As we’ve often mentioned before, retirements affect us all. It is certainly impacting us. No, don’t be silly, Cheryl is not retiring – Cheryl will never retire! However, many experienced mainframers are. Technical support managers all over the world are starting to realize that many of the people that have kept their businesses ticking over smoothly for the last 40+ years will soon be doing something other than babysitting an IPL at 03:00 on a Sunday morning. If they are smart, they have some bright, enthusiastic, young mainframers on their team. But travel and education budgets are tight, if not non-existent, and even the smartest newbie will take a while to catch up. In an attempt to have a period of stability as the old guard start heading into retirement, clients have been coming to us, asking for performance health checks – they want to make sure that everything is ‘ship-shape’ and running optimally. If there are any opportunities for enhancement, they want to turn that into a learning opportunity, so the next generation can make the changes under the watchful eyes of their mentors.
To try to help as many of these folks as we can, Mario Bezzi developed a structured offering that we are calling the Watson & Walker Starter Pack. The Starter Pack consists of:
- An annual performance analysis of your mainframe systems. The first part of this service is to perform a high-level performance review of your systems, aimed at identifying major issues and areas of potential optimization. To minimize the impact on your organization, we use your SMF data to remotely analyze your environment and prepare a summary document that we will present and discuss with you during a video conference with your entire staff. This service allows you to have an expert eye, not involved with your daily system management activities, assessing the status of your systems, making sure that there is nothing seriously wrong, and identifying areas for optimization.
- Two customer meetings held at your premises to present the latest technical trends, pricing options, and to discuss your own plans and issues. The experts at Watson and Walker present at many international conferences and work with large customers all over the world. Doing so we get first hand information about the latest technical news and the major market trends. These on-site meetings give you and your team the ability to keep up to date with mainframe innovation, taking advantage of our experience in evaluating what’s really valuable among what’s new. They also allow you to discuss your own plans, ideas, and topics of interest with our team. This provides twice-yearly consulting tailored to your environment.
- One-year subscription to Cheryl Watson’s Tuning Letter and Cheryl Watson’s CPU Charts. (Optional for current subscribers.) We have been publishing the Tuning Letter since 1991, providing expert, objective, independent advice to clients all over the world. The Tuning Letter is the longest running, advertisement-free, vendor-agnostic, periodical in the mainframe industry.
- The ability to ask questions via e-mail, phone or conference call. Should a member of your technical team have a z/OS-related question, as a VIP client they can contact us and we’ll do our best to answer. This allows you and your team to leverage our own technical knowledge together with our large network of contacts in development organizations across vendors and our experience with other customers. With over 200 years combined experience, we have your back.
