Open Mainframe Project Continues Momentum with New Members, New Open Source Projects, and Additional Support for Diversity

SAN DIEGO, Aug. 20, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- OPEN SOURCE SUMMIT -- The Open Mainframe Project (OMP), an open source initiative that enables collaboration across the mainframe community to develop shared tool sets and resources, is announcing four new members: Phoenix Software, Syncsort, Western University, and Zoss Team LLC; three new projects: Feilong, zorow, and TerseDecompress; the Zowe Conformance program, and continued support for internships and diversity in the mainframe community.

"The Open Mainframe Project is a focal point for deployment and use of Linux and open source software on mainframes," said John Mertic, Director of Program Management for the Linux Foundation and Open Mainframe Project. "We are increasing collaboration in the mainframe community, developing shared tool sets and resources and making mainframes, with their underlying compute power, more broadly available. Recent successes and continued international support show fantastic progress in these areas."

Hosted by The Linux Foundation, the Open Mainframe Project is comprised of more than 30 business and academic organizations that collaborate on vendor-neutral open source project with the mission of building community and adoption of open source on the mainframe. The Open Mainframe Project strives to build an inclusive community through investment in open source projects and programs, career development, and events that provide opportunities for the mainframe community to collaborate and create sustainability.

New Projects enable new collaboration opportunities

The Open Mainframe Project welcomes three new projects under its umbrella to expand how  modern mainframe technology integrates with existing systems. Projects hosted by Open Mainframe Project have a vendor-neutral governance structure to encourage participation from a diversity of vendors and individuals, Feilong, TerseDecompress, and zorow are joining current projects ADE, Atom plugins for z/VM, Mentorship Program, and Zowe, nearly doubling the number of projects hosted by the OMP umbrella.

Feilong is a z/VM Cloud Connector that provides virtual resource management for z/VM. Users can manage the VM lifecycle dynamically and automatically without deep knowledge of z/VM itself through REST API. Users do not need to manually provision, manage, and destroy guests. Feilong also provides an SDK to make it easy to develop system management tools. Fundamentally, Feilong allows IaaS/PaaS solutions such as Openstack or Terraform to consume z/VM by providing REST APIs, making time to market faster.

TerseDecompress helps IBM mainframe customers uncompress large files like system dumps with the TERSE program on a mainframe. Normally, if the receiving does not have a mainframe in their datacenter it is not possible to uncompress files. With TerseDecompress the files can be decompressed on any workstation that supports JAVA. There is no need to have access to a mainframe to uncompress files that are tersed on a mainframe. 

z/OS Open Repository of Workflows (zorow) is a new open source community dedicated to contributing and collaborating on z/OSMF workflows. Many tenured systems administrators use their own processes to perform common system management tasks. Workflows help to create efficiency and reduce the complexities of these tasks while enabling the transfer of knowledge from tenured systems administrators to early career professionals in a seamless and consistent way.

For more information on supported projects, please see: https://www.openmainframeproject.org/projects/supported-projects

Zowe Conformance Program launched to build a vendor-neutral ecosystem around Zowe

Open Mainframe Project's Zowe turned one year old this month bringing excitement and energy to the global Zowe community with more than 712,000 pageviews and 4600 downloads. The project is ready to help members, incorporate it with new and existing products that will enable integration of mainframe applications and data across the enterprise. To ensure vendors are delivering offerings that align with the Zowe framework, Open Mainframe Project is launching a Zowe Conformance Program.

Each vendor can follow the Testing Guidelines to ensure their offering is aligned with the conformance standards developed by the Zowe community. Products achieving conformance will have exclusive logos and marks they can use in the promotion of their product, as well as be listed in the Zowe Conformance Directory. Vendors that have offerings that are a part of the initial launch include Broadcom, IBM, Phoenix Software, and Rocket Software.

