In today’s episode of the “I Am A Mainframer” podcast, Steven Dickens sits down with Greg Lotko, SVP and General Manager of the Broadcom Mainframe Software Division. On this podcast, Greg discusses his journey with the mainframe, advice for those just starting their journey with the Mainframe, and where he sees the Mainframe going in the future.
Steven Dickens: Hello and welcome to the I AM A Mainframer podcast brought to you by the Linux Foundation. My name is Steven Dickens, and I’m your host. And today we’ve got a fantastic guest on the show. We’ve got Greg Lotko, the General Manager of the Mainframe Division from Broadcom. Hey, Greg. Welcome to the show.
Greg Lotko: Hey, Steven. Great to be here.
Steven Dickens: So Greg, I’ve been looking forward to this episode. So just let’s get everybody orientated first. Tell us a little bit about what you do, introduce yourself, and let’s just get started there.
Greg Lotko: Sure, sure. So, as you said, I’m the General Manager of the Mainframe Software Division at Broadcom. And I’ve got the honor to lead that group, which has absolutely been the pinnacle of my career. But let me go into a bit about why I said that. Frankly, the investment that Broadcom is making in our division and the Mainframe is extraordinary. I mean, the primary focus of why Broadcom acquired CA was about the Mainframe business. The theory at the time was that with investment, we could drive great value to our customers and grow at the same time. And I mean, we’ve proved that theory, and we’re going strong, but you asked about my background, right? So let’s go back. I’ve been really fortunate. I’ve had this career that spans the breadth of IT from application development and operations to software, to hardware, and that all launched after getting a computer science degree with a minor in interpersonal and technical communications from Clarkson University and-
Steven Dickens: How long have you been at Broadcom now, Greg?
Greg Lotko: I’ve been with CA Broadcom now since 2017, coming up on four years this August. And so I talked about having this breadth in different spaces. And I think a lot of people don’t realize this because they’ve seen me since about 2000 in the software and the hardware space in Mainframe. But over that first third of my career, I actually sat on the same side of the table as our customers. I mean, I was an application developer, a tester, an on-call programmer, and systems operations person. I did requirements, and I was a business analyst. I was a project manager, and then I was a manager, and all that stuff was across IBM’s corporate financial systems. And then, I was a delivery executive for Prudential on large application development, strategic outsourcing contracts.
So that first third of my career was all sitting on the same side of the table—our joint customers’ experiences with our products and the platform every day. And then, in 2000, for the next 10 years of my career, I went into middleware software. I actually started out in the digital media space. Then I did IMS for information integration, warehouse solutions across Db2 distributed, as well as Db2 for Zilius and Informix. So that was the middleware software phase of my career up until that point. And then it was in 2010 that I moved into hardware. And for me, I had this career that was across the middleware and across the application development, but I had spent time in and out of the mainframe. So 2010 was coming home for me to the mainframe space as the business line executive for System Z.
And that was right with the launch of the Z enterprise system. I was also in that capacity as IBM delivered the Z12. And I set the strategy and direction for the Z13 before becoming the head of storage development and ultimately the general manager across all of IBM’s hardware and software storage offerings as it was in August of 2017 that I went to CA to become the head of Mainframe engineering. I had aging parents on Long Island, and I wanted to get closer to them. And at the same time, CA reached out to me.
So the professional and the personal life had this great opportunity to come together. So I came to CA in August of 2017, seven months later, became the GM of the mainframe division. And three months after that, it was announced that Broadcom was going to be acquiring us. And we closed in November of 2018. If I look back, I’ve spent more than 80% of my career, either working on or having some level of responsibility across Mainframe technologies, and more than half of my career; I’ve had responsibility for distributed technologies. So it really has been a back and forth.
Steven Dickens: So if we talk, I mean, the title of the show is I’m a Mainframer.
Greg Lotko: Yep. And I certainly am.
