How the Mainframe Is Evolving with AI, DevOps, and New Talent from SHARE Cleveland 2025
Transcript
The Share Conference. The longest running tech conference in the known universe came to Cleveland in 2025, bringing the mainframe community together for a week of learning, connection and innovation. The atmosphere was positive and energetic with well-attended sessions and enthusiastic attendees.
For me, it was particularly special since I lived just 30 miles away. So this was a hometown tech event complete with a beautiful view of Lake Erie and the opportunity to show off. Cleveland Tech Field Day was proud to once again participate in share with the support of all of the SHARE staff who provided space and encouragement for our sessions.
We had strong support from our sponsors, Broadcom and Popup Mainframe, as well as our delegates and invited guests. Tech Field Day gives us the opportunity to highlight innovation in the mainframe space, while also bringing in voices from outside the community to help bridge conversations across Enterprise it. Here are my three key takeaways from Share Cleveland 2025.
Broadcom presented their Watchtower observability platform, which applies machine learning to help alerting and monitoring of mainframe operations. What stood out to me was not just the use of ai, but the way that it integrates domain knowledge directly into the platform. Watchtower surfaces the most important alerts, along with relevant support documents and debugging concepts.
This should dramatically accelerate response times and assist mainframe operators. This kind of integration shows the depth of Broadcom's understanding of the mainframe environment, business processes, and end users, those outside the mainframe space. Watchtower is a good example of AI applied in a very focused way.
They're solving real operational challenges and making expertise instantly accessible. I expect this approach to influence how observability evolves in the broader industry, not just in the mainframe space. And I was particularly impressed by the deep knowledge that the Broadcom staff showed of everything about how the mainframe operates and how it's used in the modern enterprise.
We heard from Popup Mainframe a company we saw last year as well, and they've made remarkable progress since then. Their platform can instantly spin up a fully configured mainframe environment using virtualization, containerization infrastructure as code and Linux. This is an incredible new capability and it is very impressive in the mainframe space.
But what really caught my attention this year was the addition of snapshots and rollbacks features that have not been standard in the mainframe, even though we've gotten quite used to them in DevOps, open systems and cloud. This snapshot and rollback capability could be a real game changer in the mainframe space. It opens up new use cases for software developers and gives them new platforms for testing pop ups.
Ability to replicate an entire mainframe environment cost effectively with anonymized data really enables developers to securely develop new applications with real seeming production data. But what's most striking is how POPUP doesn't feel like a traditional mainframe company. They feel like a modern DevOps company.
Their language, their concepts and their workflow design are all rooted in today's software development practices and that really sets them apart in the mainframe space. Beyond the tech field day sessions share, Cleveland reinforced the fact that the mainframe is evolving in many important ways. First off, let's like think about technology.
Linux on Mainframe demonstrates how adaptable the platform has become. It enables organizations to deploy modern application stacks right alongside traditional workloads on the same hardware. This combined with, uh, cloud support from companies like AWS makes the mainframe more versatile and adaptable to modern applications than ever.
Just as important, the people around the mainframe are changing as well. While longtime veterans remain essential, a new generation of professionals is stepping up, bringing fresh energy and new ideas. Broadcom really highlighted this shift in a recording that they made for the main Scoop podcast with Daniel Newman.
They shared inspiring stories from emerging leaders in the field, and I just can't wait till you see those, uh, episodes for anyone outside the mainframe space. This is a reminder that the platform is not just surviving, but actively renewing itself technically and culturally. From Broadcom's machine learning driven approach to observability, to popup mainframe's, DevOps inspired agility to the modernization of both technology and talent share.
Cleveland 2025 highlighted how the mainframe continues to adapt and thrive. Tech Field a was proud to be part of this event and helping share these innovations with the broader IT audience. The mainframe remains central to critical industries like finance and transactional data, but it is far from static.
With new tools, new practices, and importantly new professionals, it's evolving to meet the needs of modern enterprise it. We wanna thank the Share staff for inviting us once again to share Cleveland. Thanks for watching this episode of the Tech Field Day takeaways series on the tech field, a plus YouTube channel.
If you enjoyed it, please be sure to like, subscribe and share your thoughts. We would love to hear from you follow Tech Field Day on X, Twitter, blue Sky and Mastodon for more updates. And check out all of our presentation videos on the Tech Field Day website and our Main Tech Field Day YouTube channel.
We'll see. See you at the next tech field event, which is AI infrastructure field. A three kicking off on September 10th, 2025.
