Now that he’s become an IBM Fellow, Namik Hrle has just one thing left on his bucket list: make the mainframe sexy.
“My passion is the IBM mainframe. No matter if it’s been around for 50 years, it still leads the pack by a lot in its availability, capability and scalability,” said the good-natured Namik from his office in the IBM Boeblingen lab. “We know it’s essential for transactional processing, but I’d like to make System Z the natural habitat for a new brand of applications in business analytics, cloud and mobile.”
If you gave the IBM DB2 Analytics Accelerator a paternity test, Namik would be revealed as the father. He invented the technology, led it through development, and has personally evangelized it to dozens of clients around the world.
“The Accelerator turns the DB2 into a hybrid database that can run both transactional and analytical workloads on System Z,” Namik explained. “It allows customers to exploit legendary mainframe capabilities for their business analytics applications—and makes the migration very easy, a few days, not weeks.”
“I like to be remembered by my kids as somebody who was always there for them when they needed me and who enabled them to accomplish their dreams.”
A native of Bosnia, Namik grew up in the city of Banja Luka with three passions: soccer, mathematics, and playing bass guitar in heavy-metal bands. “In my younger days,” Namik laughed, “I was a head banger.”
After studying mathematics and computer science at the University of Zabreb in Croatia, the future Fellow started his IT career in Sydney, Australia, before settling in Boeblingen, where he officially joined IBM in 1998 after working as an independent contractor developing IBM software.
Holder of numerous patents, outstanding technical achievements, author recognition and corporate awards, Namik is known as IBM’s ultimate authority at the intersection between enterprise applications and information management technologies. He is a sought-after expert by customers, IBM sales, marketing and technical support teams—and a frequent speaker at industry events.
(Source: IBM/ ekapija)
