IBM and Business Partners Intro Scholarship Program

IBM (News - Alert), the software and hardware solutions company, has announced a collaboration with Business Partners and universities to launch a jointly-developed scholarship program for students focused on furthering mainframe education.

 

It is being hoped the new program, which is named the IBM Destination z Enterprise Computing Scholarship Program, and will be formally launched later this year in the U.S., will allow students to receive scholarship funding for educational courses that will increase their technical skills in mainframe computing.

 

IBM Business Partners, who are increasing their investments in the mainframe, will co-fund the program, which will support increased demand in education and training in mainframe and large enterprise computing. The number of new partners aligned to the System z has increased by more than 40 percent during the past eight months.

 

Under the program, students will get the opportunity for scholarship funding for such classes, including "z/OS Basics: Introduction to the New Mainframe," "Linux on System z," and "WebSphere Application Server for z/OS." These topics are already being taught at membership colleges and universities.

 

Enterprises are now thinking of growing computer data centers that process everything from banking and retail transactions to managing health care records, because of the increase in rising energy costs and environmental concerns.

 

Business partners are realizing the opportunities to build and deploy new offerings to help organizations looking to transform their enterprise data centers, as demand for mainframe technical expertise is also increasing.

 

IBM Destination z, a multidimensional mainframe community organization dedicated to increasing the value of IBM System z mainframes for clients, is funding the scholarship program.

 

IBM Business Partners such as Mainline Information Systems, Levi Ray & Shoup, Rocket Software, Vicom Infinity as well as Universities such as Illinois State, Marist College, Minnesota State University, and Syracuse University of South Carolina, are already committed to the scholarship program.

 

Doug Harrell, vice president of sales for System z at Mainline Information Systems, said that this new scholarship program is yet another unique way that IBM and Mainline are teaming up as part of the larger ecosystem to continue to educate the up-and-coming mainframe programmers of tomorrow.