Re: Press Release: IBM Academic Initiative Boosts Mainframe Community, Helps Plug Projected Skills Gap
- From: "Robert Smith" <rsmith@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: 16 Jul 2005 16:16:36 GMT
Customers have been fleeced
blind ever since the marketing vampires figured out that hitching
"Timothy Sipples" <timothy.sipples@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:OF682AAE1B.3F71E949-ON8625703E.00712754-8625703E.00715AF7@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Timely and topical....
>
> http://biz.yahoo.com/iw/050714/090880.html?printer=1
>
> IBM Academic Initiative Boosts Mainframe Community, Helps Plug Projected
> Skills Gap
> Thursday July 14, 2:39 pm ET
> Program Expands to 150 Universities Around the Globe; IBM Connects
> Generation Y With Baby Boomers to Train the Mainframe Experts of the 21st
> Century
> ARMONK, NY--(MARKET WIRE)--Jul 14, 2005 -- IBM today announced that 150
> colleges and universities worldwide offer educational resources on the IBM
> eServer zSeries mainframe through its Academic Initiative. Launched in
> 2003, university membership has grown 650 percent in the last year.
> The zSeries program of the Academic Initiative provides students and
> professors with hands-on access to the zSeries mainframe, curriculum,
> industry experts, and training for students and faculty. The goal is to
> assist students in developing practical mainframe skills that enable them
> to find good jobs quickly upon graduation and to help businesses replace
> retiring mainframe experts. IBM has pledged to work with schools to reach
> a target of 20,000 mainframe literate IT professionals in the market by
> 2010. To meet this goal, IBM hopes to double the number of schools
> involved by the end of 2005.
> "Through this program, computer science programs around the world are
> training thousands of students on highly marketable mainframe skills based
> on the platform's unmatched features and support of open standards like
> Linux and Java," said Mike Bliss, Director of IBM eServer zSeries
> Technical Support and Marketing. "Students are often surprised to learn
> that many of the virtualization and security features that are now
> beginning to appear on UNIX and x86 systems have been running on
> mainframes for many years. These mainframe capabilities are in many cases
> more capable than the implementations on distributed systems and remain
> uniquely relevant to the demands of today's IT challenges."
> Professor David Douglas of The University of Arkansas, Walton School of
> Business, teaches two courses around the mainframe as part of a B.S. in
> Information Systems. Walton Business School recently announced that this
> year it would receive access to a zSeries mainframe, IBM software,
> courseware, customized training and development, benefits valued at
> approximately $7 million.
> "Even though mainframes hold most of the world's data, today's computer
> science students grew up with distributed systems and even consider older
> UNIX systems to be legacy platforms," said Professor Douglas. "By teaming
> with IBM to offer course materials and hands-on access to the mainframe,
> students are beginning to realize that although mainframes are a more
> complex technology, most of the features they've learned about in the
> distributed environment actually originated on the mainframe. It's an
> innovative platform with a great future."
> The training is paying off for students. Twenty-four-year-old Joshua Smith
> credits an operating systems class within the zSeries program taken at
> Malone College with helping him land an IT programmer/analyst position at
> an Ohio-based manufacturer. Smith explains, "Before taking the operating
> systems class on zSeries, I thought the mainframe was on its way out. The
> more I learned, the more I realized the value of working on hardware that
> sets the standard in security, scalability and uptime."
> The Academic Initiative zSeries Program reaches students globally:
> -- In Europe, IBM recently signed Adam Mickiewicz University to join the
> initiative. Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan, Poland, is the 150th
> participant of the program with over 20 students enrolled in its post
> graduate Computer Science degree. IBM is training faculty members with
> hands-on mainframe education. The university added IBM's 14-week
> zSeries
> University Program Course to its curriculum to help students find
> competitive positions in the IT job market. This university joins 24
> other
> institutions in 16 countries around Europe that are pursuing zSeries
> education through the Academic Initiative.
>
> -- In China, IBM donated zSeries mainframe systems and software to seven
> universities in China, including Huazhong University of Science and
> Technology, South China University of Technology, and Peking
> University.
> IBM aims to have the Academic Initiative zSeries Program lead to
> 10,000 new
> mainframe literate IT professionals in China alone.
>
> -- In Australia, 50 students are currently enrolled in an IT degree
> program developed jointly by Global Online Learning and Griffith
> University
> to produce IT professionals working in the IBM zSeries environment.
> With a
> focus on practical skills, these IT students are getting paid,
> on-the-job
> experience working with the Australian Department of Defense, National
> Australia Bank, Australian Health Insurance Commission and other
> Australian
> mainframe users.
>
> -- In the U.S. and Canada, an IBM mainframe hub housed through the
> program at Marist College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. can be accessed
> remotely by
> schools in the U.S. and overseas. This allows students hands-on
> experience
> of working with the mainframe as part of their Computer Science
> degrees.
> IBM also connects industry sponsors such as Royal Bank of Canada with
> universities to work together on co-ops, program curricula, technical
> support and professional instruction.
>
> -- In Latin America, University of Campinas (Unicamp), a large public
> university in São Paolo, Brazil, is establishing a mainframe hub
> running
> Linux. This deployment will give students, partner universities and
> research institutes access via the Internet to an IBM zSeries server
> environment, where they will be able to develop their teaching and
> research
> projects without having to own large-scale equipment. Unicamp is also
> forging partnerships with local ISVs. In one recent example it
> partnered
> with one ISV involving students in a study of WebSphere scalability on
> Linux on zSeries.
> "This program is part of IBM's wider commitment to the mainframe
> community," said Bliss. "We listened to our customers' concerns about the
> graying of mainframe skills. We want to help bridge the projected gap. The
> Academic Initiative is all about providing in demand skills for an on
> demand world."
> The zSeries Program is a complementary effort to the IBM Academic
> Initiative, an innovative program offering a wide range of technology
> education benefits from free to fee that can scale to meet the goals of
> most colleges and universities. IBM will work with schools -- both
> directly and virtually via the Web -- that support open standards and seek
> to use open source and IBM technologies for teaching purposes. For more
> information on the IBM Academic Initiative, visit www.ibm.com/university.
>
> - - - - -
> Timothy F. Sipples
> Consulting Software Architect, Enterprise Transformation
> IBM Americas zSeries Software
> Phone: (312) 245-4003
> E-Mail: Timothy.Sipples@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (PGP key available.)
>
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