IBM’s Master the Mainframe contest running in Nairobi, Kenya and Johannesburg, South Africa was officially announced closed 13th March 2014.
The contest part of the company’s system z Academic Initiative allows students around the world take charge of world-class z Enterprise computing platforms and showcase their talents, while learning sought-after enterprise computing skills.
The competition mostly concentrated on young mind ideas was open to students from universities in both Kenya and South Africa in which it attracted over 250 entries from students in each country- resulting in one of the highest participation levels seen in the global competition for a countries entering the competition for the first time.
Raphael Kiminya Laibuni from Strathmore University and Margaret Adhiambo Ondeng from Kenyatta University were the top Kenyans among the four top students in Africa who will join 43 other students in New York in April to participate in the global finals of the competition.
In South Africa, Johannes Siecker from FNB Hogan Academy and Rijnard van Tonder from Stellenboch University will represent the country at the global World Cup in New York City on April 7th 2014.
Out of over 20,000 IBM Master the Mainframe student contestants just 43 regional contest winners that have demonstrated superior programming skills on the Mainstream have been selected to compete on the world stage. They will sharpen their enterprise computing skills, learn about advanced development tools, and find out how the platform supports Cloud, Big Data and Analytics, Mobile and Security initiatives and eventually build a business application on the mainframe.
The final winners will be announced at the IBM Mainframe 50 Anniversary event on Aplril 8th 2014. The company’s Mainframe has been at the centre of the global economy as well as the backbone of most cities infrastructures.
They continue to grow in popularity as the technology evolves, with solutions becoming more open scalable and secure solutions with the new products being developed for cloud, mobile and big data analytics platforms.
