I'm Nancy Golden, Founder and CEO of Golden Consulting.
Mainframe: is it dead or alive?  This debate continues in the IT field and, as a leading provider of technology training, we at Golden know that mainframe is definitely not dead!  I regularly offer training in mainframe technologies because most large companies face growing demand for these skills as many of their mainframe technicians retire, leaving huge legacy systems still to be maintained.  So join me here for tips and thoughts regarding mainframe technologies - which are very much alive.

It's always good for an "old mainframer" like me to see that people are still coming to COBOL technology training classes. We have one coming up in December and we already have students enrolled. I know it seems anachronistic, but don't forget ... there's job security in knowing the traditional technologies. While older systems are often redesigned to take advantage of newer capabilities, when the economy gets tighter, large companies pull back some of their development efforts and rely on the existing infrastructure, including secure and reliable mainframe systems.

Golden Consulting keeps up with all the new Business Intelligence initiatives - both in training and consulting services - not the least of which are interactive dashboards (using Xcelsius) and Data Analytics - but we are still a leader in mainframe technology training.

What new mainframe technologies is your company using? Share your thoughts on some of the tools that have been coming out to keep our mainframe world as up to date as ever.

In these volatile times, with economic concerns and elections occupying our thoughts, I think it's not a bad idea to remind ourselves that some parts of technology have a well-deserved reputation as steady, secure, versatile and scalable. The IBM mainframe world is certainly one of those sectors.

Golden Consulting is focused on the world of business intelligence, particularly in areas of data analytics using reports and dashboards. All this new functionality is being given to top level executives and lower level managers and supervisors to help them make better decisions quickly - something that is increasingly important! What we sometimes forget, though, is that much of the information being analyzed is on the giant mainframes that support most of our large enterprises.

Golden's involved in technology training and, while much of it revolves around Business Objects' BI applications, we still find a need to train new people to maintain the giants and the billions of lines of COBOL code that exist out there. With security such a big issue, mainframes receive a lot of respect for the fact that they don't crash anymore and are highly secure.

Some of you might be considering new careers in IT or changing from one area of IT to another. It's hard to think of anything being total stable these days - companies or technologies - but mainframe programming for a large, solid company is probably a good place to find as much job security as is possible these days.