Steven Dickens: What would you describe as what it means to be a Mainframer?
Greg Lotko: I think all of us that touch or interact with, or work on the platform in any way, shape, or form we’re Mainframers, but I think the common thread, the thing that runs inherently through all of us and why I think we keep gravitating back to the Mainframe is we have something in our makeup that we want to be working on the technologies that make up the very fabric of our society, the platform and the workloads and the applications that are really making society hum, doing the heavy lifting of workloads that are cutting the checks while we’ve been going through COVID to help people make it through the crisis, all the fabric of today’s society, making phone calls, financial transactions, all that stuff.
The idea that those of us that work on this platform know that the workloads we’re supporting that we’re developing, that we’re creating are core, key, and critical to the institutions that we work for to the customers that we serve, and to society at large because they are really what’s making society run. And I think we all have that inherent desire to do things on a grand scale. You also see it in the makeup of the people working on this platform, how they want those around them, their colleagues, their partners in the ecosystem to succeed. We all rally together for a common purpose.
Steven Dickens: The common thread to all these podcasts. And I love hosting this show. I get to talk to general managers like yourself through to people who are developing code people who were still relatively new to the platform. One of the episodes that were a couple of shows ago was with the Master, the Mainframe winner. So early professionals who are two or three years out of college, right through to people like yourself. And that’s a common theme through all of these podcasts that are coming home to the technology, coming home to the community; thus, you mentioned around.
Greg Lotko: And I think that’s the bigger thing. It’s that community, that ethos; it’s the people, it’s the comradery, it’s that shared purpose, desire, and focus. That’s the part that makes it feel home. Right?
Steven Dickens: Yeah.
Greg Lotko: It makes it feel that community. Home is not a building or a house or an address. It’s the people that make up the family, right?
Steven Dickens: And that comes across from me most when we get together places like share. Absolutely. We’ll see you guys. I mean, and it’s interesting. I mean, obviously, that’s the whole purpose of the open mainframe project. Have you seen that community evolve and develop? Obviously, we’re on the open mainframe project podcast. Have you seen that evolve? Because I think it was always there in the mainframe space, but I think it’s had a center of gravity now with the open mainframe project. Would you see the same?
Greg Lotko: I do. I think it’s gone through an evolution, right? I mean, in the ’90s, when it was unfashionable to believe that the mainframe was going to go on much longer, if not for a long time, there were those that weren’t part of the community that was naysayers, right? So for some period of time, there was no education on the platform in schools, right? And it was harder to attract people to work on the platform. Clearly, what pundits had said about within so many years, the last Mainframe would be shut off, or whatever the exact quote was, that didn’t come to fruition and the platform, the workloads are still core and inherent to the fabric of society. However, there are still some misconceptions out there, right?
I mean, there are folks out there who don’t believe that you can attract new people to work on the platform. And clearly, you and I know from going to the conferences out there, and even as we’re listening to webcasts or podcasts nowadays, you can see the injection of new talent, young people, or even people that are retraining mid-career coming into space, that it absolutely is not the case.
Steven Dickens: And I think I’ve seen that dynamic change. And you’re talking about it here, just the perception that’s wrong with certain naysayers saying that you wouldn’t want to get an early professional hire to work on this platform. Nobody’s going to gravitate to this platform and the pleasure of hosting an open mainframe project panel earlier this week. And we had a guy join us from Nigeria, and he was brand new to the platform, got involved as part of the internship program. And it’s had a fantastic onboarding experience and been working on. And really listening to him talk about the platform, and then you hear the naysayers. There’s just no correlation.
Greg Lotko: But we actually started tracking one of these stats. I mean, part of this investment from Broadcom has been about all the hiring we’re doing and how we’ve been expanding our team. And in the first year alone, we hired more than 225 people to add to our team, right? And at the end of that year, we had postings up starting to post for the next year as well. So let’s figure there was probably over that period of time, about 400 posts that had gone up. Well, let me tell you, we stopped counting after about the first year. In the first year alone, we had over 4,000 unique applicants to those posts. And I’m saying unique applicants, that isn’t like 100 people applied to every job post or whatever, right. It was unique individuals that were saying, “Wow. This job looks interesting.”
