WATSON & WALKER, INC.
SARASOTA, FLORIDA

We at Watson & Walker, Inc. offer practical mainframe performance and measurement advice. We assist system programmers, capacity planners and performance analysts worldwide using the IBM z/OS (previously the OS/390 or MVS) operating system. Our goal is to provide vendor-independent and very practical assistance and training, keeping our customers up-to-date and saving them valuable time, money and resources. After working with several software development firms and in the Amdahl education center, she joined EDS in 1970 for a total of 11 years (on and off), working as an educator, performance analyst, capacity planner, system programmer, CICS administrator, and trouble-shooter in many of their offices around the world. A lot of her outsourcing experience came from this work as an outsourcer. Following EDS, she joined Morino Associates in their England and Germany offices, returning to the US in 1984, and working in SAS on their MICS product (now supported by CA). After meeting Tom Walker in 1986, Cheryl became an independent consultant, often consulting back to customers of outsourcers, so she saw the other (and often uglier) side of the situation. She taught performance and internals classes and wrote for various journals, such as Bob Thomas’ MVS Journal (now zTech Journal), and TechSupport magazine. In 1988 Cheryl and Tom formed their own company, Watson & Walker, Inc. See the company history above for their history together. For a fuller bio of Cheryl, see a For relaxation, Cheryl enjoys traveling the world, playing bridge, and doing logic puzzles. Tom is the CEO of Watson & Walker. He and Cheryl founded the company in 1988. Like Cheryl, he started working with mainframes in 1965. Tom helps oversee all strategy and operating functions of the company, with a particular focus on our marketing and development activities. Prior to Watson & Walker he was part owner, starting in 1970, of a timesharing company, Dialcom, Inc., in Silver Spring, MD. There, using Honeywell and then Prime computers, he helped design and code software such as a correspondence system for the U.S. Congress, and, in 1979, ‘The Source’, a home computing offering featuring such things as custom databases, UPI news searches, and an email system. (He also, in 1979, coined the command name “chat” to invoke their online user interaction.) The company was sold to ITT in 1982, and he served for a brief time on the ITT board of directors before retiring in 1986. Shortly after that he met Cheryl, and they’ve lived and worked together ever since. When not working with Cheryl, Frank, Rob, and Alan, he chairs two nonprofits – the Florida Consumer Action Network, and WSLR, a community FM radio station, and helps run two informal groups, one devoted to current affairs and one to reading great books. For relaxation he practices Japanese calligraphy or takes improv classes. His first IT job was as an operator in an insurance company, Irish Life, in Dublin, Ireland. At that time Irish Life were a VM/VSE site, but soon embarked on a migration to MVS. After 5 years in Operations, Frank moved to the System Programming department and became a VM system programmer. In 1998 Frank moved to the IBM Redbooks organization in Poughkeepsie, New York to lead projects to create sysplex Redbooks. Over the years, Frank’s role expanded to include high availability and performance, teaching various classes around the world, consulting with IBM’s most complex and interesting customers, and managing the creation of Redbooks and product manuals for GDPS. Frank also acted as the ITSO liaison to the zSeries Business Leaders Council (zBLC), worked with the z/OS Development organization to create the prototype for the z/OS Health Checker, and managed the creation of the Customer Configuration Collector tool. In early 2012 Alan moved to a global IBM team that provided z Systems technical strategy and architectural oversight for IBM’s GTS (outsourcing) division worldwide. This role consisted of the technical review and approval of large strategic outsourcing bids involving z Systems, including understanding the commercial considerations of z Systems pricing in those bids. He also performed technical health checks for IBM’s clients’ z/OS systems worldwide and provided support during major incidents. During his last year in IBM he was involved with developing the zLinux element of IBM’s zCloud offering. Despite his many roles in IBM, and experience with different platforms, Alan’s heart always lay with the mainframe. He wanted to get back to working directly with customers and participating in interesting projects with customers around the world. He also wanted a more flexible working environment and the opportunity to work closely with a small group of like-minded people, so in August 2015 he left IBM Ireland and established his own small consulting firm. In addition to his own consulting engagements, Alan develops articles for Cheryl Watson’s Tuning Letter and works with Cheryl and Frank on teaching classes and consulting, particularly in the area of marrying the technical and commercial considerations around mainframe outsourcing. In 1989 he moved to Hitachi which then marketed PCM mainframes and DASD subsystems. In his technical support position with Hitachi, he worked with hardware development and customers on early product introduction programs, compatibility topics, and System and DASD performance. His responsibilities included running CPU and I/O benchmarks for the labs, and writing synthetic workloads. As part of the introduction of Hitachi’s Coupling Facility, he was tasked by Hitachi development with writing a CF exercising tool to exploit XES services. Scott has more than 35 years of experience with IBM computing systems, managing clients’ large-scale operations for resource usage billing (chargeback), monitoring system / application performance and ensuring sufficient computing capacity is available at all times. He is a Principal Consultant and part-owner of SBBWorks, Inc. website: sbbworks.com , a consultancy firm delivering clients support and consulting services for IBM mainframe computing systems. Assignments involve software remote-administration, staff training and mentoring, competitive software conversions, software development / support, and data center consolidations. He has worked with corporations and government entities to maximize use of strategic software products such as CA MICS, Merrill’s MXG, and SAS programming-language software.