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I Am A MainframerPodcast

I am a Mainframer: Gary Thornhill

By November 20, 2024No Comments

In this episode of I Am a Mainframer, we sit down with Gary Thornhill, CEO and founder of PopUp Mainframe, to explore his intriguing journey through the IT industry. From an unexpected start at IBM to navigating challenges in banking, Gary shares how his expertise in mainframe technology, MQSeries, and DevOps shaped his career. Hear how these experiences inspired him to launch PopUp Mainframe, a company dedicated to modernizing and democratizing mainframe access. Plus, Gary offers his insights on the future of mainframe computing, touching on sustainability, cost-efficiency, and why this technology remains essential in an evolving digital landscape.

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Transcript:

Announcer:

This is the I Am a Mainframer podcast, brought to you by the Linux Foundation’s Open Mainframe Project. Episodes explore the careers of mainframe professionals and offer insights into the industry and technology. Now, your host, Steven Dickens.

Steven Dickens:

Hello and welcome to another episode of I’m a Mainframer. I’m Steven Dickens, your host, and I’m joined today by Gary Thornhill from PopUp Mainframe. Hey Gary, welcome to the show.

Gary Thornhill:

Thank you very much for having me on. Really, really interested to join the podcast. So thank you.

Steven Dickens:

Yeah, I’ve been looking forward to this one since we started talking about booking it. You and I have been working together a little bit over the last few months, but what we’re doing today is we’re getting out of the corporate world and we’re telling the Gary Thornhill story. So Gary, tell us a little bit about your role at PopUp and then we’ll dive straight in.

Gary Thornhill:

Yeah, so at PopUp Mainframe I’m the CEO and founder as well. So I guess everything that comes with running a tech startup. I’m also heading commercial at the moment, but hopefully that won’t be too much longer and I’ll be able to bring somebody in that can run that for me who really knows what they’re doing so I can look at the broader picture.

Steven Dickens:

So Gary, as I say, we’re stepping out of the corporate world. We’ll get to the PopUp story a little bit later in the story arc. But tell us a little bit about your background. As I say, you and I have been working together the last few months over a beer, over those conversations, it’s been fascinating to kind of understand your journey and how you get to be CEO of a startup. So tell us the story. Tell us a little bit more.

Gary Thornhill:

Yeah, I mean, interestingly enough, so I didn’t really have any plans to ever be in IT. So my father worked for IBM for eons and started his career changing light bulbs in massive computers in the fifties. So IBM was a theme all the way through my childhood and I wasn’t drawn to it at all. So I went to university and got a degree in economics, and by that time I’d been in full-time education. So I basically took two years out and went backpacking and went to all sorts of places and had adventures, which was fantastic. So then I was completely skint. And funny enough, I had, because although I went to a good university, I only got a 2:2, and it was difficult at that time. 2:2, I guess is a very average degree, sort of averaging 50% because I enjoyed myself at university and

Steven Dickens:

Probably a little too much by the sound of it.

Gary Thornhill:

Scraped through. So then you’re in your CV’s, just thrown in, and I struggled to get a job and I was sort of saved by my older brother because he was working at IBM and they needed grads in operations, and I was IT literate and I had an interview and then all of a sudden, very quickly I found myself working at operations in IBM North Harbor in Portsmouth. And by that time, and

Steven Dickens:

That’s a big site for people who don’t know it globally, North Harbor for IBM has always been one of those big locations, big IT infrastructure there, or it was at least.

Gary Thornhill:

It was IBM headquarters really of operations outside London of Southbank. So there were a lot of people there when I started in ’98. And then just because I hadn’t worked, I’ve never had a proper job, but I’ve done so many part-time jobs, you wouldn’t believe it. So I’ve always been good at turning my hand at whatever to work. So I had the work ethic, and actually it was so I never really knew what to expect, but I went for it. And it was really interesting. My role was really interesting because they’d just created something called SAP Ops where it was sort of a front end SAP fulfillment system and mainframe backend. So as an operator, I was doing three things. I was doing system operations, batch operations, and also Linux, sorry, not Linux, it was Solaris at the time I think. No, sorry, AIX. So I went straight into having to learn all these three different roles and I think that served me well later on, that I was never pigeonholed thinking I only do mainframe.

Steven Dickens:

You always had a bit of a breadth and a sort of sideways look into other things in the industry.