“Wow. I want to work on this platform.” So the idea to say that we can attract people to work on this platform is just; nothing could be further from the truth. That is not the issue. The issue is making people aware of what’s available out there. I think part of that is how we approach bringing new people into the organization and how we approach having them work on the platform. And I think in some of our own shops, convincing ourselves to make the investment, bring people in, overlap them with others, do the cross-training, and invest in our skills for the future. That’s more of the gating factor. And that’s why we launched our vitality residency program. Right? I mean, the idea that some of these customers were saying, “Hey, I’ve got a finite headcount, and until somebody leaves or retires or goes to another job, I can’t backfill.” Well, that removes the ability to cross-train.
So we launched our vitality residency program where we said, look, we’ll find the candidates, we’ll hire them. We’ll give them foundational education. We then give them a specialization in whatever product area from our product set they’re going to be deployed at in the customer. And then we deploy them in the customer’s shop for eight, nine months or more on our dime so that the customer gets to have them working in their shop, working side by side, doing the cross-training about their operation, not just about the underlying technology. And then they can hire them at the end of that, no services in arrears, no finder’s fee. This is what we’re doing as a partner to invest in our customers.
And we see fabulous success. I know there’s the open education project being worked with the open mainframe project. And that’s where multiple vendors are coming together as part of this, to focus on educating those that are coming into space or have been in this space or in IT for years and just want to expand their skills. So that’s part of what we talked about in the home, the camaraderie, all of us in the ecosystem coming together to help each other and advance. What’s going on in the shops of our joint customers.
Steven Dickens: I mean, you touched on it there with the vitality program that you’re doing on your own dime. I know Deb Carbos is doing a fantastic job as part of the Open Mainframe Project education program that we’ve just recently launched. I think if a client is saying that skills were a problem, and they’re a challenge, I think it’s almost we could say that they’ve not done that next step of exploration. They’ve not gone and looked at what is available as programs because your vitality program is going to fix a lot of those gaps around your tools. The Open Mainframe Project is going to fit you a bunch of gaps. We’ve got to master the Mainframe and various things from an IBM perspective. I know other vendors are doing work. So I think the takeaway for me is that if clients think they’ve got that problem, it’s really easy to engage with the vendors and the Open Mainframe Project to build a plan to-.
Greg Lotko: Absolutely.
Steven Dickens: … whether it’s vitality.
Greg Lotko: Right. It’s on all of us to get the word out. I mean, if I reflect that, I think back on myself becoming a Mainframer, I had actually only had one class in university on the Mainframe, and I ended up being attracted to the platform and actually started there in my application development. So I mean, actually, you want me to tell you a little bit about that and how this all got started?
Steven Dickens: Go for it. That sounds like there’s a story there. So go for it. Tell me the story.
Greg Lotko: So I admit that I was extremely fortunate. I grew up on Long Island, and I happened to live in a school district that gave me access to a PC in elementary school in fourth grade. So I got my first exposure to PC as just as they were coming out. It was actually a Commodore PET, right? And then my school district had a computer science class in junior high. And then I had AP comp sci in high school, which was a fabulous opportunity to be exposed at a very early age. But what I actually think is most remarkable is prior to me going to college, it was this event that actually happened at my high school’s, All School Musical, which was Bye Bye Birdie. And I was actually the character of Birdie.
And this play is loosely based on the idea of Elvis going into the military. And I got to tell you, on the opening night of my high school, All School Musical, I walked in, and I saw the program, and I opened it up, and it had you know how they always put it in the little blurb about the performers and everything. So I turned to myself, and I’m like, I didn’t remember telling them anything. I’m like, what did they write? So I open it up, and it says, “Upon graduation, Greg will be pursuing a career in acting and singing,” and I’m like, “What?”
