Azerbaijan, Baku, 5 May / Trend corr. J.Babayeva/ In a contest of real-world challenges, a West Texas A& M University student put in weeks of work to achieve the second-place honors in the 2007 IBM "Master the Mainframe" Competition.
Anar Huseynov, a senior computer science major from Baku, Azerbaijan, participated in the annual contest against more than 1,700 students from 325 schools across the United States and Canada. He competed in the contest's most difficult level of competition-Part 3. The Part 3 section requires extensive work over weeks and months to tackle tasks taken from real-life situations faced by experienced system programmers. The contest began on 1Oct and ended-Dec. 28.
Huseynov learned of his top-five position on Jan. 24. All the top-five winners will receive Nintendo Wii systems for their work, and Huseynov, as a top-two winner, also will receive a two-day expense-paid trip to IBM's mainframe laboratory in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., in March.Andwhile Poughkeepsie in March isn't Cancun or some other likely pleasure spot, it's not bad if you're considering a career in information technology.
Poughkeepsie is the base of the Mother Ship of mainframes, and it's where they were developed four decades ago and have been updated ever since. Down the road is the East Fishkill semiconductor plant where the micro-chips are made.
Anar Huseynov said that his school is just starting to work on IBM mainframes and learning to use Linux software.
"It makes management easier and faster," he said. Student cites trend. He sees a trend toward mainframes as computer departments "virtualize all their distributed computers into one box, the mainframe."
That trend is real, commented Robert Djurdjevic, industry consultant and analyst in Scottsdale, Ariz. IBM's mainframes, once the target of pundits predicting extinction, have sold well and "successfully replaced ... thousands of Wintel servers," he said, referring to Windows software running on Intel processors.
"What's going away is the Wintel as a server," he said, with the shoe shifting to the other foot. "Those whose skills are based in the Wintel will find themselves in the same place as the mainframe folks did yesterday."
According to H. Paul Haiduk, computer science program coordinator, IBM sponsors the contest to help prepare students to meet the worldwide demand for employees with mainframe skills.
"Anar's level of achievement will result in a veritable barrage of interest from employers worldwide," Haiduk said. "He will be in the enviable position of choosing where he wants to work and will be able to command a very high starting salary."