Gary Thornhill:

But I did have a baptism of fire because literally I arrived on the Monday, did five days of MVS mainframe courses of all these things with all these acronyms that were horrendous as we know in IBM, right? It was just a,

Steven Dickens:

IBM, likes a three letter acronym, let’s put it that way.

Gary Thornhill:

Yeah, it was a mind melt. And then a week later, I’m there at four o’clock in the morning trying to fix batch jobs with JCL and that in those days you used manuals. So it all looked a bit garbled, but look, if you are thrown into something, you have to learn quickly and very quickly, I came out of that and went into, became an operation analyst. So another team wanted me, and I sort of moved out of that quite quickly and became an operations analyst at IBM.

Steven Dickens:

Okay. So now you are at IBM. You’ve kind of landed just the family connection. You are into the workplace, you’ve got a proper job, let’s call it that. What’s next? So you’re in the mainframe, you’ve gone through this five day intensive course. What’s next? Tell me the next sort of segment of the story,

Gary Thornhill:

Yeah, yeah. I guess I learned so much so quickly and it was really exciting and I was deploying an internal application called Partner Commerce, and it had bits of Db2 IMS CICS and MQSeries, something I really liked. I really, really was drawn towards MQSeries. So as I was working shifts still, I managed to save up a lot of money. So I thought I was a bit of maybe a less risk averse person than some people. But I left IBM and went backpacking for six months around South America.

Took in a trip to Antarctica in the Galapagos Islands and fulfilled some dreams, and then came back and got a job working for UBS Warburg in the city with my broad mainframe experience, and particularly around MQSeries. So I was ambitious and thought working in banking was the way to go. So I did that quite early on in my career thinking that would be a great place to learn. And actually it wasn’t. It was horrendous. Yeah, it was actually a really negative part of my career, actually.

Steven Dickens:

Okay. So why was that? Was it just the environment? Was it the technology?

Gary Thornhill:

Yeah, it’s a really good question. It wasn’t the technology. The technology was really good because I was running in the build team as I was doing multiple things. The actual role was quite good and we were running Java workloads on the mainframe, actually quite tricky. So getting into the USS, doing the build from into there,

Steven Dickens:

That would’ve been not cutting edge, but it would’ve been early days growing Java on unique system services back in the day.

Gary Thornhill:

Yeah, 2001, 2002.

Steven Dickens:

It would’ve been early days for that technology. Really.

Gary Thornhill:

Yeah. And I’d already seen some MQSI as well. I’m using what is message broker services then I was also looking at that as well. So I think it was always good that I was at the cutting edge. Where I struggled in the banking side of things then was actually I realized how good IBM was a place to start your career and learn and very supportive. There were a lot of very clever, decent individuals in IBM. You were supported, they did nurture and manage people properly, and there’s a really good IBM culture there, and I didn’t realize how, it wasn’t until I’d left and was working somewhere else that I didn’t realize how important it was and how that helped me grow. So I actually, not that I didn’t learn anything but that environment, and it’s funny talking to other people who work for the same organization at the same time, depending on which department you’re in and who’s running. It depends what the culture is and how people behave. It was actually quite a negative. Everybody was out for themselves. There was a lot of, if you don’t work 70 hours a week, you’re not going to get your bonus and things like that. So I found myself doing a lot of hours and being used and abused really. And that was the sort of ethos and mentality that if you are young, you are just sort of in a sweatshop. And that was the experience.

Steven Dickens:

And that’s coming back, I mean, we’re seeing that with all the banker’s hours at the moment, that’s kind of in the press. So it kind of ties to that, what we’re still hearing. What’s that, 20, 30 years later?

Gary Thornhill:

Yeah. Yeah. So see what happened, it was a project, as soon as they’d got their money’s worth, I was made redundant just before Christmas, so they didn’t have to pay the bonus. So it was all very calculated and I learned something very important from that experience was when you work with a bank, you have to behave like one when you work inside one, and otherwise you get sucked up and spat out. And it felt a little bit like that. I didn’t really, I wasn’t at the time, it was just something that happened. And so young you don’t, things just happen to you when you’re young, don’t they? And you just, yeah,

Steven Dickens:

Haven’t got the context to understand what it means.