No. So I found the director. I’m like, “What is this?” And he said he was nice. He was like, “Oh my God, isn’t that what you’re doing? You should be doing that,” right? And I said, “Look, I would love to be an actor or a singer someday.” But the odds, remember this is before YouTube or any digital media or any of that kind of stuff, right? I said, “Look, the odds of me making it that way are so much longer. Let me tell you; I’m going to go to Clarkson University, get a computer science degree. And I hope to be an IBM executive someday.” I actually said that at my senior high school play Opening Night. And of course, I mean, that’s how my career unfolded. So I went off to college. I actually only had one class that used the Mainframe back in the ’80s.
But for me, IBM’s culture was actually pretty tightly aligned with what we’ve discussed as the Mainframe culture. And that’s what attracted me to them. And I ended up starting with IBM. Two weeks after graduation, a lot of really, really cool experiences throughout my career. I had never traveled internationally in my life until I worked professionally with IBM. But let me tell you one of the things that are memorable for me. My most memorable moment was actually standing on stage at the House of Blues in 2013, at a Mainframe customer appreciation event, singing as part of the rocket band, and doing a 14 song set. So who would have thought, I said, I wasn’t going to get into acting and singing. This is what I’m going to do. And then I end up, that would be almost 30 years later on stage. And what am I doing, singing? But let me tell you-
Steven Dickens: And now it’s trying to turn you into a radio guest.
Greg Lotko: Yeah. There you go.
Steven Dickens: It’s amazing.
Greg Lotko: It’s not working out very well for you, is it?
Steven Dickens: No. You’re doing a fantastic job, Greg.
Greg Lotko: But-
Steven Dickens: No. I mean, it’s really interesting how much of those core skills I think are part of the evangelism piece that I know you did so well on the platform, speaking at conferences. So I think-
Greg Lotko: Steven, that was the part that made that most memorable. The part of being on stage and looking out at the audience was the people, the community. All of us have in that common bond of the platform that we work on and being able to casually get together partake of some food and some drink, not overly laugh at ourselves too much with me and others across the ecosystem. I mean, the members of the rocket band were the core of that night. But the members of the band on stage came from numerous vendors in the space performing together, which is… you think about that, that’s what our technology does. The hardware, the storage devices, the software, the different middleware that comes from this collection of the community, performing together to help our customers. For that instance, it was to get enjoyment, but it’s for them to be successful in business in our technology.
Steven Dickens: Yeah. And it’s interesting. I think that is the essence of the Mainframe community. Greg, I want to take you back to something you mentioned there a few moments ago. You mentioned just the amount of investment that Broadcom has been making. So let’s get you to do the corporate commercial for a moment, but the investment that you’ve talked about, I know we’ve spoken about that before. I know that was foundational to you coming in and the journey that was going to be ahead with what was CA and rapidly Broadcom. Can you just unpack that a little for the listeners? And give us a strategic view of what that investment means, where you start to see things going forward?
Greg Lotko: Absolutely. That was a huge part as Broadcom was acquiring CA that had me sign up to do this going forward. Oftentimes in business, as a generalization, when you’re launching a new business, you’re really trying to grow revenue, right? And you’re looking to the future for when you can get to a more profitable state. Still, as businesses have been around for many years, unfortunately, sometimes companies, businesses look at the way to expand profit by controlling expense. And that doesn’t always end up being optimal for the product or for the business. And the conversations we were having as Broadcom was acquiring CA was all about them, absolutely believing this was a very stable business but asking us if there was an opportunity for growth. Emphatically, many of us in this space believe there’s way more opportunity for growth than a lot more value than we can drive to customers.
