Nearly three decades ago, Pat Riley was on his way to coaching the Los Angeles Lakers to a series of NBA championships. At the time, a reporter asked Riley how he determined who to play. The writer asked Riley whether he relied on field goals, assists and rebounds during the game as metrics. Riley actually said no. He said he didn’t really look at any of the common statistics—but instead, he used what he called an “effort index.” The effort index was not something an official scorekeeper tracked, so Riley had one of his assistant coaches manually track who went up for the ball at both ends of the floor.  The theory was that the team exerting the most effort under the basket at both ends of the court was going to win the game—so he was identifying the “difference makers” who might not turn up in any of the official statistics, but who were facilitating the situation most advantageous for the team.

Virtualization continues as a driving force behind data center optimization and the movement to private cloud infrastructure—but in many ways, organizations’ ability to define and enact best practices for virtual system creation, deployment, costing and deallocation have failed to keep pace.

Just one year ago, industry reports heralded that 30 percent of businesses were utilizing cloud, and that cloud adoption was moving forward at exponential rates http://www.businesscloudnews.com/platform-as-a-service/205-cloud-use-by-tech-companies-rises-29.html. These same surveys also pointed to sizable percentages of C-level executives who remained concerned with cloud, especially in the areas of governance and security.

We are making a slight tweak to the name of our magazine, Mainframe Executive; as well as it’s tagline that now says, IT Management in the Mainframe Centric Enterprise. To better align the magazine with the hybrid architecture and platform consolidation taking place in today’s large enterprises, the magazine’s new name is, Enterprise Executive; and the new tagline is, The Magazine for IT Managers in the World’s Largest Multi-Platform Enterprises.

Because of the terrific response to our Mainframe Trivia Contest 20112: #1 we decided to randomly select four winners. Each winner will receive the mainframe t-shirt they selected when responding. The winners are: Rich Jacks, Annette Simmons, Jeff Kaplan and John Gruenberg.

It’s back!  Started more than three years ago, our Mainframe Trivia Contest is back and this time winners have the choice of winning any one our nine terrific mainframe-centric t-shirts at http://www.mainframezone.com/store.

T’is the season of discounts, and it apparently applies to the zEnterprise as much as it does to holiday gifts. This deal, however, does not appear to end with the holiday. DancingDinosaur supports anything IBM does to lower enterprise data center costs.