Gary Thornhill:

No. So I was out of work for about six months and then I actually got a job working for Argos, then the GUS brand, And it was a great place to work. And I tell you why, because there were four floors in the building in Avery and Milton Keynes for the whole business. And at that time, Argos was a very successful business. Obviously the internet came along, but I think they’ve recovered nicely, which I’m really pleased about. But because everything was self-contained in one building, and it wasn’t an international business, any project and all the IT sat on one floor and I got a job as a middleware consultant because I had strong MQ experience. They wanted someone who could do MQ on z/OS, which I could do. And I had a bit of distributed background and from working in UBS, so I took a job as an MQ consultant across all platforms. So we were doing z/OS, which I was a specialist in z/OS, sorry, and then AIX, Windows AS/400 as well.

So I became an MQ consultant across these multi-platforms. And again, and that was really good because there was a really good strong caring team, and I learned to do things properly there. I’d started at IBM being abandoned a bit on, not really supported in UBS, whereas in Argos, John Scott, who was very influential on me, he showed me how to do everything properly and he taught it was important for him to make sure that the people who worked for him did their job really well so he could go and do other things. And to me, I learned something there. And so that was a really key thing, how that whole team was run and a really lovely time for me actually.

Steven Dickens:

I think the takeaway from that, and we get a lot of younger listeners that listen to this show, is you’re building your resume, you’re building your career, and it’s not going to be home run after home run after home run. It’s not going to be perfect, not, you sounded like you got into IBM, great company for the early part of your career, got some good skills, then went to UBS, not so great, learned some good life lessons, probably didn’t enjoy the experience, but learned some life lessons. Then you land at Argos and you’re back on the growth story from sort of getting more skills and being supported again. I think if I look at that entire segment, those three roles there, Gary, I see that as a net positive. Even the UBS piece and the way you described it, I think as these younger listeners, that if the job’s not great, I’ve been fired from a company, made a part of a redundancy package, got laid off, company restructured. You’ve just got to learn the lessons from that. It’s not going to be all upward trajectory. It’s all not going to be butterflies and rainbows and unicorns. There’s going to be some bad times, but what you’ve got to do is take that experience from that and layer it up. What I’m hearing so far from those first three jobs is a real sort of layering up of experience. Maybe it’s life experience, maybe it’s technical experience, but that kind of builds that solid foundation.

Gary Thornhill:

Exactly. And both, I would say. So I took a pay cut, a significant one to go from between UBS and Argos. Younger listeners, don’t be scared to do that, to get the right job because it all comes back if you’ve got the right skills and you know where you are. So I probably regressed a bit, as you said, whereas I did a stint at Argos two and a half years I think, and then I went back into banking on a nice contract because I had the skills. And I’d also learned from my previous experience in banking how to operate in a bank, how to behave. I didn’t have the skills as a person to behave in that quite cutthroat industry. Whereas I did go and work for a nicer bank when I went back. I got a lovely job working at RBS and just before they bought ABN AMRO in the retail bit, and it was very old fashioned. No, it wasn’t fashioned, but I mean it was a massive mainframe department, I think the more CICS regions than anyone else, RBS. So I went in there and did a change for actually integrating Ulster onto the mainframe platform. And so that was really, really interesting. And I could bring everything,

Steven Dickens:

A well run shop. I used to call on RBS, always a well run, well structured, well thought through balanced shop, I thought.

Gary Thornhill:

Yeah. And because they handle 40% of UK clearing mainframe was so massively important to them on their operation. So it does need to be watertight. And it did things quite conservatively. I’m sure they’ve massively changed now everybody else had, but there was a three week lead time into a test LPAR to make any change. So you had to plan well and do things. But it was a great time for me and I really enjoyed working. Going from not working in London on a perme salary to getting a contract, although it wasn’t a massive contract, I did sort of two and a half times my salary and as someone in their twenties that’s exciting, isn’t it?

Steven Dickens:

It comes back to your point of if you invest, it pays forward.

Gary Thornhill:

Yeah, so probably at that time of my career, money was important and just where I was, so that was a driver, but the guy that hired me was really good. Ed Hopper, who’s quite big in mainframe circles, I think everyone knows Ed Hopper. So he looked after me. I only had one recruitment consultant and he was really good to work with and took care of us, but that was really positive. And I then went from the retail bank and sort of advertised myself and said I had to work with, from the retail bank to the investment bank, what was called GBM, then GBM RBS, they were doing MQSeries, let’s call it very loosely. They didn’t have an MQ consultant and they had a really important MQ. So I said I was working with them, setting things up. I said, well, I should come over and work in the investment bank side and I could do all these things for you and build you a failover cluster and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So I just sort of moved out from retail and then into the investment banking. So then I found myself investment banking just before the RBS crash in 2008. RBS was massive then, and it was the biggest bank in the world, wasn’t it? So all of a sudden I found myself in the biggest bank in the world managing the MQSeries for the whole organization, integrating ABN AMRO onto a new platform. So it was a really good time to be working. And yeah, I’ll probably pause there.

