My story

I have worked with IBM mainframes since 1977. This is how a night-shift operator became the person responsible for three data centers, and why I am back at the console today.

 

1977: the first shift

In 1977 I started as an operator at the data processing center of Banco Noroeste in São Paulo, running OS/VS1 on an IBM 145. A Univac valve machine still sat in the corner of the room. I never operated it, but it marked the beginning of my path. Over the next eight years, at Banco Noroeste, CESP and Credicard, I learned the craft: batch control, job scheduling, and diagnosing and recovering from incidents where processing could not stop.

 

Banespa: running production

I joined Banespa Bank in 1985 as an IT projects coordinator. In 1993 I was promoted to Division Manager, Production. I led about 170 people and three data centers, with responsibility for IBM mainframe and network, the batch schedule, the 24x7 Command Center, the Print Center, and contingency and disaster recovery. I also chaired the Production Change Committee, which evaluated every change to infrastructure and batch workloads.

 

Santander: consolidating a platform

Santander Bank acquired Banespa in 2000, and the merger was consolidated in 2002. I joined the Americas Division and spent about four years on the rationalization of the group’s mainframe environment in Brazil: removing redundancy, optimizing CPU, memory and storage, standardizing naming, and running multiple institutions in the same LPAR with strict security segregation and portability between sites. I then took part in the Banco Real integration and became Executive Manager of Production Planning and Control, leading 40 people and the batch schedule, with Control-M and ChangeMan, until I retired in 2010.

 

Back to hands-on

After eight years away from IT, I wanted to know whether I could still do the work. I sat a national (Brazil) public-sector exam for z/OS support analyst and placed second.

 

From July 2018 to February 2019 I worked in Banrisul’s production mainframe environment in Porto Alegre. My experience made the technical work feel almost effortless.

 

In 2024 I went further: IBM Z Xplore (All Star), z/OS Mainframe Practitioner, and the z/Architecture Assembler courses, forty years after my first Assembler course.

 

Today

I now take selected, project-based engagements: batch schedule reviews, Command Center and change processes, continuity and disaster recovery, consolidation and migration, and mentoring. In production, big failures rarely have a single cause. I like finding the combination.