IBM Z has a 40+ year history in security and cryptography starting with the design of the Lucifer cipher in 1974 (which became the Data Encryption Standard, DES algorithm) to today, in 2022, with enablement of Quantum Safe Cryptography for the IBM z16.Join this session for an introduction to cryptography concepts such as encryption & decryption, hashing and digital signature generation & verification. Learn about new capabilities in IBM Z hardware, operating systems and middleware to provide quantum safe encryption and more.

Understanding how z/OS works from the ground up is essential to helping early career Z professionals accelerate their knowledge proficiency and career journey with the IBM Z platform.  This session will introduce the basic building blocks and components within z/OS today.  It will illustrate how the technical z/OS capabilities enable delivery of the enterprise grade capability essential to the unique business value delivered by IBM Z and z/OS.

Why do we test?  The obvious answer is to improve software quality and ensure that mission critical applications are free of defects before deployment. We have recently announced IBM Test Accelerator for Z, your one-stop shop for testing z/OS applications.

Join this session to learn how to:
- Automate unit and integration testing
- Facilitate test-driven development
- Eliminate manual environment provisioning
- Overcome the time-consuming hurdles of testing
- Leverage non-production environments to practice and improve your z/OS skills

Don't miss this opportunity to revolutionize your continuous integration processes and know how to implement a pipeline with continuous testing of Z Hybrid applications.

So, perhaps you are a z/OS or DB2 system administrator (system programmer) and quite familiar with your area of expertise. However, you are constantly working with those CICS (pronounced “Kicks”) system administrators and wonder what this CICS thing is. Well then this is the session for you. In one short hour, we will provide a technical introduction to CICS. It will cover what is CICS and who uses it. The differences between conversation and pseudo conversational programming, application services and more. Included are CICS connectivity options as well as how CICS applications can be accessed from the Internet.

The IBM Z strategy continues to push clients in the direction of leveraging industry standards to manage their systems and build their applications. For automation and management of IBM Z systems, the strategic choice has been the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform and its power to automate at scale across the majority of systems in the enterprise. Now with the new generative AI capabilities of Ansible Lightspeed with watsonx Code Assistant, getting started with Ansible and writing Ansible playbooks has never been easier! Join this session to hear about how you can use Ansible for IBM Z, and how you can accelerate your playbook development through the new generative AI capabilities of Ansible Lightspeed with watsonx Code Assistant.

The open source movement has rapidly become the way code is being developed for today's smart and agile businesses. If you deploy and maintain applications with the efficiency that DevOps offers, IBM Z should be an integral part of your workflow. Our panel of experts will cover how an "open mainframe" is the enterprise solution for deploying open source on an enterprise computing platform. This interactive session will showcase current open source projects, how to get involved, and what role the Open Mainframe Project plays.

People struggle with the connection between the traditional IT infrastructure that runs their business and the modern Cloud world. This struggle is based more on IT culture and preconceived notions about Z and cloud. This session will describe the state of the art in Hybrid cloud solutions that tie together these environments and show what progressive businesses are doing in this space to take advantage of their entire IT landscape to provide value to themselves and their customers.

Seenu will be walking through what IBM Hyper Protect Services (HPS) are and why it is important in the cloud and on prem.  He will show at a high level what it is and describe why it is so vital to customers running IBM Z machines with the Hardware Security Module (HSM).  He will also talk about what an HSM is and how it is used.  He will also provide some tutorials for creating your own Hyper Protect Virtual Servers running on IBM Cloud that will help you get started and explain about IBM Hyper Protect Crypto Services that runs on IBM Cloud where IBM Z machines are also being used and allowing access to Startups and others to harness the power of IBM Z on IBM Cloud.

Introducing DB2 for z/OS 

IBM Db2 for z/OS is IBM’s relational database management system for the z/OS operating system. This session will explore some of the basic concepts of Db2 for z/OS.

Penetration testing as a Pokemon battle.

In celebration of cybersecurity month, Niall Ashley is the guest host for our networking session, creating an opportunity to showcase penetration testing as a Pokemon battle.

Share your own expertise, and be part of the conversation.

Hybrid Enterprise Application Development in CloudEnterprise 

Application development for z/OS from the Hybrid Cloud is a real alternative for simplifying how development tools are used and deployed in an organization, particularly, if you are building hybrid applications. You can now offer one common set of modern tools and automation technologies to your teams reducing the need for specialized skills which empowers developers in several important ways. In this session you will learn how developers can setup and use an entire development environment in the public or private cloud by only using a browser or command-line.

In this session you will learn about the IBM z16's Telum chip’s Integrated Accelerator for AI. We cover how you can leverage the Integrated Accelerator for AI to speed up AI predictions driven by your applications.

An example credit card fraud Deep Learning model is demoed to show the performance of embedded AI inferencing in transactional z/OS applications.

Watson Machine Learning for z/OS is also demoed as a powerful AI model deployment platform for IBM z/OS.

It is designed for beginners who are curious about Ansible and would like to gain practical experience with it. The lab will enable participants to apply their newly acquired knowledge and develop their skills on an IBM LinuxONE virtual server.

The z/VM Performance Data Pump provides new functionality for users of Performance Toolkit to use z/VM real-time performance data in modern tools and enterprise observability platforms. This presentation introduces the Data Pump and explains how data can be consumed in Splunk Enterprise. We also demonstrate an alternative approach using InfluxDB and Grafana, two popular open source projects. With the container images from the IBM Z Container Registry, customers can deploy real-time VM performance dashboards using a Linux guest on z/VM. With the information provided, customers could have this operational in their own configuration in a few hours.

The Z Platform offers an exciting opportunity to help build and maintain critical global infrastructure—but it can also come with challenging new terminology, non-standard processes, and a steep learning curve. Come learn about IBM's efforts to strengthen the New-to-Z experience and better meet the needs of users in their first few years on the platform. Our team has interviewed new-to-Z users from different industries around the world in order to learn about their pain points, and we are in the process of prototyping solutions to be included in the next Z mainframe. These include better active learning opportunities (including access to sandbox environments and an AI mentorship initiative), simplification-by-design, new standardization efforts, and connecting new users to the broader mainframe culture. We will be testing and iterating on these solutions over the next few months, so this is also your opportunity to share your thoughts and contribute to future versions of IBM Z!

You want it all. IBM Z is the most reliable, secure, and vertically scalable system on the planet. The Cloud excels in automation, containerization and horizontal scalability. Bring IBM Z and Cloud together and get it all - and more. In this interactive discussion, we will:

• Introduce the Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, which the IBM Z and Cloud Modernization Stack  (the Mod Stack) runs in.

• Describe the operators (services) that the Mod Stack provides

• Demo Mod Stack being used by a z/OS developer updating their application using cloud native technology by Dr. Peter Haumer

Join us for an introduction to Go.

Try the hands-on challenge at IBM Z Xplore.

Google created Go to solve its own software engineering issues and provide an alternative to C++