A Fond Farewell to IBM InterConnect 2017

By Andy Youniss on March 23, 2017 in Community, Events

As I write this on the flight back east from Las Vegas, I look back at another successful IBM InterConnect. As an IBM business partner for over two decades, I’ve attended many conferences. But this one was particularly exciting. This week in Las Vegas I had the opportunity to meet with key business and technical leaders to discuss and demonstrate our solutions for the modern mainframe. A number of Rocketeers joined discussions on the API economy, open source languages and tools, advanced analytics, hybrid cloud, cognitive, and other themes that resonate today across a diverse set of industries.

I was particularly excited to see how many organizations are ready to unlock and leverage their critical mainframe data across a wide range of applications. I was also excited to see so many next generation technology professionals who are all-in on z. The modern mainframe is here today and it speaks new languages (like Python and Perl and R) and runs all of your favorite tools (like Spark and Git).

We hosted our friends—our customers, partners, and peers—Tuesday night at our community event. It was fun to see everyone, share stories, talk about the latest technical developments, and just catch up. And even though The Rocket Band didn’t perform in Vegas this week (we will be back, I promise!), we did continue our tradition of giving away a custom Rocketcaster guitar to a lucky InterConnect attendee!

It was a great week filled with energy, passion, creativity, and optimism. Thank you to everyone who stopped by and visited or made the time to meet. Together we are creating the future of technology that will drive our businesses onward and upward.

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Andy Youniss

Andy Youniss co-founded Rocket Software in 1990 and continues to be the company's main driving force. Andy successfully established and actively manages Rocket's largest OEM partnerships and is guiding the company's growth through technology investments, acquisitions, new product lines, and strategic partnerships. Prior to founding Rocket Software, Andy was the development manager for DB View Inc., a software company specializing in DB2 database tools. Previously, he was a programmer/analyst at American Management Systems, and was also a project development consultant. Andy holds a B.S. degree in Computer Science from the Catholic University of America in Washington, DC.