You can learn more about Zowe Conformance Program at https://www.openmainframeproject.org/projects/zowe/conformance

A Growing Ecosystem

Four new members, Phoenix Software, Syncsort, Western University, and Zoss Team LLC, highlight the international reach and range of interest in supporting mainframe development across software consultants, vendors, and academia. If your organization is interested in joining the Open Mainframe Project, please see: https://www.openmainframeproject.org/about/join

"It's a match made in heaven," said Donna Hudi, Chief Marketing Officer for Phoenix Software. "The Open Mainframe Project provides exciting opportunities through the open source model for the next generation of mainframers and Phoenix Software prides itself in taking a leadership role in helping to address the z/OS skills gap. Our focus on leveraging the latest technology, creating modern solutions, and sharing our overall enthusiasm for the platform will be further enhanced by the opportunity to share our depth of knowledge and experience throughout the Open Mainframe Project community."

"Mainframes continue to be a strategic part of data infrastructure, hosting mission-critical workloads for many of the world's largest enterprises and working with an ever-increasing deployment of hybrid architectures," said Dr. Tendü Yoğurtçu, CTO, Syncsort. "The Zowe framework is an exciting initiative with the potential to transform the approach to mainframe modernization and connecting to a broader set of applications as well as next wave platforms such as hybrid cloud and blockchain. Syncsort has expanded our membership in the Linux Foundation by joining the Open Mainframe Project, enabling us to contribute in the community effort to make core mainframe services and data interoperable with other systems and emerging technology platforms."

"With Linux being one of the world's largest software projects, we are pleased to partner with the Linux Foundation and Open Mainframe Project in providing our students with unique training opportunities," said Hanan Lutfiyya, Professor of Computer Science at Western University. "Linux and open source will continue to lead the way as important learning tools for students around the world."

Committed to Diversity

Part of Open Mainframe Project's mission is to build an inclusive community through investment in programs, career development, and events that provide opportunities to underrepresented and disadvantaged groups around the world. There has been a lack of representation of women in technology that is especially more notable in the mainframe industry.

Recently, Open Mainframe Project partnered with SHARE on the launch of a Women in IT initiative at both the Phoenix conference last March and the Pittsburgh conference earlier this month. Both events were successful with more than 200 participants and Open Mainframe Project is committed to continue the support for women in technology You can learn more about Open Mainframe Project's participation at SHARE Phoenix at https://www.openmainframeproject.org/blog/2019/03/06/encouraging-women-in-technology

Open Mainframe Project also strives to ensure its leadership is showcasing its diversity value in the mainframe community. Recently, both Meredith Stowell, IBM's Director IBM Z Community Advocacy and ISV Success, and Anjali Arora, Rocket Software's SVP of Engineering and Chief Product Officer, joined the Governing Board to provide strategic guidance to the project.

About the Open Mainframe Project

The Open Mainframe Project is intended to serve as a focal point for deployment and use of Linux and Open Source in a mainframe computing environment. With a vision of Open Source on the Mainframe as the standard for enterprise class systems and applications, the project's mission is to Build community and adoption of Open Source on the mainframe by eliminating barriers to Open Source adoption on the mainframe, demonstrating the value of the mainframe on technical and business levels, and strengthening collaboration points and resources for the community to thrive. Learn more about the project at https://www.openmainframeproject.org.

About the Linux Foundation

Founded in 2000, the Linux Foundation is supported by more than 1,000 members and is the world's leading home for collaboration on open source software, open standards, open data, and open hardware. Linux Foundation projects like Linux, Kubernetes, Node.js and more are considered critical to the development of the world's most important infrastructure. Its development methodology leverages established best practices and addresses the needs of contributors, users and solution providers to create sustainable models for open collaboration. For more information, please visit us at linuxfoundation.org.

The Linux Foundation has registered trademarks and uses trademarks. For a list of trademarks of The Linux Foundation, please see its trademark usage page: www.linuxfoundation.org/trademark-usage. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.

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