SHARE Pittsburgh 2026
SHARE Pittsburgh, happening on August 16-20 at the The Westin Pittsburgh hotel, bringing together IT professionals for five days of community, knowledge sharing, and forward-thinking insights centered around the mainframe.
Open Mainframe Project will be on-site at the conference again this year with several sessions including:
Monday, August 17
9:45am – 10:05am EDT: From Datasets to AI Insights: What’s New in Storage Management with OMEGAMON – Chris Walker, IBM
Mainframe storage teams are being asked to do more with less—while data growth, complexity, and skills transitions keep accelerating. In this 20‑minute session, we’ll spotlight the newest capabilities in IBM OMEGAMON for Storage that help storage professionals move faster from “something changed” to “here’s what to do next.” You’ll see how Realtime Dataset Metrics (RDM) brings a modern, Zowe-based web experience to dataset-level work and how new AI-based insights can be leveraged to proactively identify problems before they become incidents. Finally we’ll show storage metrics can be both integrated across the OMEGAMON family though the new Grafana-based web UI and streamed to observability consumers using the OMEGAMON Data Provider in a variety of formats like OpenTelemetry and JSON.
10:30am – 11:30am EDT: Open Source and the Mainframe Panel: stAsk Me Anything? – Joe Winchester, Nanxi Meng, IBM
With the growing use of open source software on the mainframe, there are many questions to answer. How will companies adopt and trust the technology ? How will vendors participate in a way that brings revenue yet doesn’t detract from the “free at the point of source” ? Will open source make the platform less unique and is this is a good or bad thing for z/OS ? What role do early career professional bring alongside experienced tenure mainframes ? What role does academia and learning initiatives play ? What is the intersection and opportunity with open source and AI on the platform ? This panel will place customer sysprogs and DbAs, students, and software vendors alongside to present their arguments and ideas and take Q&A from the audience to help share ideas, problems and solutions.
10:30am – 11:30am EDT: The Future of Mainframe: Zowe, AI, and the New-to-z SME – Dan Kelosky, Rose Sakach, Broadcom
The Open Mainframe Project Zowe Model Context Protocol (MCP) is key to open-source integration and development on z/OS. This session explores the strategic direction of the Zowe MCP Server and showcases use cases where MCP, paired with AI, accelerates onboarding and productivity. See featured practical examples using AI tools to assist in complex tasks like decoding JCL and Assembler.
1:15pm – 2:15pm EDT: Leveraging Git and VS Code Tooling for Your Mainframe Applications – Joe Winchester, Nanxi Meng, IBM
Learn how Morgan Stanley has moved to Git and is making use of the VS Code functionality available to help mainframe developers leverage these new tools in their day to day development efforts
Tuesday, August 18
8:00am – 9:00am EDT: Modern Way of Developing COBOL Applications Using Zowe Explorer and Z Open Editor – Lewis James, Akanksha Modi, IBM
Traditional CICS development often relies on legacy tools that can limit productivity and slow onboarding. This session demonstrates how Zowe Explorer for CICS TS on VS Code modernizes the CICS TS development experience by enabling developers to work with mainframe resources using a familiar, intuitive interface.
Focusing on enhancements and extension work for CICS TS, the session highlights how developers can streamline access, editing, and interaction with CICS artifacts directly from VS Code. Through a practical walkthrough, attendees will see how this approach reduces context switching, improves efficiency, and brings a developer-first experience to mainframe workflows.
9:15am – 10:15am EDT: Modernizing the Mainframe Developer Experience with Zowe: TD Bank’s Strategy for Empowering the Next Generation – Wellington Mazongo, TD Bank – Rose Sakach, Broadcom
This session will present a practical case study detailing how TD successfully leveraged the open-source capabilities of Open Mainframe Project Zowe to fundamentally modernize their z/OS development and maintenance process. Facing the dual challenge of workforce transition and the need for accelerated application delivery, they implemented a strategic plan to combine traditional, platform-specific tooling with a standardized, open-source stack centered on Zowe.
