TAS Seminar
Lineup
Since
1987 thousands of people have attended the Technical Awareness Series (TAS).
This catalog contains the current list of seminars that we will bring to your site in either half-day or full-day sessions. Seminar content can be adapted to be relevant to your organization. For information on public TAS events
Please see http://www.actscorp.com/tas
Please note the instructor bios are provided at the end of this document.
For additional information, pricing, and scheduling, please contact
Bill Carico at bcarico@actscorp.com, or call 434-933-2287
(L to R) John Kirschner, Bill Carico, and Jim Porell
at TAS 2007 in Hilton Head
Catalog Contents:
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Seminar_Information |
Pages_2_to_6 |
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Instructor_Bio's |
Pages_7_to_9 |
Seminar
Information:
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TAS 110 - Session Title: Server Virtualization for Improved Shared
Services Delivery -
Monte Bauman and Bill Carico
Virtualization
technologies are everywhere. Server competition is severe. And IT stakeholders
and shared services delivery channels just want to save money. This session
will present an explanation of the value of server virtualization for a
services delivery provider. This session will present a cross platform sizing
methodology for virtualization-based server consolidation and a total cost of
ownership model for analysis of virtualization hosting servers and their
virtualization technologies. Session attendees will see a demo of an Excel (TM)
spreadsheet model useful for comparing and contrasting Intel-VMware-Linux
virtual server realization with mainframe-based z/VM-Linux virtual server
realization. Attendees should come away from this session being able to
understand server design
points and tradeoffs, and server positioning in accord with common "application workloads," They
should also be able to understand an application-workload-based cross platform sizing methodology,
as well as the economics of virtualization across hardware, software, facilities, admin, time, and other cost elements associated with a shared services delivery environment.
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TAS 120 - Session Title:
Getting a Handle on Costs and TCO –
Bill Carico and/or John Kirschner, and/or Jim Porell,
and/or Monte Bauman
Who can you believe when each vendor claims to have the superior solution and points to third-party consultants to support their claim of having the lowest TCO? In the move to shared services, where can you achieve the greatest economies of scale, which area offers the greatest leverage for lowering costs without compromising service levels? Which is the most economical technology over a three to five year time span? Is it really true that software and hardware acquisition costs only account for about 10 percent of a platform’s TCO? This seminar explains how to get a handle on costs and how to properly consider the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) to have maximum impact on your bottom line.
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TAS 200 Series Seminars featuring
Dr. Gene Amdahl
Topics: Industry legend Dr. Gene Amdahl teams up with Bill Carico to
co-teach a number of half-day or full-day seminars on one or more of the
following topics:
Dr. Gene Amdahl and Bill Carico
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TAS 310 – Session Title:
Storage Spectrum - Fred Moore
The new economics of the storage industry are reshaping traditional methods for
storing, retrieving, protecting and managing data as the value of digital data
grows exponentially and over half of the world’s digital data is now stored in
a mobile technology. The storage industry is now tackling new pro-active
storage/data management, transparent data movement, hybrid storage
architectures, disruptive data protection schemes, and a new and highly secure
internet as probable breakthroughs in the years ahead. Fred Moore's seminar, Storage
Spectrum, presents the latest knowledge on key storage directions,
technologies and architectures that are taking the storage industry to the next
level enabling you to better plan for your future.
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TAS 300 Series Seminars featuring
Fred
Topics – Industry expert Fred Moore also
teaches a number of half-day or full-day seminars on one or more
of the following topics:
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TAS 130 - Session Title
- Agile Application Development - The Good, The Bad, The Awful, The
Super - Bob Johnson
It is almost a proverb that IT today is being asked to do more with less,
develop systems faster and better, and have perfect security, reliability, and
availability. But these requirements have not really changed in several
decades.
Bob will share his experiences with a number of application development efforts
and give you action items to ensure success in your arena. He starts with
sharpening your saw topics: people, tools, and training that provide the
architectural foundation to build the agile environment.
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TAS 135 - Session Title
-
This is a one-day session designed to identify and prioritize areas that need to be addressed in an organization. The BJ Meta Planning session generates a large volume of ideas in a quick, efficient manner from a large diverse group. The techniques used here were expanded from the original “brainstorming sessions” of Quality circles. That session format has been improved dramatically to:
- Define and agree on the primary purpose.
- Develop ideas and tasks that identify specific tasks and projects that address the primary purpose of the working session.