Steven Dickens:

So wind forward from there. RBS, let’s maybe get to the PopUp story now. Let’s join the dots up and how you got from there to sort of founding PopUp, because I think that lasts a little bit of the journey before PopUp, and then we’ll talk briefly about PopUp and then we’ll bring it home.

Gary Thornhill:

Oh, okay. Well, me, I’ll accelerate on the next bit of how I got there. So in RBS, and this is a core thing in my life, is I set all the MQ up and I automated it all. So I did myself out of a job and it was a very strong platform and did it properly. So I was very proud of what we built. And then I moved into project management because I found the way that projects run and the requirements that came to me was so frustrating. I just said, I want to run that project, do it properly. I had no project management experience, so I paid for myself to go on a print project management course. So I did that and unfortunately my boss got moved on for other reasons. So a few months, three or four months later, I found myself program managing the development team.

We’re heading up the middleware development team. So I stepped out of MQ and I was running a middleware team. And one of the biggest problems was that we had was how long it took to test. It was a manual testing cycle. It used to take about six weeks to do a run a regression test. So I sort of bought market leading software from, it was Green Hat at the time that IBM bought that software and you could do all the test automation and integration level. So we managed over two years, we reduced the regression testing time down from three months, sorry, six weeks to three hours. And so we really turned the handle. So just through that automation and moving early doors, DevOps, and this is sort of 2010, 2011, the team grew massively as did RBS. And we were getting every single project because we could turn it around and deliver it and get it on. So there was lots of other messaging initiatives, but basically Global Message Hub was very successful because we had a test automation DevOps in there and we had a fully mapped up process so we could do things quickly and at speed for the enterprise.

And that was a direction that I wanted to go in, and I was still contracting at the time. So it was a bit, do I get a full-time job or do I go somewhere else? And me being naive thinking because I’d had such great success internally in RBS that I could then join a consultancy and be a miracle worker and be successful and get all these other companies using it because it’s no-brainer, why you wouldn’t do test automation. Why would you not invest in test automation and take massive costs out and improve your quality and accelerate time to market? That’s obvious to me.

So I went to work for, I was working with a partner at RBS, and they wanted to go in this direction, and so they brought me in as, I can’t remember what I was called to start off with, but so the idea was to grow their consultancy by doing test automation and middleware because that I’d come from, so that was in 2012 or 2013. And because I always know better than anybody else, I ended up as a general manager, CEO quite quickly because I had a vision, I had a plan for the company. But to be honest, it was, I had no sales experience. I had not been in a consultancy. I’d been IBM, I’d been on business for clients. So what I think they call me gamekeeper term poacher. So that was another baptism of fire because doing things well in a company and translating that to be successful as a consultancy is so different and so difficult. To be fair, I grew two themes, middleware, DevOps, middleware is much better with DevOps, do things quickly and test them. And then my mainframe experience came back in because no one was doing mainframe DevOps.

So I took the company some data technologies in that direction, and we always had our big existing clients, Vodafone, RBS, and we did really well there and we were very sticky and we did some excellent services. We had great people. As a smaller consultancy, you can’t get away with stuff. You’ve got to be good, otherwise you’re out on your ear because everything else is,

Steven Dickens:

There’s no brand recognition, it’s the quality of your people or nothing basically.

Gary Thornhill:

That was, but we did well. But trying to do mainframe DevOps was massively hard and we didn’t get that much success. And this was because there was, if you are trying to do new things, first of all, there’s always a pushback of why are you trying to do this? It works perfectly well like this. So there’s always a bit of always a pushback.

Steven Dickens:

People can’t see the promised land.

Gary Thornhill:

And there’s a little bit of job protectionism as well, I think, in mainframe land. And the other thing was that there was never any environments to do any work in. So if you were successful to sell something, then you then had to wait and get access, and then hopefully you might get a bit of an environment to set someone up. So all those things put together we weren’t commercially successful as doing mainframe DevOps as a consultancy because no one was really ready for it. There was no environments to do it. And that led to, hang on a second, if we created a product that allowed us to have instantaneous environments at a fraction of a cost, maybe you can do new things and you can modernize the mainframe.

