IBM Academic Initiative Boosts Mainframe Community, Helps Plug Projected Skills Gap

IBM today announced that 150 colleges and universities worldwide offer educational resources on the IBM eServer zSeries mainframe through its Academic Initiative. Launched in 2003, university membership has grown 650 percent in the last year.

The zSeries program of the Academic Initiative provides students and professors with hands-on access to the zSeries mainframe, curriculum, industry experts, and training for students and faculty. The goal is to assist students in developing practical mainframe skills that enable them to find good jobs quickly upon graduation and to help businesses replace retiring mainframe experts. IBM has pledged to work with schools to reach a target of 20,000 mainframe literate IT professionals in the market by 2010. To meet this goal, IBM hopes to double the number of schools involved by the end of 2005.

"Through this program, computer science programs around the world are training thousands of students on highly marketable mainframe skills based on the platform's unmatched features and support of open standards like Linux and Java," said Mike Bliss, Director of IBM eServer zSeries Technical Support and Marketing. "Students are often surprised to learn that many of the virtualization and security features that are now beginning to appear on UNIX and x86 systems have been running on mainframes for many years. These mainframe capabilities are in many cases more capable than the implementations on distributed systems and remain uniquely relevant to the demands of today's IT challenges."

Professor David Douglas of The University of Arkansas, Walton School of Business, teaches two courses around the mainframe as part of a B.S. in Information Systems. Walton Business School recently announced that this year it would receive access to a zSeries mainframe, IBM software, courseware, customized training and development, benefits valued at approximately $7 million.

"Even though mainframes hold most of the world's data, today's computer science students grew up with distributed systems and even consider older UNIX systems to be legacy platforms," said Professor Douglas. "By teaming with IBM to offer course materials and hands-on access to the mainframe, students are beginning to realize that although mainframes are a more complex technology, most of the features they've learned about in the distributed environment actually originated on the mainframe. It's an innovative platform with a great future."

The training is paying off for students. Twenty-four-year-old Joshua Smith credits an operating systems class within the zSeries program taken at Malone College with helping him land an IT programmer/analyst position at an Ohio-based manufacturer. Smith explains, "Before taking the operating systems class on zSeries, I thought the mainframe was on its way out. The more I learned, the more I realized the value of working on hardware that sets the standard in security, scalability and uptime."

The Academic Initiative zSeries Program reaches students globally:

In Europe, IBM recently signed Adam Mickiewicz University to join the initiative. Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan, Poland, is the 150th participant of the program with over 20 students enrolled in its post graduate Computer Science degree. IBM is training faculty members with hands-on mainframe education. The university added IBM's 14-week zSeries University Program Course to its curriculum to help students find competitive positions in the IT job market. This university joins 24 other institutions in 16 countries around Europe that are pursuing zSeries education through the Academic Initiative.
In China, IBM donated zSeries mainframe systems and software to seven universities in China, including Huazhong University of Science and Technology, South China University of Technology, and Peking University. IBM aims to have the Academic Initiative zSeries Program lead to 10,000 new mainframe literate IT professionals in China alone.
In Australia, 50 students are currently enrolled in an IT degree program developed jointly by Global Online Learning and Griffith University to produce IT professionals working in the IBM zSeries environment. With a focus on practical skills, these IT students are getting paid, on-the-job experience working with the Australian Department of Defense, National Australia Bank, Australian Health Insurance Commission and other Australian mainframe users.
In the U.S. and Canada, an IBM mainframe hub housed through the program at Marist College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. can be accessed remotely by schools in the U.S. and overseas. This allows students hands-on experience of working with the mainframe as part of their Computer Science degrees. IBM also connects industry sponsors such as Royal Bank of Canada with universities to work together on co-ops, program curricula, technical support and professional instruction.
In Latin America, University of Campinas (Unicamp), a large public university in São Paolo, Brazil, is establishing a mainframe hub running Linux. This deployment will give students, partner universities and research institutes access via the Internet to an IBM zSeries server environment, where they will be able to develop their teaching and research projects without having to own large-scale equipment. Unicamp is also forging partnerships with local ISVs. In one recent example it partnered with one ISV involving students in a study of WebSphere scalability on Linux on zSeries.
"This program is part of IBM's wider commitment to the mainframe community," said Bliss. "We listened to our customers' concerns about the graying of mainframe skills. We want to help bridge the projected gap. The Academic Initiative is all about providing in demand skills for an on demand world."

The zSeries Program is a complementary effort to the IBM Academic Initiative, an innovative program offering a wide range of technology education benefits from free to fee that can scale to meet the goals of most colleges and universities. IBM will work with schools -- both directly and virtually via the Web -- that support open standards and seek to use open source and IBM technologies for teaching purposes. For more information on the IBM Academic Initiative, visit www.ibm.com/university.

About IBM
IBM is the world's largest information technology company, with 80 years of leadership in helping businesses innovate. Drawing on resources from across IBM and key IBM Business Partners, IBM offers a wide range of services, solutions and technologies that enable customers, large and small, to take full advantage of the new era of on demand business. For more information about IBM, visit http://www.ibm.com.

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