Invitation

Invitation from the GSE UK Region Manager

Welcome to the GSE UK 2015 Conference website.  Here and on the following pages you will find all the information you will need about the twenty first annual GSE UK Conference.  I urge you to browse the agenda and decide what sessions you want to attend. Then with the aid of the draft justification letter build your case for attending what is the best UK mainframe conference of 2015.

Registration is now open and although we do have a few more hotel rooms available than last year, these are offsite.  Therefore I recommend that you register early if you want to get a room in the conference hotel.

Very little has changed in the T’s & C’s since last year.  The delegate prices remain the same for GSE Members and non-members.  GSE UK Members still get five voucher codes that they can redeem for free entrance to the conference, exhibition, networking sessions and the conference dinner.  There is no restriction on who can use them; you can even give them to someone outside your company.  GSE UK Members can also claim a voucher for one of their trainees. This must be someone who has recently joined your company from school or university or someone who has changed their profession in the past 12 months and is in a training programme. To obtain this trainee voucher you must first contact ukconference@gse.org.uk to obtain a special voucher code giving the name and the e-mail address of the person concerned and a brief outline of why you believe they qualify.

For the conference keynote speech we are extremely fortunate to have Graham Cluley, the award-winning security blogger, researcher and leading authority on internet security. Graham has been a well-known figure in the computer security industry since the early 1990s when he worked as a programmer, writing the first ever version of Dr Solomon's Anti-Virus Toolkit for Windows. Since then he has been employed in senior roles by companies such as Sophos and McAfee. Graham has worked with law enforcement agencies on investigations into hacking groups, and regularly appears on TV and radio explaining computer security threats.

We also welcome back Mark Anzani, (Vice President, Portfolio and Technical Strategy, System z - IBM) who is returning to do the ever popular birds of a feather session early on Wednesday morning discussing the future of z. 

Finally, Glenn Anderson will close the Day 1 sessions with “Energize Your Presentation Skills: Moving From Mind-numbing to Mind-blowing!”.

For your trainees, university students and anyone else wanting a refresher, we have a dedicated 101 stream.  101 is a working group in the UK that is being run by three young people just starting their mainframe careers and therefore ideally suited to empathise with and understand the training needs of the 101 audience. 

In addition to the above, there will be streams covering many other mainframe topics being run by the GSE working groups as well as a series of zLinux workshops.

We value your feedback on the conference sessions and the conference as a whole.  Last year we tried to get rid of the paper feedback forms and encouraged you to send us your feedback using the web app but the number of responses we got was somewhat less than in previous years.  So the forms are back running alongside the web app.  We would much prefer you to use the web app that you can access on your smart phone, tablet or laptop via a browser, as it makes processing the information far quicker.  But if you really want to use paper, the option is back.

Each day we will have a draw from all the feedback submitted that day and the lucky winner will receive a gadget or Amazon vouchers.  The same web app will be able to be used to display your personal conference agenda and register the sessions you attended for your CPE certificate.

Please also visit and use the pages on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter (see links below) to keep up to date with conference events and to give feedback to other delegates during the conference. All the feedback will be sent to a Twitter Cloud and displayed on a monitor at conference reception.

I trust that you will find the conference and the agenda meet your training needs and that you will join us on November 3rd and 4th at Whittlebury Hall.   

For the conference brochure visit http://conferences.gse.org.uk/gse_brochure.pdf.