Steven Dickens:

So that’s the genesis story of PopUp then?

Gary Thornhill:

So that’s how we did that. But it took Covid. So we did have, when I was still running CEOing at the time, Covid came along and we basically lost all of our consultants and we’re all pushed out in the UK very quickly exited from Deutsche Bank, Royal Bank of Scotland to save money because the world’s going to win, right? First thing you do is cut your IT contractors or your consultants, but that meant we had the dream team where we could, people were there. So that’s how we came up with PopUp mainframe. So we thought, well, hang on a second. If we could turn this into an appliance and have it ready very quickly, then this would solve the problem of trying to do your ideas on mainframe DevOps. So yeah, that’s how PopUp popped up out of Covid actually.

Steven Dickens:

Well, it’s good. I mean the good piece for that, and it’s a couple of times we’ve talked about it already, the adversity leads to opportunity. So CEO of a consulting firm and all your consultancy contracts are canceled. You would frame that as a bad day at the office, I think. And then from that, you don’t frame it that way. You go, oh, well all those experts now aren’t doing client work. I’ve got ’em in the office, let’s put ’em to work to do something and create a fix to a known problem. But you probably just didn’t have the time or the consultantcy. So it’s a really interesting way to look at a bad day in the office when you’re running a consulting firm as if your consultancy contracts get canceled. But you didn’t frame it that way.

Gary Thornhill:

No, for me personally, at the time, I had to remortgage my house to pay the mortgage. So we had to come up with something quite quickly in order to be successful. And it is amazing how situations happen. And as you say, I would always been someone who’s half empty glass rather than half full type. So it just meant that we could do something, do something quite quickly, and that was really exciting. So yeah, I think you’re driven. I think that’s what happens, isn’t it? What they call exogenous events, supply chain events create demand opportunities. If I go back to my economics degree,

Steven Dickens:

Dust it off. So tell us just in a couple of minutes about PopUp, we’ve got that genesis story there. And then we’ll get into the final couple of questions and bring this home.

Gary Thornhill:

Okay, great. Yeah. So what we’re doing now is, I mean, really what our drivers are as a business is that by supplying these, what PopUp mainframe is something that we can install in 10 minutes and on the cloud on x86. So pretty much anyone can have their own mainframe, an individual team, they could be sized differently to meet use cases, any use cases. So dev test is the, so I should say we can only use PopUp mainframe for dev test only. You can’t even for production workloads. But hey ho, there’s a lot of dev test environments around and it is there to do things quickly so you can solve the problem getting more environments at lower cost, but all of a sudden you can work different ways and try new things out. And that could be installing a new version of Db2, testing your full application.

So it’s all about encouraging agility, accelerating time to market. And one of the most important things is because we have all DevOps stack software on it, either from IBM or BMC, a person can be productive without having any green screen mainframe experience. So this, as we’ve talked about, the democratization of access allows a whole new different set of democracies onto it, doing stuff quickly, highly productive. So that’s really what we’re trying to do here. And what we’ve also looking at now is we’re looking to get a version. We’ve got a version on the PopUp mainframe that can run on the IFL on the physical and the integrated Linux facility on the physical mainframe and on Linux one as well. So now we’re covering the full spectrum with these environments. So the idea being that you can spin it up on x86 on the cloud if you want, or you can do it on a LinuxOne or IFL and get more room on it.

But the whole principles work the same. And the other thing that we work with is very quickly is with a product called Delphix that’s owned by Perforce. And this gives us 4D time travel where you could forward and rewind these dev test environments. And so that gives you super agility and all of a sudden what took boards of people now could take a couple of heads to make change very quickly, but because you’re doing it against a gold copy production copy, it’s about having the, like you were testing in production, but fraction of a cost. So yeah, that’s how we’re changing the world with new ways of working and bringing that in. So I would like to say that all this stuff is there, but it’s like how do you get to that Alexia quickly? And so that’s what PopUp is about. It’s like you could develop this all in house, but do you want to be changing your business and making that and working your business or does the client want to be cutting edge and trying to spend all of its money and time on IT when they could just get something awesome to just be there straight away? So that’s what we’re doing there really.

