IBM Debuts Master the Mainframe World Championship
IBM realizes that the cloud has its roots in the mainframe systems of yesteryear. With so many companies still operating mainframes, IBM’s Master the Mainframe competitions have fostered a new breed of mainframe engineers all across the globe. In fact, Master the Mainframe competitions have occurred in over 33 different countries and the competitions have given over 68,000 student’s access to the most sophisticated mainframe systems on the planet. These competitions have led up to the World Championship which will be help in New York City on April 7th, 2014.
In IBM’s press release, Big Blue quotes Martin Kennedy. Kennedy is the managing director of global enterprise systems at Citi. Kennedy mentions, “I’ve been following the contest for a number of years and have made successful hires from both IBM’s Master the Mainframe Contest as well as their System z Academic Initiative program. I envision a World Championship such as this generating momentum in academia and making educators take a second look at the mainframe in enterprise computing.”
The finalists who will represent the United States in the IBM Master the Mainframe World Championship are:
- Mugdha Kadam (University of Florida)
- Elton Cheng (University of California San Diego)
- Rudolfs Dambis (University of Nevada Las Vegas)
The press release that IBM authored went on to say, “As part of IBM’s ongoing commitment to develop the skills of a new generation of mainframe experts, the competition will highlight the modern capabilities of the mainframe, designed to handle today’s complex Big Data, Cloud, Security and Mobile computing workloads.”
Engineers who excel in the Master the Mainframe World Championship are most likely destined to become innovators in the cloud computing arena. IBM hosts these competitions in order to spark interest in enterprise computing on a collegiate level. These competitions not only spark cloud interest, they spark new cloud innovations as well.
