Phil joined Rocket in 2022, bringing with him an extensive history of driving product strategies and delivering value across varied platforms. As President he oversees worldwide development, product management and solutions development for the Infrastructure Modernization business unit. Prior to Rocket, he was the General Manager for IBM Cloud Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) where he led product strategy, database, security, and monitoring services, as well as the business and operation services that support IBM’s public cloud. The breadth of his earlier responsibilities underscores his skills in building and leading teams, optimizing performance, and modernizing operations. His background also includes experience in communications solutions, product brand management, and sales. When not guiding teams to high performance, you might find Phil playing pool, smoking Texas barbecue, or planning his next trip.
Sami earned a degree in Mechanical Engineering from Concordia University in Montreal, Canada, and began his career as a technical project manager for a track and trace solution provider. Later on, he transitioned into business development for a company specializing in digital anti-counterfeiting solutions and moved to Lyon, France. At both companies, it was the data analytics portion of these solutions that sparked his interest, which ultimately led him to join a tech company that puts software development and data analytics at the core of its business: Zetaly.
Today, Sami serves as the European Sales Manager at Zetaly, where he helps clients gain valuable insights into their IT ecosystems‘ performance through data analytics. With fluency in English, French, Spanish, and Arabic, Sami is able to communicate effectively with clients from diverse cultures and regions.
Sebastian has an extensive track record in mainframe technologies. He started his career as a z/OS system engineer for large French companies such as Credit Agricole (France’s largest bank) or La Poste. He then held a position as an assembler development engineer and carried out a mission for BNP consisting in the securisation of legacy mainframe applications. He joined Virtel in 2015 as technical support manager and quickly became the company’s CTO.
1969 – 1973 Studied computer science at the University of Stuttgart. Working student at IBM Labs Böblingen. Training on IBM /360-20. Night shift operator on IBM System /3.
1974 – 1980 Software engineer at a small software house in Stuttgart: focus on Assembler development for DOS, BS1000, OS/VS, VM, CICS, IMS, ASMUS, SESAM. Projects: SWIFT (IBM/PPDC), TERCO Luzern/Bern, UDS -> IDMS migration, andmore.
1981 – 1998 Developed proprietary analysis and migration tools. Manager of about 25 mainframe modernization projects in Switzerland, Germany, Czech Republic and Slovakia (DOS -> MVS, BS1000 -> OS/VS, IMS -> DB2 etc.). 2 Disaster Recovery Planning Projects in Basel, Switzerland.
1998 – 2001 Manager of 5 large-scale projects (Y2K, Euro) for international enterprises and a German finance ministry.
2002 – 2008 Migration projects in Germany and Saudi Arabia: (OS/390 -> Linux, OS/390/VSAM ->Linux/Oracle, AIX -> Linux, DOS -> Windows, MVS large scale software inventories.
2009 – 2013 Developed second level of tools for source code analysis and transformation. Tools applied in assembler migration and inventory of several MVS environments.
2014 – now Founded IT Modernisation Services GmbH together with Thilo Dreyer. Designed Njema, a rule-based generic system for source code analysis and transformation. The feedback from using Njema in a dozen projects in Germany, France, USA, and Australia leads to a constantly growing number of supported languages and source or target environments.
Don Fitzgerald has been with EasiRun and associated companies for over 40 years. Born in South Africa with Irish-Italian roots, Mr Fitzgerald has been managing director of EasiRun Europe since 1994. With core competence in COBOL, Application modernisation and related topics Don has been actively involved in hundreds of projects.
My career, which began 11 years ago, has awarded me experience across various subjects including, application development, recovery, resiliency, software project management and operations. My mentors and colleagues are a vital part of my progression and passion to continuously learn as well as improve and contribute this knowledge back to the technology community.
Wolfgang Hildesheim is a high energy physicist by education. He worked at CERN and DESY. After more than ten years in research and consulting he took the Executive Vice President role for Worldwide Sales and Marketing of a family owned company in the area of Big Data and Communication Intelligence. Being a member of the board he significantly grew revenues and profits, in particular through individual custom solutions and strong client orientation.
In 2007 Wolfgang Hildesheim joined IBM to lead the Automotive, Aerospace and High Tech Practice. Since 2009 he led IBM`s Big Data Industry Solution Business In Europe helping clients to become more data driven and create value by using Advanced Analytics.
Since 2012 Wolfgang Hildesheim is responsible for creating and growing IBM´s Watson, Data Science and Artificial Intelligence Business in Europe with a major focus on Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Watson Solutions are IBM`s answer to the current worldwide Artifical Intelligence (AI) mega trend, offering unmatched intelligent services and competitive edge. While the risks of a Super AI are overestimated in the public discussion and driven by Hollywood, the market opportunity for growth and new jobs related to Narrow AI technologes are underestimated. Wolfgang Hildesheim is regularly presenting at conferences and publications related to AI. He is member of the national commission to advance the roadmap to standardize AI for Germany, member of the board of the working group AI of Bitkom to understand, distribute and create competitve advantage using AI.
David Lea is the Senior Product Owner for BMC AMI Security. Having spent seven years in mainframe security consulting he transitioned into his current role and is focused on converting technical knowledge into product enhancements. An advocate for Agile, David is passionate about all things mainframe security and works closely with customers driving modernisation into the BMC AMI security portfolio.
