Recently, Mainframe Executive visited with Corry Hong, founder and CEO of UNICOM Systems, Inc., a global information technology company providing software, hardware, professional services, and outsourcing services for zEnterprise and other computing platforms. UNICOM’s extensive client portfolio includes Fortune 500 and Global 2000 companies that use its end-to-end solution suites in data centers on six continents. Hong founded the company 30 years ago, and continues to lead UNICOM in its unparalleled mission to grow and integrate technologies and solutions.
Mainframe Executive: How did you get started in the IT industry? What are some of the organizations you worked with before founding your own company, and what’s important to you as a technology contributor?
Corry Hong: When I was a teenager, I played lead guitar in a hard rock band in Korea. I composed classical and modern orchestral scores before I turned my attention to designing software. Then when I was 20, I came to California and studied computer science at Pierce College in Los Angeles.
When IBM announced its popular IBM 43xx CICS-based mainframe computers, it sparked my interest. I had an affinity toward writing CICS code. In 1979, my first job was as a CICS/VSE programmer at Certified Life Insurance Co. in Los Angeles. Then I worked for Jacobs Engineering as a VM/VSE systems programmer, and later joined Transamerica as a senior CICS/MVS systems programmer, writing systems code and user exits. Later, I was retained by Candle Corp., as an OMEGAMON/CICS software developer. In addition to the software development projects I assisted with at Candle, I also continued writing and testing my own artificial intelligence mainframe software. After a year, I left Candle to devote all my energies to my new project, which became AUTOMON, my first software product and to this day, the flagship software product of UNICOM.
My musical background was helpful because I found the process required to compose orchestral arrangements to be similar to the process required to design complex, subsystem software operating under multi-platform servers. There’s an inherent natural order in both sophisticated musical arrangements and well-written computer software. The more complicated the problem, the more challenging it is to come up with the complete solution. Often the best answer is the most straightforward and the simplest!
ME: What made you decide to start UNICOM in 1981, and how has it grown since then in terms of the solutions it delivers, the size of your client base, and the number of offices you have?
Hong: At Transamerica, I was a senior CICS/MVS systems programmer in charge of the national Medicare systems running multiple CICS/VS R1V5 systems under MVS/XA systems. My first day at work, I had more than 20 system dumps and critical situations such as system crashes, storage violations, loops, VTAM/NCP buffer pool overloads, and performance degradation problems. Within days, I started writing my own Assembler programs to replace some faulty IBM management modules to prevent storage violations, system crashes, and loop conditions. I remember reading dumps, setting traps, and writing new code without eating or sleeping for one to two days at a time. Within six months, the Medicare systems became stable and highly available CICS systems. These programs became the engines for AUTOMON/CICS and UCCF/Server, the first software products of UNICOM. Through this experience at Transamerica, I realized the solutions I came up with to complex problems had general appeal to the mainframe community at large, and I decided to turn these valuable solutions into software available to all mainframe shops. UNICOM was that answer.
Since 1981, UNICOM has grown both organically and by acquiring multi-platform, strategic systems software assets. Today, the UNICOM Group has 18 corporate entities with offices in Los Angeles, Dallas, New Jersey, New Hampshire, Germany, the U.K., France, Italy, Spain, Benelux, and Switzerland, providing technology, financing, M&A, business services, and outsourcing services to Fortune 500 and Global 2000 companies worldwide.
ME: How have IT issues, challenges, and expectations of your clients changed between 1981 and today?
Hong: People who have only recently been introduced to software and systems have no idea how far we’ve come from the early days of punch cards to compile programs, hand-mounting scratch tapes, noisy spooling printers, manual batch production job processing on an overnight shift, and even the bulky IBM 3278 green-screen display terminals.