- Consolidate and further define each of the tasks.
- Assign priorities for each of the categories and tasks.
- Assign responsible party and delivery date for each category and task.
The techniques overcome the
group dynamics problems where some are gregarious and very verbal and others
are quiet and introspective. Ideas are brought out from both
personalities equally.
Bob improved these techniques working with IBM, SHARE, Inc, government, and
private companies over the last 25 years. He never failed to identify key tasks
and prioritize them in a few hours.
The output is a task list with dates and assigned leaders to accomplish the
primary purpose as defined at the start. Tracking these leads to doing the
right thing in the right way.
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TAS 140 - Session Title- Agile
Development Methodology Within An Enterprise Architecture – John Kirschner
There is a lot of discussion regarding agile development methodologies like
scrum, extreme programming and the like. These methodologies revolve around the
project level, not at the enterprise level. How then do we marry up the
benefits of agile programming techniques, which provide applications faster and
with more quality for the customer, with enterprise architecture and a
technical multi-year roadmap for the enterprise? John Kirschner will explain
how his team has taken agile development methodologies, using user stories,
epics and themes to describe the business requirements, then exploiting use
cases from the user stories and their acceptance criteria to develop the system
requirements. The architecture can be built or modified from the resultant
business and user requirements and a portfolio of services mapped out over time
to fulfill that architectural vision of the future.
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TAS
150 - Session Title: Agile Application Development Strategies: Practices
and Processes - Jim Weekley
This presentation examines techniques that leverage agile development in the
construction of shared services in a distributed, architecture-driven
environment. Jim highlights the problems that traditional development
processes and agile development practices are designed to address, and shows
methods of integrating them.
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TAS 400 Series Seminars featuring Jim Weekley:
- Architecture driven service development establishing and propagating a coherent architectural vision in the delivery of services to consumers.
- Distributed system development techniques for building systems using distributed teams (distribution can be viewed as geographic, agency, customer base, or temporal)
- Portfolio/organizational management identifying opportunities for cross-agency sharing while maintaining customer focus, identifying and growing communities or centers of expertise, and building relationships and trust.
- Agile techniques in development and project management applying small team force multipliers in building shared services for the larger enterprise establishing global standards and managing local adaptations.
- Working SOA with agile teams.
- Strategies, tools, and standards for services development.
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TAS 160 - Session Title:
Trends in Hardware Technology - Dave Nagy or Bill Carico
Topics on hardware technology include mobile handhelds, the merging of
telephone and PC technology, and the continued debate over viability of the
various hardware platforms used in IT shops.
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TAS 170 - Session Title: Trends in Software Technology - Dave
Nagy or Bill Carico or Jim Porell
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Software topics include a review of operating systems and their evolution and
future predictions, and how applications are evolving. Will examine the
web services model and explain just what this is, how to implement ideas coming
out of Web 2.0 into business, and how to leverage the different licensing
models for business, including when to consider the open-source and
contribution community for products. Will discuss Linux and the
open-source movement. We also discuss programming languages so people
understand the technologists who are faithful to the various language 'faiths'.
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TAS 180 - Session Title – The Future of System Z –
Bill Carico or Jim Porell
People continue to question the viability of the traditional IBM mainframe environment. How serious is the skills shortage? Can costs be contained? Are the ISVs going to relent on software charges? Is anyone developing new mainframe applications? How loyal is the customer base, and how committed is IBM to these customers? This seminar will examine legitimate concerns and expose many myths about the future of IBM’s System Z.
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TAS 190 - Session Title: Industry Trends and Vendor Strategies
(IBM, Intel, HP, Sun, Microsoft, Oracle) –
Bill Carico and/or John
Kirschner and/or Jim Porell
This
presentation examines many of the latest "hot topics" that IT
professionals are dealing with. It also looks at competition among
some key vendors including IBM, Intel, HP, Sun, Microsoft, and Oracle,
and reveals how they are posturing both now and into the future. It is
important to consider how their plans may impact your organization's IT
strategies.
TAS Instructor Bio’s
Bob
Johnson, BJ Associates. Bob has developed large and small systems: from
co-author of the original Lexis-Nexis Information Retrieval system, to IRS
master file processing, to recently as the Chief, Retirement Financial Systems
Branch at the U.S. Office of Personnel Management. At OPM he used agile
development techniques to upgrade and modernize retirement systems, financial
systems, health benefits, insurance, and annuity payment systems from all
government employees. These systems process up to $80 Billion dollars per year
and pay approximately 1.4 million annuitants monthly. As member of the OPM
Office of the Chief Information Officer and technical advisor to the Chief
Architect, he prepared for Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI).
