Letter from our CEO

August 2015

I wrote a note to our global Rocketeers this week and told them that I can’t believe August is already here. This year is a milestone year for us – our 25th anniversary year – and it is flying by so fast. We’ve been spending time this year looking back on our first 25 years.  But we’ve been spending more time with our customers and partners looking ahead – at future technology, trends, disruptions, and more. 

One such partner we’ve been spending more time with is IBM. Our IBM partnership is our largest and most long lasting. Here are a few of our 2015 partnership highlights:

  • In May I took the stage at IBM Edge 2015 alongside IBM zSystems General Manager Ross Mauri to announce our new data access service in the IBM Bluemix platform. We’re calling it Rocket Mainframe Data Service, and it’s powered by our Rocket Data Virtualization technology.
  • Last week I joined IBM leaders at The Analytics Experience in Boston and together we talked about both Spark and R on z/OS.  Moving your analytics closer to your data has been a theme that I’ve been talking about since IBM announced their new z13 early this year. That drumbeat got a lot louder at this TDWI conference this week.
  • Next week I’ll be in Orlando for the 60th anniversary of SHARE, the world’s premier mainframe user group. I’ll be joining IBM zSystems leaders to talk about some exciting new trends in our industry. If you’re there, you are guaranteed to run into many of my Rocketeer colleagues, each one of them z Systems domain experts.
  • In early October we will be at COMMON, the Power Systems user group in Ft. Lauderdale and will be a featured speaker on the topic of Modernization. We were also at COMMON in Anaheim this past spring and among other things celebrated our 25th anniversary with the world’s leading IBM i customers who were there.
  • In October Rocket will be in Las Vegas at the IBM Insight conference. We will showcase our self-service BI, analytics, cloud, mobile, IoT, B2B, and security solutions.  You can sign up for in-depth demos, attend our provoking and educational roundtable lunches, and meet one-on-one with Rocket executives.
  • We are also the Marquee Entertainment Sponsor again this year at IBM Insight and are proud to bring you Maroon 5!  I’ll be on stage before the concert and will give away one of our custom Rocketcaster guitars to one of the conference attendees.  And… you might even get to see The Rocket Band perform at The House of Blues some time that week. Stay tuned on how to enter to win our guitar at the Maroon 5 concert and when The Rocket Band will be performing.  

Of course, those are just a few of our highlights. Behind the scenes we continue to work on dozens of initiatives with IBM, IBM partners, and IBM customers and continue to expand our partnership in new directions.

I hope that you have a great rest of the summer (or winter, depending on what part of the world you’re in…) I hope to see you or hear from you soon.

-Andy

Andrew J. Youniss
President and CEO, Rocket Software, Inc.

 

 


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