… And I do some mentoring with college kids, et cetera, certainly at a Sheffield university, which is my alumni. And I realized talking to them that they have so much to learn. They have so much to know and to learn from essentially what happens in the ecosystem, in the environment of college, to really what happens in the real world. And being aware, being studying technology, and studying the news, and studying the directions. The conversations we are having with these guys is opening up their eyes in things like blockchain and enterprise systems and security and security development. There are so many areas. And of course now from an AI perspective, we’re all getting heavily into AI and bringing AI to the platform and bringing AI to the transactional environment. There is just so much opportunity.
And I think I’ve always said that IBM is like one of the greatest playpens in the world, all right. There is so much technology you can play around with. There is so much you can do, whether you’re working with research, whether you’re working with the hardware development, the chip designers, et cetera, or whether you’re working in the operating system or up the stack. There is so much you can get involved in whether you are mobile, blockchain, cloud based, AI based, whatever. Pretty much every aspect of the way that technology is moving forward these days is available within the IBM development labs and in research. And I think we are lucky certainly within our platform that we are starting to touch every single aspect of that now. And so, you could say five or 10 years ago, some of the open source activity and new languages and things like Python and Go, et cetera, was it appropriate to the mainframe? Well, now, now it’s starting to be very appropriate and now we have it.
Steven Dickens:
I mean, thank you for wearing the Open Mainframe piece. Little main fact, I was involved in doing the logo design back when we launched the project. So I get to claim a bit of that, so it’s nice to see it on a t-shirt. But you talked about open source there. Give us a view. I mean, if you’d have gone back maybe five years and you’d have said that there’d been an open source within z/OS, I think there’d been a revolt. People would’ve seen that as something that’s really tough, but we’ve seen the Open Mainframe Project mature. We’ve obviously seen Zowe mature over the last three years or so. You are obviously leading a lot of that from a development effort point of view. Give us a perspective there.
David Jeffries:
I think open source has always been something that we’ve probably aspired to try and leverage and capture within the platform. But the platform that we have is inherently secure, it’s reliable, it’s resilient. It has all the utilities that we pride ourselves on. And open source, introducing open source into the platform has probably been to a certain extent, let’s do it softly, softly. Let’s do it slowly. Let’s make sure we don’t break the fundamental premise of what the platform’s therefore. And I think certainly over the last three or four years, we developed something called zCX, which is IBM z/OS Container Extensions. And that now is a very scalable and reliable and secure environment in which you can bring open source in and have it co-located with z/OS applications. We are starting to see a fantastic amount of interest in this of people bringing different applications, Mongos, Kafkas, et cetera, DevOps tools, et cetera, into the z/OS ecosystem. Traditionally they’ve sat in containers on Linux and Z, or other environments. Now, we bringing them into the z/OS environment and z/OS container system. There is a word of caution though, as we all saw with things like Log4j. Open source has its downsides, all right. And so, what we are now clearly focused on is ensuring that we bring trusted open source in, we bring curated open source and reliable open source. Open source has a terrific amount of potential for us, but there is also that risk. We have to manage and we have to [inaudible 00:11:16]-
Steven Dickens:
You’ve got to balance. You got to balance the rapid speed of innovation with, as you say, what the platform’s known for, what it’s capabilities around security, reliability, availability. You can’t be putting any of that at risk-
David Jeffries:
We can’t.
Steven Dickens:
… to get harness that innovation. So, it’s genuinely a blend. I see.
David Jeffries:
We can’t do that and we won’t do that. We won’t compromise the platform and we won’t compromise the value that clients… what they trust us for.
Steven Dickens:
But on the other hand, you’ve got to tap into the speed of innovation and some of those other… particularly some things like the AI and ML that are coming with Telum I would assume.
David Jeffries:
Yeah. And there’s been a really good approach to the AI journey. The Telum processor, et cetera, is going to be fantastic for us, but the whole ecosystem around things like PyTorch, around TensorFlow, we’re not going to create an entirely new ecosystem for Z and for z/OS. That makes absolutely no sense at all. So therefore we’ve got to leverage the ecosystem that’s out there, but provide it access to the platform in a trusted and secure way. And that’s what we’ve done through the development of things like deep learning compilers and OnX, et cetera. The OnX environment is allowing people to bring models, AI models, to the platform in a consistent, coherent, and fully knowledgeable way, but into the platform that really is now going to unleash that.
Steven Dickens:
And I think we’ve sort of painted a good picture there at the sort of three to five year history. We’re at a really, what I think is pivotal moment for the mainframe, with the new Box coming, and Telum, and some of the things that are going on with AI and ML and the ecosystem.
Final question. If we’re at this exciting time, where do you see us three to five years out from now? Get away from Z60, maybe look a little out from what’s on the product roadmap that you’ve got certainty around. Where do you see us longer term?
David Jeffries:
I see the world is our oyster to a certain extent. And I think anybody who invests and commits and new developers coming to the platform has a plethora of tools that they can now use. And where will we be in three, five years time? I hope even more vibrant than we are today, but what will that ultimately look like? Because we bring in all these tools, I think that can be whatever we want it to be, and it can be whatever our fantastic engineers can create on whatever they can build and whatever they can mash together on whatever they can ultimately unleash this platform to do in the next wave. It’s about around security. It’ll be more around quantum-safe encryption. It’ll be more around compliance. It’ll be more around AI. And if we get it right, if we get it right, all those new technologies will further unleash the common applications and trusted applications people have today on the platform. It’ll augment, it’ll add value. Yeah, I think the future’s very, very bright for us.
Steven Dickens:
I don’t think I can say it better. Dave, thank you for joining us. Really good to be back in person. You’ve been listening to the I’m a Mainframer podcast. We’ll see you next time.
Voiceover
Thank you for tuning in to “I am a Mainframer.” Liked what you heard? Subscribe to get every episode or watch us online at openmainframeproject.org. Until next time, this is the “I am a Mainframer” podcast, insights for today’s mainframe professionals.
The “I Am A Mainframer” podcast explores the careers of those in the mainframe ecosystem. Hosted by Steven Dickens, Senior Analyst at Futurum Research, each episode is a conversation that highlights the modern mainframe, insight into the mainframe industry, and advice for those looking to learn more about the technology.
The podcast is sponsored by the Open Mainframe Project, a Linux Foundation project that aims to build community and adoption of Open Source on the mainframe by eliminating barriers to Open Source adoption on the mainframe, demonstrating the value of the mainframe.