UBS, Zürich, Switzerland (06.2001- current)
Working language: German, English
Base technology: IBM z/OS, COBOL, CICS, Db2, SQL, XML
Roles and Titles
Current Roles
January 2022 – Current
COBOL Software Engineer, Head of WMPC COBOL Developer Community
In addition, since April 2022: Chapter Lead for Mainframe Developers
In addition, since August 2022: UBS Distinguished Engineer
Jan Menne has a track record in consultancy of application architectures, software migration / development projects. Additionally, he worked in international program management, near- and offshoring, as well as global service standardization and outtasking undertakings. His work lately focusses on agile coaching of enterprises.
Joris Mertens working for IBM as Developer Advocate for IBM Z.
His mission is to engage students, reskillers and professionals and connect them with the IBM Z community and companies.
With a special focus onSkills & Modernization, Joris can assist in understanding where to find and how to apply onboarding roadmaps for new professionals and companies in their process of modernizing their mainframe platform.
Bruno Michel received a Ph.D. degree in biochemistry and computer engineering from the University of Zurich, Switzerland and subsequently joined the IBM Zurich Research Laboratory to work on scanning probe microscopy and accurate large-area soft lithography. He developed microfluidics, 3D packaging with interlayer cooling for sustainable data centers. He then pioneered low thermal resistance technologies for efficient zero-emission datacenters, solar concentrators, heat-driven heat pumps, and desalination systems. Later, he worked on integration of IoT and wearables usiing new sensing principles, multi sensor data fusion and edge artificial intelligence. His current focus is on accelerated materials discovery, deep search tools, and data integration platforms for carbon capture and other sustainability applications. Bruno Michel is an IEEE Fellow as well as a member of the US National Academy of Engineering and the IBM Academy of Technology.
Working with the mainframe was my first job and I fell in love with it immediately. During these 20 years, I dedicated most of my time to working on the infrastructure side, passing through different positions like operator, analyst, sysprog, architect, etc. My focus now is to lead the Observability solutions at Broadcom.
Marc Oppermann, 27 years old, Scrum Master at Swiss Life and currently in the final stages of a Master’s degree in IT Management & Information Systems.
Brett Phaneuf is the founder and chief executive of Submergence Group LLC (USA) / M Subs Ltd (UK) and through his office in the United Kingdom overseas the design and production of manned and unmanned, underwater vehicle systems. A serial entrepreneur, Mr. Phaneuf has recently turned his attention to machine learning and artificial intelligence; a new company (Marine Ai) has been spun out from M Subs Ltd with the goal of creating cognitive AI to enhance maritime capabilities by drawing on decades of experience in manned and unmanned marine vehicle design, manufacture and operations, coupled with vast experience in automation and autonomous systems software architecture, and computer vision expertise. Brett is also one of three founding board members of ProMare, a non-profit (501c3) public charity founded in 2001 to promote marine exploration throughout the world.
Peter Plevka joined BMC in 2003, where he worked as a mainframe software consultant, brand manager for data and performance management and as a sales specialist. Since 2021, he has been supporting the international mainframe sales teams as a Product Evangelist for Z Systems solutions in many different technical sales functions. This includes product training and sales enablement as well as speaking at local and international user groups.
Peter started his IT career in 1987 in the data center of a large Austrian insurance company as an IBM mainframe (MVS) operator and later as a DB2 system programmer and DBA. In 1994 he joined Platinum Technology as a software consultant for their DB2 solutions. Later at CA (now Broadcom) his role expanded to European technology leader for CA’s database management solutions.
Senior Sales Engineer at Precisely
“The technology we depend on today provides the knowledge and insights for our future”. Charles has a career spanning more than 30 years in the IT working for several companies and in various roles as support engineer, trainer, consultant and currently as a senior sales engineer at Precisely. Since a young age Charles was, and still is, highly interested in state-of-the-art technology in many different areas inside and outside the IT. With a strong background in programming, operating systems, networking, database technology and distributed computing he has worked on many data migration and modernization projects.
Product manager with over 15 years of experience in various technical and leadership roles on Mainframe at Broadcom and IBM. Early 2017 I joined the Broadcom product management team. My current focus is modern developer experience and I deeply sympathize with new-to-the-platform developers‘ struggle and am passionate about bringing the best user experience to every mainframe dev team!
Olivier Vandromme is currently IT Lead for Northwest region (Continental Europe) for Marsh. In this role he is responsible for IT demand and supply coming from the 10 countries in his region (Belgium / Netherlands / Luxemburg / Denmark / Sweden / Norway / Finland / France / Germany / Ireland). He is also leading 3 IT service centers operating from Brussels, Belgium. These IT service centers are supporting the main Tier1 applications (including main fiduciary mainframe) in EMEA by leveraging both internal and external (offshore) partners. Olivier has 24 years of technology experience, including 21 years in the Insurance industry. In previous roles at Marsh, he led the implementation of several regional Projects/Programs across multiple technologies (including mainframe), as well as holding the role of IT Lead for Belgium / Luxemburg. Prior to joining Marsh, Olivier worked in the software consultancy industry, mainly as software test engineer / manager, working at several large corporations.
Tim Willging joined Rocket Software in 2005 and has over 30 years’ experience building enterprise software solutions for z/OS. He holds the title of Rocket Fellow, VP of Engineering, and is the CTO for Rocket software’s Infrastructure Modernization business. He leads a high-performance team of architects and distinguished engineers tasked with simplifying and modernizing the infrastructure software that Rocket produces. Over the span of his career, Tim has architected and authored several mainframe products in the areas of backup and recovery, administration, performance monitoring, and change management. He has delivered keynotes at various conferences and spoken on several z/OS technical and strategic topics. He has recently been focusing on solutions for AIOps, Observability, Data Modernization, and DevOps enablement on z/OS. He is currently based in Chicago, and is an alumnus of Northern Illinois University with an emphasis in theoretical computing.