9:15am – 10:15am EDT: Top Open Source Powerups No Mainframer Should Be Without – Joe Winchster, IBM
The intersection of #opensource and the z/OS operating system has yielded some nuggets of technology and tools to make every majnframer’s daily tasks easier and more productive. This talk will showcase a number of these with demos and how to guides to obtain and install as well as cover use cases and licensing concerns. We’ll look at zti to bring 3270 emulation to a shell. We’ll explore z open community that delivers vim, curl, OpenSSL, bash, and many other great ports to USS. We’ll dig into Zowe Explorer for VS Code and IntelliJ and show how these bring modern GUI IDEs to the platform. CBT will be covered with its powerful ISPF installer and a look at some of its most popular utilities. Galsa, SEAR, Blackwall, PIRACF and other great power ups that work well in enterprise computing environments as well as daily tasks will be covered.
2:30pm – 3:30pm EDT: Attracting New Talent and Driving Developer Productivity – Brian Jagos, Vaughn Marshall, Broadcom
As mainframe practitioners retire, business continuity concerns have made attracting new talent to z/OS application development more important than ever. During this session, our speakers will share what Sunlife has been doing to address these concerns. We’ll share our priorities, how we are accomplishing our goals, and the challenges we experienced along the way.
Wednesday, August 19
9:15am – 10:15am EDT: Hello Mainframe! Using Zowe in an AI World with MCP Agents to Talk to z/OS – Joe Winchster, IBM – Andrew Toews, Gestell – Dan Kelosky, Broadcom
The Open Mainframe Project’s Zowe CLI is a powerful way to execute raw z/OS commands, but they lack the contextual understanding for mainframe development. Users must be familiar with TSO syntax, mainframe concepts like data sets, JCL, how to understand error codes, codepages, … This talk will showcase the Zowe MCP server that interacts with Zowe CLIs and SDK APIs and allows tasks such as job submission and file navigation and manipulation using a textual language interface. In addition we’ll show how to execute TSO commands with guardrails and syntax assistance plus command completion and help.
10:30am – 10:50am EDT: DEI, Open Source Software & Mainframe (MF) Transformation, Illustrated via a MF Database Performance Example – Thomas Halinski, Broadcom
In this session we will start with an explanation of diversity in Open Source Software and its positive effects in the IT Industry. We will then review the definition of what a REST API is and what the open-source project of Zowe is. Then we’ll take a look at an example of Open Source Software for a performance monitoring use case, using sophisticated open-source tools to visualize performance metrics exposed by an API. The comparison of the original performance report with the Transformed Open Source version is outstanding.
Our example will be based on the open-source software of Zowe with an API for a MF database of IDMS, but can be used wit Db2, IMS or any MF database. The techniques are general and can be applied to any product that exposes performance metrics through a REST API.
Wednesday, August 19
3:45pm – 4:45pm EDT: Simplifying and Opening the Mainframe to Clients with the Zowe Command Line Interface – Joe Winchster, IBM – Dan Kelosky, Broadcom
The Zowe Command Line Interface opens up IBM z/OS to non mainframers who want to do anything from ad-hoc scripting, building full DevOps automation pipelines, and everything in between. By providing simple easy to use intuitive commands to run commands covering everything from listing data sets, submitting jobs, running REXX, as well working with CICS, MQ and Db2, non-mainframers can become versant at how to become mainframers without needing to leave their familiar PC terminal or command window, and embed scripts in their laptop’s existing technology. This talk will cover 101 getting started with Zowe CLI through to advanced tasks such as console commands, substitution variables, and will cover many scenarios for the audience from beginner mainframe students to advanced system programming. This talk will cover using z/OSMF as the back end as well as the Zowe Native SSH server.
Thursday, August 20
1:15pm – 2:15pm EDT: BYOD Lab: A CI/CD Workshop with Zowe CLI and Jenkins – Tom McQuitty, Sandeep Sirivolu, Broadcom
This hands-on lab guides building CI/CD automation for the build-scan-test-deploy DevOps workflow. Using Open Mainframe Project Zowe CLI and Jenkins, attendees will learn best practices like credential handling, dependency management, and z/OS connectivity configuration. The session emphasizes code reuse through techniques like templating, ensuring confidence in applying these concepts.
