Orlando Wrap Up Article

SHARE Creates Magical Experience with Fresh Education, Award Announcements and New Product Introductions

February 29, 2008 – SHARE’s first conference of 2008 welcomed more than two thousand enterprise IT professionals to sunny Orlando, Florida from February 24-29. Located at Disney’s Coronado Springs Resort in Disney’s Animal Kingdom, SHARE provided attendees with a full week of continuous education, networking, professional development training and a first-hand look at product updates. The week offered a General Session presented by Jeanette Horan, Vice President of Business Process and Architecture Integration with IBM and new sessions focused on SHARE's 2008 conference themes - The SOA Journey and Virtualization.

More than 800 attendees gather at the General Session.

In addition to the education sessions, the SHARE Technology Exchange Expo housed over 100 booths filled with leading third-party solution providers where attendees learned about the latest products available to improve the performance of their enterprise computing environments.

 Attendees join exhibitors for the first day of the SHARE Technology Exchange Expo.

Fresh Education

The Keynote presentation by Jeanette Horan, "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle - Sustainable Smart SOA in IBM," discussed the IBM approach to building modern infrastructures on existing infrastructure and services. Jeanette presented examples of the savings achieved from reuse of existing assets, as well as the efficiency gains of adopting common processes and business services.

Jeanette Horan, VP of Business Process and Architecture Integration
with IBM presents a Keynote presentation about the SOA adoption at IBM.

New sessions that addressed today’s enterprise IT concerns provided solutions to some of the hottest issues facing SHARE attendees.

Sessions about The SOA Journey helped attendees understand that SOA adoption requires not only planning but also organizational commitment to stay the course, and an understanding that many of the benefits and ROI are long-term. SHARE also partnered with the SOA Consortium to present in-depth sessions including a Keynote by Brenda Michelson.

Virtualization sessions included topics that focused on understanding the implementation possibilities and being prepared for the complexity of IT service management in the virtualized and consolidated environment. Attendees discussed the challenges associated with solutions that cross multiple products and vendors, have locally developed code, contain data from multiple sources and are executed across multiple hardware environments.

Student Career Exploration Day

With the help of IBM’s Academic Initiative, SHARE hosted more than 45 students for a Student Career Exploration Day on Wednesday, February 27. Students from local area high schools and colleges spent half a day at SHARE learning about the enterprise IT industry, speaking with zNextGen mentors and visiting with SHARE Technology Exchange Expo exhibitor companies. Students were given information on the direction of the industry as well as the value employers will place on computer science graduates. Students left SHARE with valuable information about the industry and future career contacts.

2008 SHARE Award for Excellence in Technology

During the General Session on Monday, February 25, SHARE President, Martin Timmerman, and IBM's executive sponsors, Carla Shultis and Joe Doria, announced The University of Georgia as the winner of the 2008 SHARE Award for Excellence in Technology. The university managed to creatively decrease its operating expenses by taking advantage of IBM’s sub-capacity pricing metrics when it upgraded to a 64-bit machine. The impact of the solution for The University of Georgia allowed savings of more than one million dollars since December 2005 and delivery of business processes in record times.

The University of Georgia's Shannon Marable and Jeffrey Garmon were on hand in Orlando to accept the award. To learn more about the Award for Excellence, click here.

Joe Doria and Carla Shultis, IBM Executive Sponsors along with Martin Timmerman, SHARE President, present the 2008 Award for Excellence to The University of Georgia's, Shannon Marable and Jeffrey Garmon.

Industry Announcements

On Tuesday, February 26, IBM announced its latest high-end enterprise class server, the IBM System z10 Enterprise Class (System z10 EC), which promises to deliver improved price performance, scalability and security. The announcement which occurred during SHARE’s conference allowed user attendees the first glimpse at the System z10 EC.

Additional media coverage of SHARE in Orlando from various trade publications can be found on our SHARE Press Room page.

Best Session Winners from SHARE in San Diego, August 2007

The cornerstone of SHARE conferences is the educational program. SHARE is proud to congratulate the following session presenters, and their organizations, for receiving the highest attendee ratings from SHARE in San Diego:

• Assembler University 302: Additions to z/Architecture - Dan Grenier, IBM Corporation
• Introduction to J2EE Application Architecture - Peter Enrico, Enterprise Performance Strategies, Inc
• WebSphere MQ Queue Manager Clustering - Morag Hughson, IBM Corporation
• Magic of DB2 for z/OS REBIND in Version 8 - Bonnie Baker, Bonnie Baker Corporation
• E-mail Archiving and Message Integrity in the Enterprise - James Mason, IBM Corporation, Art Gilliland, Symantec and Scott Whitney, Symantec
• Windows Vista - Wow or Whoa? - Al Williams
• Linux on System z - A Strategic View - Jim Elliott, IBM Canada Ltd
• Building a Strong z/VM and Linux Architecture on the Mainframe - Alain Leclerc, Centre de Services Partages Quebec and David Kreuter, VM Resources Ltd.
• Migrating to z/OS 1.9 - Get Ready: Part 1 of 3 - Marna Walle, IBM Corporation
• JES2 Short Subjects - Dave Danner, Summit Technical Services, Inc and Brian Peterson, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Minnesota
• What's New with V2 of VPS and DRS - Beverly Weaver, Levi, Ray & Shoup
• Quick Start to Implementing TCP/IP on z/OS - Gwen Dente, IBM Corporation
• The Serious Business of HUMOR! - Randall Munson, Creatively Speaking
• SSL and Crypto, H/W, S/W - Who does what? - Greg Boyd, IBM Corporation
• The FBI's Perspective on Cybercrime - Ted Lindsey, Federal Bureau of Investigation

Al Williams, SHARE Director of Operations, presents the top three Best Session Awards from SHARE in San Diego.

RAVE On!

RAVE (Recognize a Valiant Effort) is an accolade given to SHARE attendees by SHARE attendees to recognize outstanding efforts that are over and above the norm. The SHARE in Orlando RAVE recipients are:

Martha McConaghy recognized Betsie Spann for volunteering to chair eight sessions.

Martha McConaghy thanked Darryl Hoffman for volunteering to chair four sessions.

Jim Willette recognized Toby Marek who helped accommodate an overflowing room by swapping her session room with Jim’s. She even helped direct traffic!

Jim Willette thanked Tom O’Brien for being flexible in moving his session to a different meeting room in order to give Jim more space.

Ed Addison recognized Leigh Compton for giving an introduction to the session, “CICS/TS User Experiences.”

Mark Picard submitted a RAVE for Carl Gehr. He did a terrific job of buffering speakers from internal politics while always fighting to get their suggestions heard and implemented. Also, Mark thanked Carl for the numerous things he does that go unnoticed!

Monique Conway recognized Erin Farr for working hard to arrange the SEC Project dinner on Thursday in Orlando.

Monique Conway recognized the effort by Jack Jones for stepping in last minute and presenting the SEC Project Opening session when the original speaker called in sick.

Monique Conway submitted a RAVE to Mark Hahn for resurrecting and doing a great job on “The Security Blanket,” the Security and Audit Project’s newsletter.

Mary Ann Edwards recognized Lou Lane who volunteered to chair a session from a different Project and Program.

Barry Brooks recognized Steve Maxwell for going above and beyond the call of duty. Steve paid his own way to SHARE so that his job as Project Scheduler and Deputy Project Manager was not left for someone else to take on with little notice or preparation.

Kenneth Tomiak recognized Marna Walle who assisted in scheduling several of the sessions hosted by the MVS SCP Project. Since the content was closely guarded during the scheduling process, its scheduler did not know what the sessions would be covering. She overcame this challenge by having IBM arrange several sessions covering material announced just this past Tuesday, in the order they felt would benefit the attendees most. Marna also organized and managed transportation for our Project dinner of close to forty people, too. She rocks!

Kenneth Tomiak thanked Iris Rivera who took the time to help review, restructure and at times rewrite the abstracts for the MVS SCP Project, in order to clearly understand the details of each session. The effort Iris put forth helped us maintain a professional look so attendees can use this material to help justify their attendance, even though the SHARE conference is organized by users. She also worked during personal time. Kenneth thanks Iris for putting in those long hours in a short period of time.

Kenneth Tomiak submitted a RAVE for David Whitney. David has been a “behind-the-scenes” resource for the MVS SCP Project, coordinating the large quantity of IBM speakers who presented sessions hosted by our Project. In addition, the z10 and software announcements this week presented some challenges as the actual content for several sessions could not be made public earlier in the scheduling process. Many thanks to Dave for bearing through the process.

Barry Brooks recognized Ed Decker who as a relatively new attendee to SHARE, he jumped in and helped with chairing and co-chairing sessions. Ed also participated in project planning/working sessions.

Martha McConaghy recognized Chuck Morse who consistently supports the LVM Program with humor and technical experience.

Mary Ann Edwards thanks Patrick O'Keefe for stepping up to chair several sessions. He was close to chairing a session in each time slot!

Karla Houser recognized Paul Soya, Victor Freyer, Jim Willette and Rich Szulewski who all covered the Welcome Desk on Monday night when Karla was unable to attend. Paul, Victor, Jim and Rich demonstrated what SHARE is all about.

Kenneth Tomiak recognized George Fulk for rescuing the "REXX Power Tools and Performance Tips" session when the speaker was called away. He downloaded the presentation and stepped up with little notice. George was able to keep the session alive and did a superb job. Thanks, George!

Al Williams thanked Christina McGill for facilitating a major restructure of her program, and for helping to preserve the quality offerings of the DATA program.