Originally posted by: TonyPearson

Tony Pearson IBM Master Inventor, Senior IT Architect, and Event Content Manager

This month, I was in Johannesburg, South Africa for IBM Systems Technical University, or TechU for short. For those not familiar with [Johannesburg], it is South Africa's largest city with a metropolitan area more than eight million people. Like New York City in the USA, Johannesburg is not the capital but serves as the economic and financial center for the country.

(Compared to the rest of Africa, Johannesburg is only the 10th largest city. I spoke at TechU events earlier this year in Africa's largest two cities: Lagos, Nigeria, and Cairo, Egypt.  IBM also had a TechU event in Casablanca, Morocco, the 12th largest in Africa, but this was all in French language. My high-school French is a bit rusty so I was not there.)

Here is my recap of Day 1.

Opening Keynote Session

The day started with an opening keynote session. Our emcee was Ronnie Moodley, the new IBM Systems Lab Services GEO Leader for Middle East Africa (MEA). My third line manager, Calline Sanchez, IBM Vice President of IBM Systems Lab Services, gave a welcome and introduction.

We had two distinguished keynote speakers from the IBM Research lab in Johannesburg. Kugendran Naidoo, IBM Research for Business and Strategy, talked about the future of IT, and IBM's role in it. Dr. Ismail Akhalwaya, IBM Research scientist and Q Ambassador, explained Quantum Computing.

 

2019 Top IT Trends - Understanding the fundamentals of the next generation IT Environment

Slides are available on IBM Expert Network on [Slideshare.net]

(Note: For the past many years, my predecessor Glenn Anderson, presented a session called "Top IT Trends You Probably Don't Understand". However, now that I have taken over, our executives felt this title was insulting to our delicate audience, and so it has been officially renamed to "Top IT Trends - Understanding the fundamentals of the next generation IT Environment".)

This was an updated version of the talk I gave in Atlanta and Berlin earlier this year, and is equally relevant for people interested in IBM Storage, IBM Z mainframes or IBM Power systems. The concept is simple, spend about 10 minutes on different topics, just enough to be conversant on the subject. I explained the following six topics:

• Internet of Things (IoT)
• Big Data Analytics
• Artificial Intelligence (AI)
• Containers and Orchestration
• Blockchain
• Hybrid Multicloud

With IBM's recent acquisition of Red Hat, some of these were especially timely. TechU had subsequent full-hour breakout sessions on many of these topics later in the week, so it was a good level-set introduction to help people plan the rest of their schedule.

 

IBM Cloud Object Storage: How it works and typical use cases

Slides are available on IBM Expert Network on [Slideshare.net]

Over 80 percent of the world's unstructured data is stored in object storage. Every major Cloud Service Provider (CSP) uses object storage and makes object storage available as a service to its customers. My presentation explained object storage concepts generically, then covered IBM Cloud Object Storage, IBM's implementation of these concepts.

The day ended with a nice Welcome Reception with drinks and snacks in our Solution Center, followed by dinner with my colleagues at a nice restaurant! Because Johannesburg is south of the equator, this is actually Spring time, heading into Summer, and the weather was just delightful.

IBM has several more TechU events planned for October and November at: Bogota (Columbia), Las Vegas, NV (USA), Sydney (Australia), Prague (Czech Republic), Pernambuco (Brazil), and Bali (Indonesia). Check out the [IBM Technical Events] landing page for details.