My involvement with IBM products and my focus now …
Almost 30 years ago I started as a mainframe system programmer responsible for IBMs System Network Architecture. Since that time I have always had close connections to IBM and IBM products. After some years my focus moved more and more to IBMs System Management. I was always interested how to automate boring things and to keep the tasks running. After IBM bought Tivoli, I was very interested in this new technology and we started to use it for our company. Now – 17 years later – I can say that this was the beginning of a real success story. We never destroyed our environment; we always migrated to new functions and new versions, while keeping the service for our customers alive.
My focus now has moved more and more to Service Management, especially in integrating products from different vendors. There is a need to establish a stable service platform for our customers, where services are available in the manner, it’s written down in our Service Level Agreement and can be measured to fulfill our assignment.
IBM products – both, software and hardware - are an important part of our strategy. We use e.g. IBM APM, Netcool Omnibus, Tivoli Usage and Accounting Manager, San Volume Controller, Websphere, Cognos, DB2 …
The Power 795 Platform is the strategic platform for the consolidation of the most important Oracle Databases. We have about 400 Databases running on two machines with 140 partitions at different locations.
My way to connect to the IMWUC (formerly TUC) …
My first contact with IBM User Groups was in the early 90th. In Europe the Guide Share Europe (GSE) Community was very popular and was the strongest User Community for customers with IBM Software worldwide. I enjoyed the meetings and the way to interact with IBM. We had the opportunity to start enhancement requests and to push open problem management records. I was often asked, to take the leadership of the Networking Group, but I felt, that I didn’t have the experience to do this.
In 2005 I was asked again from our local IBM’ers to take the leadership of a new Austrian Tivoli User Group. This was the point, I decided, that I could not only consume all the time, but that I should also give something back of my experiences from 17 years of IT-business and of the lessons-learned.
Have I done a good job so far?
I hope so! I always tried to make things better – and I looked at other groups, how they make their groups successful. I learned a lot from the German User Group; even Austria is always a bit different.
I am very proud, that the Austrian GSE Tivoli User Group was honored this year for the 10th time to be a Premier TUC Group and myself to be the User Group Leader 2015.
Why are the Austrians “a bit different”?
The Austrian customer is typically interested in good presentations but also in social networking and coming together enjoying good food and drinks. They want to have presentations of customers, but they don’t have a lot of time to prepare one. We don’t want only to meet – we want to have fun at our conferences. That means for me, that meetings have always to be prepared very well. This is only possible, if there are responsible guys at IBM, with which you can work together and you can trust, that the decisions you made will be met.
I am lucky that I have 2 guys from IBM Austria, which do a lot of work.
Why do I want to be part of the IMWUC Council?
From the beginning of our Austrian User Groups we had always international guests. Maybe that was the reason I was invited to join the IMWUC Council. I am now part of this global team for more than 10 years. Although the structure of the team has changed during the last years, I think it can be even valuable for IBM and the customers.
My vision is to bundle the voices of the local users over the IMWUC Council to get a meaningful voice to IBMs executives.