The basic development architecture: Information Technology Systems
Management (a formalized Systems Development Life Cycle SDLC) was tailored to
maintain control, meet deadlines, and come in under budget while maintaining
control the development processes.
Jim
Weekley, Lockheed Martin, Mr. Weekley specializes in application
development methodologies and has 28 years of experience in the design,
development, implementation, maintenance, and upgrade of complex distributed
systems. He has served in technical leadership roles on project contracts
to both commercial and Government customers.
John Kirschner, ABSi VP of Special Projects and CTO. John is a technology
specialist who has over 25 years experience in IT. He has worked for Lockheed
Martin and IBM as a I/T architect, systems engineer, systems programmer,
instructor, and as a consultant. He is a certified IT security specialist and
helps establish US government security policies in regard to new technologies.
John is a certified I/T architect, certified business manager and certified
large systems specialist. John is the author of numerous white papers on
systems architecture, availability, performance, and ADPE modernization.
Dave
Nagy, ACTS. Dave is a senior consultant and instructor for ACTS
Corporation. Dave's IT career began in 1973 with the Social
Security Administration. He has since worked at GTE Data Services
Eckerd Drugs, General Mills, Talbots, and Abercrombie & Fitch, where he has
served in a wide variety of technical and management roles. He diverse
experience ranges from building data centers to managing outsourcers, and
from working with
high-end centralized servers to caring for state-of-the-art networking
environments. He is also a part-time instructor at
Fred Moore. In 1998, Fred Moore founded
Horison Information Strategies, an information strategies consulting firm in
Jim Porell is an IBM distinguished
engineer and chief architect for the IBM System z Software Brand. For IBM's
Server and Technology Group, he is the co-CTO for IBM's Financial Services
Sector. Working through IBM Federal Systems Sales, he's a client IT architect
for the U.S. Intelligence Community. He is also chairperson of the zSeries
Software Design council, which includes all IBM mainframe operating systems and
middleware. In each of these roles, Jim's focus is to ensure IBM deploys technology
across the zSeries operating system that works consistently with other
operating systems, and to enable application growth for IBM's customers, either
by writing their own new applications or deploying new code from independent
software vendors. Jim has been leveraging this knowledge to work with customers
to build secure
solutions. He recently co-authored Larstan's Black Book of Corporate Security and has been consulting with customers on security solutions for more than 10 years. Jim will discuss IBM's plans for the mainframe both short and long term, especially as they pertain to the zOS operating system.
Dr. Gene Amdahl, ACTS Advisory
Board. Gene Myron Amdahl is founder of
Amdahl Corporation, and an IBM Fellow.
His early professional career was spent at IBM where he worked on
simulation studies and machine designs for character recognition; was initial
planner for the IBM 709 and 7030; became Manager of Architecture for the IBM
System/360 and in 1965 was named an IBM Fellow
Dr. Amdahl is perhaps best known for founding Amdahl Corporation where his
company became the first successful IBM-compatible CPU manufacturer, opening
the door for competition to advance technology. The world's first Large-Scale
Integrated (LSI) chips were developed and made possible high performance,
air-cooled, rather than water-cooled, CPUs.
Bill
Carico, ACTS Corp. Bill is an IT consultant and author of numerous
articles (see mainframe-exec.com, zJournal.com) and white papers, and the
founder of the Technical Awareness Series (TAS) which has been held over 50
times world-wide since 1987. His specialty areas include security,
business continuity, server consolidation, performance and tuning,
virtualization, and open source software.
Members of the TAS teach team include:
John Kirschner, ABSi, VP Special Projects and
CTO
Rick Slade, IBM Distinguished
Technologist
Bob Johnson, BJ Associates
Jim Porell, IBM Distinguished Engineer
Dr. Gururaj Rao, IBM Fellow
H. Dale Reeves, TX Comptrollers Office
Monte Bauman, IBM
Fred Moore, Horison Information Strategies
David Hines, ACTS Sr. Consultant
Bill Carico, ACTS Sr. Consultant
To schedule any of these events, or for additional information, please
contact:
434-933-2287