University of Melbourne Student “Masters the Mainframe”

Mainframe Resurgence Brings Record Number of Student Entries

MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA–(EMWNews – August 22, 2008) – IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced that

University of Melbourne Student Dharvinder Bassi has been named Australia’s

“Master of the Mainframe” student contest winner after out-performing more

than 450 other students across Australia. In addition to becoming

Australia’s Mainframe student contest winner, Bassi now joins the growing

list of approximately 50,000 worldwide students with mainframe computing

training. This burgeoning group of future mainframe experts is a direct

result of the ongoing resurgence of the mainframe, which continues to serve

as a centralized, secure powerful transaction engine for all of the world’s

top 50 banks and multinational organizations.

Made up of three stages of increasingly complex programming tasks on the

mainframe platform, the contest provides a unique opportunity for students

to experience the mainframe environment. They do this by remotely logging

into an IBM mainframe — a common situation they may face in their future

workplace.

“Originally we anticipated 200 students participating in ‘Master the

Mainframe,’ however we ended up having more than 450 students sign up for

the event,” said Glenn Wightwick, IBM Distinguished Engineer and Director

of IBM’s Australia Development Laboratory.

“This demonstrates the continued interest in mainframe computing,

particularly in an IT environment where there is a lot of pressure to

consolidate and reduce space. The mainframe is a great platform in terms

of scale, performance and energy efficiency.”

“I took part in this contest because it provided me with a challenge,” said

Bassi, who is studying a Masters degree in Information Systems. “I liked

Part 3 of the contest as it involved lots of different technologies and

things that can be done using IBM mainframes such as issuing UNIX commands,

executing JAVA classes, etc. which were totally new to me. I really enjoyed

it!”

Wally Smith, Information Systems Course Co-ordinator at the University of

Melbourne, added, “Dharvinder entered the competition on his own

initiative. We are delighted as this shows the calibre of students with

technical skills in our program.”

The University of Melbourne is one of over 400 worldwide universities that

have partnered with IBM to teach mainframe and large systems skills. For

more information about IBM’s Academic Initiative for Mainframe and schools

teaching mainframes, visit http://www.ibm.com/university/systemz

For more information on IBM Australia, visit www.ibm.com/au