So that’s exactly what we said. We said, look, there’s a lot of things having myself, my colleagues haven’t been in the space for many years. We’re like; we know there are challenges to address. We know there’s an opportunity to drive more value. So we came up with quite a lengthy list of all of our ideas, of things that we thought at that point, that we came up with, that we felt we could execute on. And we got the investment. We were told, “Let’s not go pilot one, two, three of them.” It did them all. And there are times when you go, “Oh my God. Be careful what you ask for,” right. And we were like, “Okay.” And if you hear me talk about the types of things we’re doing, it is all-around value. It is all about partnering with customers to help them be successful.
And just to give you a few ideas, right? The vitality residency was born out of the idea that customers were having problems cross-training and doing that bubble of skills to do the cross-training. And that’s how the vitality residency program idea was born. Another one was just how we were able to organize ourselves. The idea that all the services folks, all the education folks, all the support folks are sitting directly in the division. And I’m running this division to one PNL. It’s really about the software. That’s what our business is. So we started thinking about, Well, what’s good for the customers? What’s good for us? Well, it’s a no-brainer that you want your customers to be more well-educated on your products. So we took all of our online education that was non-instructor-led that, I mean, come on you me, any other business knows once you have it online if it’s not instructor-led, there are very minimal costs to keep it hosted; there, right?
It’s very low cost. So we said, well, what if every customer who had an active service and support wasn’t entitled to the product. What if we just made all those classes available at no cost? Wouldn’t that be great? And we just, on the snap of a finger, declared, we were doing that. In the first year, the number of customers, the customer seats were taken. So actually, individual classes taken by customers doubled. And in the second year, it grew 50% again. So in two years, we have tripled the number of customer seats being taken. And we don’t care if the same person takes the test or the class and the test with it every six months or comes back and does it again; we don’t care if the CIO wants to learn about Mainframe or if Distributed people want to cross-train or whatever.
It’s all good because the more effective, the more knowledgeable, the more successful, the less prone to error somebody is using your technology, the more successful they’re going to be with it. But there’s; also, I’ll give you one more as a flavor. Look, we’re all partners in the ecosystem because we know our technologies have to work together. But on some level, we’re also competitors, right? There are multiple enterprise security managers. There are multiple databases; there are multiple tools for DevOps. So one of the things we do as co-op petitions is to convince customers to use more of our portfolio or use some of our tools together versus necessarily using them across the ecosystem. When you’re trying to do a portfolio rationalization, the challenge with that always ends up being the cost for the services involved to migrate, right? You can get an ROI by charging a different price for your product or but it’s the time the swap out and the expense to do it.
So we launched Win No Fee services. And we said, look, if you want to migrate from a competitor’s product to ours, we will invest side-by-side with you as a partner, bring services to bear, and work directly in your shop on that project help you migrate. And Win No Fee is what absolutely made sense. We said, look, if we don’t hit the performance and the functional criteria, then you don’t have to pay for those services. And by the way, if we hit the performance and the functional criteria and you migrate, those services are free as our investment. So why would we charge?
Steven Dickens: Greg, what do you see this, that reaction?
Greg Lotko: Fabulous. Fabulous.
Steven Dickens: You’re talking there about the strategic purpose for investment to change the experience. It’s an investment in skills, investment in the partnership. What are you seeing as that reaction from your clients?
Greg Lotko: We’ve done dozens of migrations and have many more planned for our technology. Think about the things I just took you through. They’re not code. So we talk about these as our beyond code offerings. These are about displaying the partnership, about investing side by side with the customer. I mean, think about it. This folds right back into OMP and the mission there, right? The idea of opening up technologies so that the more vendors we get involved in the ecosystem and the more we all open up our APIs, the more freedom of choice that customers have to decide whether or not they want to use our product A with somebody else’s B or another person C because they can tie it all together. And then, what the conversation becomes about is the capability, the feature function in your given product, and the partnership with that particular vendor in the ecosystem.
