Ben Provenzano

Moving on to bigger things

Ben spent a year in the bank’s apprenticeship program, taking various courses led by the bank’s senior developers, gaining valuable real-world experience on various projects, and studying programming languages such as COBOL. The mentorship provided by his more experienced team members, particularly in the beginning of his apprenticeship, was critical to his success. “I learned about business and how a mainframe development team operates,” he says. “After the first year, you start becoming more self-sufficient, working on your own projects and taking on your own tasks.”

For Ben, working with mainframe technology enables him to build on a much bigger scale. “I wanted to build more complicated electronics,” he says. “To do that, you really need to get into software, because the most complicated hardware now is all software controlled.” For a developer, IBM Z provides a powerful, open, and secure platform to create, innovate, and build and was a natural fit for Ben’s ambitions.

Banking on security, reliability, and speed

As an application developer in the banking industry, Ben has a deep appreciation for the security and availability that IBM Z offers. “IBM Z’s pervasive encryption allows our data at rest and in transit to stay fully encrypted without application developers needing to worry about coding all of that in,” he says. “Another feature that sets it apart from other platforms is the automated failover in case of an outage. We can immediately switch over to a backup mainframe and have zero downtime with any of our applications.”

Ben uses the mainframe to help the bank gain deeper insights into their customers and stay competitive in a market that’s constantly evolving. “The IBM Z platform enables our team to leverage a massive amount of processing power,” he says. “Batch jobs that have millions of transactions process as quickly as possible with an incredibly high reliability and no downtime. It’s the fastest computer I’ve ever worked on.”

From student to teacher

Beyond his apprenticeship at the bank, Ben also took advantage of the IBM Z Xplore learning platform to advance his mainframe knowledge. “IBM Z Xplore gives you an intuitive look into how the mainframe works,” he says. “You can use a real system on the fly, right on the website.” He recommends IBM Z Xplore as a great, self-paced starting point for aspiring mainframers to learn more about the mainframe.

Ben finds motivation in the fact that there is always something new to learn in his job, and he shares that lifelong passion for learning by now teaching others who are new to the IBM Z platform. The journey from student to teacher has been one of the most rewarding aspects of his career as a mainframer. “I never would have thought I would be where I am now,” he says. “From not knowing anything about mainframes to starting a job and, today, running small classes for incoming apprentices on JCL and COBOL and getting to share my knowledge with everyone.”