Hybrid IT is all about harnessing the power of the digital age to deliver, analyze, adapt and innovate your enterprise's critical functions, regardless of technology or platform. While distributed platforms have employed DevOps practices to accelerate digital transformation, mainframe organizations have been challenged with making the mainframe more readily consumable across all platforms and by the next-generation workforce, limiting the ability to deliver value to the business.

The mainframe community has come together to address this critical issue by opening the platform, in a controlled manner, to the modern world of DevOps practices and off-platform, open sourcing tooling.

The Zowe open source framework provides a cloud-like interface to the mainframe enabling teams to adopt practices and tools now common elsewhere in the organization. Incorporating the mainframe into these proven practices opens the door to powerful cross-platform applications and experiences.

This distinguished panel will describe the striking productivity gains and software acceleration they've realized by extending modern DevOps to the mainframe, thereby unlocking the value of Hybrid IT.

Venkat Balabhadrapatruni is the lead Enterprise DevOps solution architect at Broadcom. Venkat has extensive experience in DevOps and Mainframe modernization and conducts customer DevOps Assessments as part of Broadcom's DevOps Center of Excellence. Before joining Broadcom, Venkat led the design, development and delivery of key modernization products at IBM like IBM Developer for z Systems (IDz) and IBM Application Discovery and Delivery Intelligence (ADDI).

As CTO, George DeCandio is responsible for a team of architects that lead product development across the entire mainframe portfolio and directs Broadcom's DevOps Center of Excellence. Prior to joining Broadcom, George worked at IBM for 25+ years attaining the level of Distinguished Engineer. While at IBM George served many roles including developer, architect, development manager, and executive focused on application development tools and was responsible for the teams that created the Rational ALM tool suite, including Eclipse IDEs, DOORS Next Generation, and Rational Asset Manager. George is based in North Carolina and is a graduate of the Rochester Institute of Technology.