That’s what the differentiation should be. It’s not about technology lock-in. It’s about freedom and flexibility and displaying the value of being involved in that partnership. So that’s our ethos. And I’ve just given you a small flavor of what significant investment in this space can do. And by the way, it’s not like it took significant investment to do one of these things; the significant investment wasn’t on magnitude and scale. It was on the breadth of the things we could launch and do. And our business is doing fabulously as a result, which is by the way, if you were working with somebody, whether it’s in your professional or personal life, those partnerships that are mutually beneficial, that are successful for both of you, those are the ones that tend to grow.
Steven Dickens: Exactly. We talked a little bit earlier about what it means to be a Mainframer. What would you be saying to your younger self as you were looking to embark on that journey? You’re coming out of college; what would that advice? You get the ability to go back and speak to Greg Lotko, age 22. What would the advice be? Would it be just to do everything exactly the same? Would you make some different choices along the way?
Greg Lotko: No. I think it would be some foundational thoughts. So I’ll tell you what I’d tell myself, and then I’ll tell you what I think that means that… how I translate that to folks that are new to the Mainframe. So the first is realizing that your own mindset is the most limiting factor in anything you do and what you can accomplish in life. Right? If you get past your own mindset, you can accomplish anything. I would absolutely tell myself to make mainframe part of my future because it has so much to offer us as a platform and the people that you’re being involved in. And then I’d probably try to figure out how to get a little more sleep, although I’ve never been successful at that.
Steven Dickens: You did tell you, 22-year-old self, to buy that Corvette and then put it nicely in the garage, I’m sure. Because now you’d be driving that. What is it? 35, 40-year-old car.
Greg Lotko: Well, you probably don’t realize I actually still have the first car I bought when I was 15. So I did tell my younger self to hang on to that-
Steven Dickens: Fantastic.
Greg Lotko: … first car. And I have 72 Chevelle supersport that has been with me since I was 15. But so let’s move to the advice I’d give to those that are just starting out this journey. The first thing is congratulations. This is a fantastic and highly rewarding career. You’re going to have this huge opportunity to contribute to the companies as we talked about before; they’re absolutely moving the world economy and commerce forward. But the other thing I’d tell them is people think that the job that’s going to make them the happiest is about the work they’ll do, or even a specific skill or a specific function or task or activity. It’s way more about your fit with the organization and the people you’ll work with, at the company, as well as in the ecosystem.
And again, that’s what I love so much about the mainframe space. It’s the people. I’d also tell them the intellectual aptitude and drive are way more important to long-term success than any specific technical skill or experience because you can always learn those. And then I tell them, take the risk, which is, by the way, that’s how I ended up in all those different spaces. Try different things, look for jobs that you’re not qualified for because taking those jobs is when you learn the most. And one of the things I really love about Mainframe is it tends to be a career, not just a gig, right? Because you’re working on that stuff that really matters. And think about that. The workloads that folks in this space are working on when you get a call from a customer or from operations, or you’re working on this stuff in the middle of the night, and somebody needs your help, the people in this space, I think all of them are being like Michael Jordan.
They want the ball with a second to go to take that last shot. They want to make a difference. It’s huge. And then I’d tell them, take advantage of the ongoing education and training. There are lots of opportunities out there at either zero or low cost. You know, those who are getting started, we’ve talked about OMP is mainframe open education. You know, that’s the whole mainframe community coming together to help train the next generation of mainframes. We have our own associate software engineering program. There’s the master-the-mainframe competition. We have our vitality residency program that I talked about.
We’ve taken our mainframe E-learning library and made most of that available at no cost. There’s product web-based training, digital badging. And then probably also bringing it back to thinking about the OMP and open the first approach has absolutely changed the game and opened the door to a whole new group of new talent. The freedom of choices, empowering teams, and expanding the opportunities. You can develop on the mainframe today, just as you would with any other platform while taking advantage of the inherent capabilities, right? There are those out there who believe one great new technology is going to replace everything, right? Cloud’s the answer. What’s the problem, or what was the question? That thought or way of thinking has been around for years. Still, despite new technologies and different technologies coming out over the years, Mainframe has and will continue to handle certain web workloads better than any other technology.
