How to be an i survivor:
Diversify your skills to become a more valuable asset to your company

How do you apply your specialized i skills so you and your organization are more valuable and competitive in today’s economic climate? Join Trevor Perry, Strategist at Angus Thinks!, for a thorough understanding of how to adapt your current i-related skills to remain competitive as an individual and steer your business to success in the current economic climate. Get actionable tips you can use to diversify your current expertise to add depth to your skillset, prepare yourself to handle critical projects at your company, and be ready for the future of i and IT.

Trevor Perry has been a consultant in the midrange industry for over 20 years. He is currently consulting on modernization and IT strategy around the globe and occasionally at home in New York. His sessions on a united approach to IT and business strategies challenge traditional methods and help companies advance their IT infrastructures. Trevor is a member of the iSociety Foundation and is active in the i community. Trevor has been a popular speaker at industry conferences and user groups for fifteen years and forges new trails with his motivational sessions.

Alison Butterill, IBM
Alison works on the Power Systems Software Team which has responsibility for a variety of software product offerings for IBM i, whether on Power or Blades Servers. Her responsibilities include many products, specializing in the IBM Application Development Offerings.

Having worked in the mid-range area for more than 25 years, Alison has held a wide variety of positions at IBM, primarily with midrange servers and software. She has held a range of positions including field Systems Engineer, an instructor in Customer Technical Education, national support representative for IBM Canada, and Worldwide Technical Marketing support rep for the development tools and compilers from the IBM Toronto Laboratory.

Joe Pluta, Pluta Brothers Design
Joe Pluta is the President of Pluta Brothers Design, Inc. located in Palatine, Illinois. Pluta Brothers Design specializes in extending and enhancing IBM midrange legacy systems using the latest technologies. Joe has written several books on Web-related topics for MCPress Online as well as various iSeries-related mailing lists. He is also a frequent speaker on all things iSeries.

Jon Paris, Partner400
Jon Paris has been involved in the data processing industry for over 40 years, including a 12-year period with IBM’s Toronto Lab. There he played a major role in the planning and design of the new RPG IV language. Subsequently Jon was assigned to the Application Development Tools Market Support Group, where he was involved in producing educational and other support materials and services related to System i programming languages and development tools, including RPG IV, and the workstation based development tools.

Jon left IBM in 1998 to concentrate on developing and delivering education focused on enhancing the skills of IBM i application developers. Together with Susan Gantner he runs Partner400, a System i consulting company focused on Application Modernization.

Jon is an award winning speaker at User Group meetings and conferences around the world and a founding member of the System i Developer education consortium.

Larry Bolhuis, Frankeni Technology Consulting
Larry began working on IBM midrange equipment with the S/34 and S/36 in the early 1980s and started working on the AS/400 at its introduction in 1988. After spending many years as a developer, he began working on communications, networking, and systems management tasks. In addition to networking on the IBM side, Larry learned the infrastructure components of the network including switches routers and firewalls, working chiefly with Cisco equipment.

In 15 years as an IBM Business partner Larry worked with IBM’s systems from design through implementation and migration. He has worked on the smallest and largest and everything in between.

Pete Massiello, iTech Solutions
Pete Massiello has been working with the AS/400, iSeries, i5, IBM i since 1989, focusing on systems management and technical support. He has held numerous technical positions throughout his career. He is the President of iTech Solutions Group, an IBM Advanced Business Partner delivering solutions and services to IBM i shops throughout the US. He is a member of IBM’s certification test writing team, an IBM eServer Certified Systems Expert with certifications in iSeries Design, Administration, Implementation, LPAR, and HMC management. Pete has a BS in Computer Science from Hofstra University, and an MBA from the University of New Haven. He is President of the Fairfield CT AS/400 User Group (FASUG), a member of the COMMON Board of Directors, a COMMON Speaker of Merit, and a frequent speaker at user groups.

Richard Milone, CNX Corporation
Richard Milone has worked as an application developer on the IBM i platform and its various predecessors for 21 years. Richard served as Director of IT for Packaging Resources until co-founding CNX Corporation in Chicago in 1996, where his initial focus was on ERP enhancements for the AS/400 and iSeries community. Currently serving as CNX’s Chief Technical Officer, Richard is dedicated to promoting the IBM i profile by encouraging RPG programmers to expand their development skills beyond the traditional green screen paradigm and into building dynamic Web 2.0 applications that run directly on the IBM i platform. Richard has lectured at COMMON, RPG World, and iSeries DevCon about the merits of uniting RPG back-end logic with widely available JavaScript libraries on the front end, a technical union that produces IBM i-based applications with state-of-the-art browser interfaces.

Susan Gantner, Partner400
Susan Gantner is a member of Partner400, a System i education and consulting company. She is also a founding member of System i Developer, a consortium of System i educators.

Her career has spanned over 30 years in the field of application development. Beginning as a programmer developing applications for corporations in Atlanta, Georgia, she joined IBM in 1985 as a Systems Engineer. She worked at the IBM lab in Rochester, Minnesota for 5 years and later moved to the IBM Toronto Software Laboratory.

Susan left IBM in 1999 to devote full time to teaching and consulting. Her primary emphasis is on enabling customers to take advantage of the latest programming and database technologies on the IBM i platform (System i, AS/400 and iSeries).

She is a regular speaker at COMMON conferences worldwide and at many other technical conferences around the world. She holds several Speaker Excellence medals as well as the Jim Sloan Technical Speaker award from COMMON North America.

Walden Leverich, Tech Software
Walden Leverich is the President and CEO of Tech Software, a consulting and professional services company. He spends most of his (non-management) time working with customers to help them bring the data assets locked in their legacy systems (iSeries and non-iSeries) to the Web. He is a current board member and past president of the Long Island System Users Group, a iSeries focused user group and can be found lurking – and stirring up trouble – on the midrange.com mailing lists.

Anil Madan, IBM
Anil is an IBM Lab Services Consultant working on DB2 for i Center of Excellence team in Rochester MN. He is an IBM certified Database Associate and an IBM certified IT Specialist. His main focus is database performance and database modernization on IBM i. For the past 15 years he has been involved in performance and database consulting with IBM i customers. Prior to that, he worked for 10 years as an application and database designer/ architect.