Steven Dickens:

I think this has been a known problem for a long time in the space. You guys have looked at it pragmatically, looked at it, unpicked it from experience and been able to go, I can fix that problem and this is how we do it. So got to start bringing this home Gary, I can talk to you for hours. We do talk regularly for hours. A couple of questions I always ask of everybody on the show, and I’m fascinated to get your opinion, your perspective. First question is what do you go back and say to 21-year-old Gary coming out of college with a degree? As I say, we have a lot of younger listeners for the show. We mapped a story arc there and there were some ups and some downs. You’ve got the opportunity to go back and speak to your younger self, what would you say?

Gary Thornhill:

Yeah, I thought about this and it jumped straight out on me. And I’m not a cynic because trying to win new business, you can’t be cynical otherwise you just have to pack up and go home. But I realized from a couple of the, I guess negative experiences and just particularly how management works in banks is that quite often decisions aren’t made for the right technical reasons. And often they’re in the self-interest of individuals. I was always a purist of, you do this, this is the best way of doing it, and look at the technology and look how better it is. But that’s not necessarily a recipe for success because that could be treading on somebody else’s territory and they won’t do it. So you can get eaten up and spat out alive. And I think a lot of it’s to do with who your manager is and are they supporting you. And I think the management is going to become more and more key of how people look after their employees. Because some managers in my career just took all the kudos for themselves when you did anything good and then they would ride on your coattails. But to me it’s about developing people, but look at, if you’ve got a brand new idea, be careful with it and work with the right people in the organization to bring that out. So that would be my advice.

Steven Dickens:

That’s great advice. The other question I ask, I get really good answers to this, so I keep asking it. It’s been a consistent on the show for years now. Where do you see the mainframe platform say five years out? We know a new box is coming, we know there’s new versions.

Gary Thornhill:

So I’ve got a crystal ball here.

Steven Dickens:

You bring the crystal. I need that crystal ball off you. I asked this question of you’ve got a crystal ball and you’ve actually brought a crystal ball.

Gary Thornhill:

It’s important. I’ve got two as you should have in this life, right? Yin and yang.

Steven Dickens:

Right, that might be a bit heavier in your luggage to bring over the next time rather than the bag of crystals you brought me over this time last time.

Gary Thornhill:

This is a rose quartz crystal ball actually. It’s a very nice one. But yeah, I

Steven Dickens:

Like that. I like that. So let’s peer into that crystal ball and what do you see as the future, Gary?

Gary Thornhill:

Okay, so I’ll put it down. My arms are getting tired.

Steven Dickens:

Yeah, that looks heavy.

Gary Thornhill:

I think it’s seven kilos. But yeah, so I was talking about this today, but knowing where I see the future, there was always, throughout my career, there’s always been, oh, mainframes are finishing or no one wants those and what have you. But they stay there. And I know from the market, and actually IBM is selling more mainframes than they ever have. And two key things, it’s the compute, the resilience. I joined those up together. That’s why everyone knows that’s the strength of the mainframe. That combined with the importance of sustainability, now the whole world has realized we all have to be more sustainable. And it is really important just every time you press your phone and check your bank account, that does something for the world, doesn’t it, in terms of climate change. So how can we get efficient on that? And the mainframe computer computers, they’re 16’s, 17’s, et cetera, by far the most ecologically beneficial for the world.

That with the compute means, I think mainframes will be selling more so than ever. And the key thing is that the challenge mainframe has is that the cost transaction is low, but the cost to change at the moment is quite high because of silo and different skill set. So knowing what IBM are doing over the next few years of trying to make it a lot more easier to deliver for people to be a lot more productive on the mainframe. So I just see that combination of factors will mean that mainframe is going to be so important. And because all of the tooling is there that it just looks like anything else with GUIs and VS code and what have you, won’t even know you’re working on the mainframe, but it would just be the most efficient way for big business to deliver their business. So yeah, I see it booming. So maybe get some IBM stocks guys.

Steven Dickens:

This is not a stock advice show. Gary, I love the framing there of the cost per transaction is low, but the cost of change is high. If we can reduce that cost of change, then we get a fantastic platform. Gary, thank you for joining me on the show. Pleasure. We ran long. I decide on the length of the show dynamically based on the guests and how interesting they are. So take that as a compliment. You’ve been listening to another episode of the I’m a Mainframer podcast. I’m your host, Steven Dickens. If you like what you hear, please click and subscribe, share it with your friends, and we’ll see you next time. Thank you very much for watching.

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