Steven Dickens: And that gives me a perfect segue to my final question, Greg, which is you’ve got a crystal ball. You get the chance to look ahead into the future. Where do you see the platform three to five years out? What does that future view? Get beyond the next product release and maybe the next product release after that, and start to think on that broadest lens. Where do you see the Mainframe?
Greg Lotko: You’re absolutely going to see in the Mainframe space, a new technology comes out every year, right? New things in the hardware, new things in the ALS, new things in the middleware and the software, new technologies from the open-world or other technologies that will be applied on the Mainframe, just as some of the technologies that were invented in the Mainframe space, led to Cloud computing and virtualization and other types of things. But five years into the future, God, I got to tell you, I think it’s 10, 15, 20. This platform is and will remain a critical part of many, many enterprises across the world. It’s pervasive throughout the global economy, in the fabric of society. And what it’s doing can not easily be replaced or handled by other technologies. The vast majority of enterprises and governments around the world use Mainframe. And that’s not changing anytime soon.
And by the way, people don’t see their investments declining. We did a new survey by EMA. It says 88% of organizations believe the Mainframe will have a continuing role for them over the next decade. So not five years; they’re already saying this about the next decade. And last, I’d say it’s absolutely a hybrid future with the Mainframe as an integral component to that. It’s about Cloud and Mainframe, not or. Cloud and Mainframe. And actually, in that same research by EMA, 87% consider Mainframe a key part of their Cloud strategy. So the future of the mainframe, it’s going to be more open, more connected throughout the hybrid enterprise. There absolutely will be an infusion of new talent. I’ve told you, we’re seeing people come out of the woodwork, applying to our posts. You’ll see opening up with the mainframe, using the latest and greatest open-source tools and technologies.
That’s the beauty of how we’re opening up APIs. We’re not doing them with a point to point integrations. It’s opening up broadly because who knows what the next technology is going to be. A large part of this is Zoe working with partners across the ecosystem to open up the platform, and the adoption of Zoe and the member companies joining is growing every day. There’s been 46 Zoe APIs and extensions that are currently to this date, been made available. 28 of those, I’m proud to say, came from Broadcom. We also offer more than 10 extensions to get native IDEs like Visual Studio Code and Eclipse Che. We’re tying the Mainframe platform and capabilities more broadly across the hybrid environment and expanding its value. That open first approach drives freedom of choice in tools expanded and empowered development teams that span technologies dramatic growth in the pool of Mainframe talent.
And the reality, that Mainframe Software delivery is no different than any other platform with the speed and quality and productivity, and DevOps space while continuing to be able to leverage the capabilities and the strengths that make this platform unique. So there’ll be continuing innovations and modernization on the platform. At the same time, it remains the absolute, most secure platform on the planet, capable of driving the highest throughput for the heaviest and most mission-critical workloads. And I’ll close with all the people, right? Finally, with a vibrant and active community of Mainframers who understand the value of the work they do every day for their companies, government entities, and the world. It’s all about the people.
Steven Dickens: Greg, I couldn’t think of a better way, to sum up our conversation. This has been a fantastic discussion.
Greg Lotko: It’s been my pleasure.
Steven Dickens: Fantastic, Greg. Thank you so much. You’ve been listening to the I AM A Mainframer podcast. I’m your host, Steven Dickens. If you like what you’ve heard today on the show, please click and subscribe. You can find us on all of the various platforms. So please click and subscribe. If you can take a moment to give us a five-star rating, that would be fantastic. Thank you very much for listening today to the I Am A Mainframer podcast brought to you by the Open Mainframe Project. Thanks very much. And we’ll speak to you again soon.
