Due to a packed Agenda we were unable to hold a LSG Meeting at the Annual Conference. Below is the conference report.

The UK Region of GUIDE Share Europe (GSE) holds its two-day Annual Region Conference each year at the end of October. This year’s conference, “Virtually Yourz”, was held for the second year running at the Chesford Grange Hotel in Kenilworth.

The conference consisted of no less than ten streams covering all aspects of mainframe computing as well as workshops on such diverse topics as CICS tools, Unix Systems Services and Assembler Programming. The conference was opened by Mark Anzani, Vice President of IBM Large Enterprise Technology Deployment with a Keynote session entitled “What Happened to my Mainframe”, an informative and enjoyable look at the history of mainframe computing followed by some well-informed star-gazing into the likely developments over the next few years.

An innovation at this year’s conference was to have a “diagonal track” of introductory (or “101, as the US calls them) sessions. Each stream hosted one of these on their own speciality. The idea was to allow delegates to refresh their memories about areas they don’t come across that often, or even learn for the first time if they were relatively new to mainframe computing. Also we had invited several students to attend the conference and IBM had sent several recent graduate employees, so we envisaged this as a track they could follow right through. This stream was surprisingly successful, with the Storage 101, “An Introduction to Mainframe Storage Infrastructure”, for example, playing to a full house! Definitely something we plan to repeat next year.

The conference has been well supported by exhibitors since we first added a vendor exhibition 6 years ago, and this year was no exception. Some 27 exhibitors were on hand to discuss their particular products and solutions during the breaks and many of them sponsored the event in addition. This income is a significant help to GSE in keeping the cost of the conference to the delegates very low whilst maintaining a high quality event and we thank all of our exhibitors and sponsors for their support.

Of course it’s not all hard work. On the evening of the first day we enjoyed pre-dinner drinks sponsored by IBM Security Solutions followed by an excellent dinner sponsored by Logicalis and CA.

After the last session we presented handsome glass & silver decanters to the two best speakers, voted by the attendees;

• Best User Speaker
• Best Vendor Speaker    

We are already looking into dates and locations for next year, with a possible venue being Brighton as a change from the Midlands. We will be aiming for two days in the week commencing October 27th and we’ll give you more news as it becomes available.

A few statistics

• 300 registered delegates
• 102 separate one hour sessions
• 27 Vendor Exhibitors

For more information about the conference please visit www.gse.org.uk/tyc