President's Message by Don Rima

Well, contrary to any rumors that may be floating around, Oracle has NOT bought WAM. Nor, have they made any tender offers for us - at least not yet.

WOW, is this getting wild or what? First Peoplesoft wants to buy JD Edwards and now they themselves are looking at getting gobbled up by Larry Ellison and the folks at Oracle! For those of us running on DB2 (that’s all of OS/400 land, by the way) this presents some interesting issues in our future, but time will tell what happens here!

Speaking of time, it seems like yesterday that we started this terms series of meetings last September. It’s been a busy 10 months of meetings, seminars and JAM, but we hope you folks have had a good time and learned a lot along the way.

Before we take our summer vacation time off, we’re going to bring in Carson Soule to give us his annual view of the positions and trends in the technology and industry. This is ALWAYS a must hear presentation and one of our most attended.

Speaking of seminars, we’re looking at what we could offer for one day topics in the fall and whom would be the best presenters. SO, if you have any good ideas on topics and presenters, please send me a email at dr2@cssas400.com and let me know what you’re thinking are subjects you need us to be looking at for future seminars.

The JAM schedule is finished.

This year is going to be one busy, fun and informatative day! Starting with Breakfast with Frank Soltis, 5 tracks of current technology seminars, luncheon keynote from Malcolm Haines and my usual Saint Nicholas bag of door prizes, you should have a very full and enjoyable day that’s full of fun and lots of great information from some of the industry’s top speakers.

You’ll find all the details at the WAM website www.wash-midrange.org/cgi/jam.pl.

Folks, I hope to see all of you at WAM on the 17th. But, please make sure you RSVP NOW if you’re going to be there. We don’t want you to go hungry and if we don’t know you’re going to be there, we can’t tell the cooks to save you a plate. So, RSVP like they vote in Chicago - early and often.

June 2003 Meeting

This month’s WAM meeting brings back Carson Soule for this annual review of the technologies, trends and directions with special emphasis on the IBM eServer world. So, if you’re curious where things are going and what’s coming down the pipeline into your future, this is one meeting you won’t want to miss!

Carson Soule - is the CEO of Computer Applications Specialists, Inc., an IBM Premier Business Partner providing eServers, networking, software and services. Carson attended the University of Maryland and has earned Certificates in Computer Programming (CCP), Data Processing (CDP) and Systems Professional (CSP) from the Institute for Certification of Computer Professionals (ICCP). In addition, he is certified by IBM in iSeries sales and technical support, networking and ebusiness advisor and designer. He has over 25 years of IBM midrange experience and specializes in application architecture for modern systems. Mr. Soule was active in COMMON (an IBM user group) as a speaker and as the AS/400 and System/36 Project Manager as well as being a member of ACM and IEEE Computer Society. He is also a frequent speaker at local and national user groups on midrange computer topics including WebSphere, Domino and Linux. His writing appears frequently as a technical editor and columnist for iSeries News and ePro magazine.

Tuesday June 17th, 2003
Holiday Inn in College Park, MD
US 1 and The Beltway, College Park, MD
6:00 PM Networking/Cash Bar 6:30 PM Dinner 7:10 PM Presentation