Alex Marquis: I think we should definitely keep the audio of Wayne opening and closing the door to his recording room in the podcast.

Kurt Schroeder: That's a good idea.

Alex Marquis: It just creates a presence or something.

Wayne Bowers: Hey, Kurt. Can I push the button to make the robot intro this podcast?

Kurt Schroeder: You bet.

Introduction: Welcome to You, Me and IBM i.

Kurt Schroeder: Hey, Alex. So here we are back in the first podcast of 2025. Today we're going to have Wayne Bowers on the line, who actually sits over there by you. And yeah, it's, what, January 6th today, and we're all back from the holiday break. How was your break?

Alex Marquis: It was all right. It could have been better, actually. I took my boy sledding on Christmas Day and first run down the hill, his sled turned around facing backwards, and he didn't bail out or anything, he hit some ice boulders at the bottom of the run.

Kurt Schroeder: Oh no.

Alex Marquis: And crashed into the grass and broke his ankle.

Kurt Schroeder: Oh, that's terrible.

Alex Marquis: Yeah. Yeah, it was not a great way to kick off the break there. But he's back in school with his classmates and getting his cast signed and he's got one of those scooters, like a walking scooter.

Kurt Schroeder: With a knee thing?

Alex Marquis: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So he puts his knee on the scooter and he just pushes it, kind of like a skateboard or whatever, but it's got a little steering wheel on it. Handlebars, I should say. So I think he's going to be fine.

Kurt Schroeder: Have you ever broken a bone?

Alex Marquis: I've broken bones. Oh, yeah.

Kurt Schroeder: What have you broken?

Alex Marquis: Oh, I broke my wrist when I was hiking at camp one summer. I broke my collarbone. How did I do that? I think I fell out of the top bunk of a bunk bed while I was having a bad dream. Yeah, I broke a couple. Never anything in my legs or feet though. I've never had a cast. I've never used crutches.

Kurt Schroeder: Yeah. Oh, that's interesting.

Alex Marquis: I've been fortunate though.

Kurt Schroeder: I broke my nose pretty bad and they didn't set it. They didn't even put a piece of tape on. So now it's kind of slumped a little bit, so it looks, I don't know, different than it should.

Alex Marquis: Yeah, you might as well take up mixed martial arts at this point. I mean, you've already got the nose for it.

Kurt Schroeder: Yeah, I don't have the muscles for it though.

Alex Marquis: No, it'd be a journey.

Kurt Schroeder: Speaking of muscle, we've got some Client Access ACS muscle with us today with Wayne Bowers. And Wayne, I think, has been in the support center either as long or longer than either of us. Wayne, are you there?

Wayne Bowers: Yes, I'm here.

Kurt Schroeder: So Wayne, when did you start at IBM? It was right around the time Alex did, right?

Wayne Bowers: Yeah, just shortly after. A couple of months after, in September of 1997.

Alex Marquis: Hey, Wayne, speaking of being old, how's your foot?

Wayne Bowers: Yeah, so it's interesting to hear that your son broke his ankle. I'm assuming he's going to recover a lot quicker than this old guy did breaking my ankle the year before last. It was July of 2023, I broke and tore a bunch of ligaments in my ankle. And it's been a journey to recover from that. I'd say I'm about 95% recovered from that, so functionally recovered, but still it bothers me at times.

Alex Marquis: All right.

Wayne Bowers: My ankle feels better if I'm on it more, but when I'm standing more, then I have more back and knee pain because, again, I'm just an old broken- down guy, so...

Kurt Schroeder: Oh, that's not true. That's not true.

Alex Marquis: Well, I was thinking about you after my son broke his ankle because, I mean, my son was sledding, right, but you were just walking in the yard?

Wayne Bowers: No, I've got two steps between my house and garage, and I was coming in from mowing the lawn and I turned around to throw a hat that I keep in the garage on a shelf, and I just tripped on those two little steps and twisted my ankle wrong.

Alex Marquis: Oh inaudible.

Wayne Bowers: And leg pointed one way, foot pointed the other. And then I did the brilliant thing of resetting my foot myself and then nearly passed out. And then, did we call 911? No, I told my wife to go get that questionable pair of crutches that had been in the basement for 10 years, and I crutched myself to the vehicle and had her drive me to the ER, me nearly passing out several times on that drive.

Kurt Schroeder: Oh, man.

Wayne Bowers: So brilliant.

Kurt Schroeder: But you did save some money.

Wayne Bowers: I did. Well, the thing is, it ended up being about, I think, a$ 140,000.

Kurt Schroeder: What?

Wayne Bowers: So the$ 2,000 or $3, 000 ride in the woo- woo wagon wouldn't really have been a drop in the bucket.

Kurt Schroeder: $140, 000?

Wayne Bowers: Yeah.

Kurt Schroeder: Why?

Wayne Bowers: Yeah. Well, I had two surgical procedures on the leg and ankle in the first week and lots of physical therapy and whatnot. So yeah, it ended up being right around that$ 140,000 mark.

Kurt Schroeder: I got hit by a car when I was biking home from work one day, and the last time I'd had to take an ambulance ride, it was pretty expensive, and they didn't pay, so they put me in an ambulance and I said, " There's no way I'm taking this ambulance ride." And I just called my wife and told her to come pick me up, and so I just waited there on the side of the road and got to the hospital that way because you never know what it's going to cost.

Wayne Bowers: Right.

Kurt Schroeder: Well, Wayne, I was pretty excited to have you on the podcast today because you are one of the people that I really rely on when it comes to figuring out issues with Client Access and Access Client Solutions. I forget what it's called sometimes, and I just want to know more about how you got started with IBM, how you got so into the Access Client and what your journey was with that?

Wayne Bowers: Yeah, so that's interesting. What brought me to IBM, when I was a starving college graduate with needing to pay the rent, had gotten some experience in college, working technical support for an internet service provider. So I'd picked up customer calls and tried to help solve problems. And man, in 1995, you'd be surprised how angry people would get if they couldn't check their AOL email. Then transitioned with that same internet company from technical support to being a network engineer. So I got to drive around Northern Minnesota and set up internet access points with modem dial in banks and fix and replace modems and make sure they were giving the speed that they needed and that type of stuff. And so I took those two experiences when I applied to IBM, saying I had the understanding of working in support. Though honestly my experience with support at that internet service provider, I kind of hated it because people were always yelling at me.

Kurt Schroeder: Yeah.

Wayne Bowers: I mean, nice little old Scandinavian ladies can use some really interesting language when they don't get that email from their nephew in Wisconsin. But I needed a job, and then I talked about being network engineer, and I was pretty proficient with PCs and I was 12 credit hours short of a com sci major, along with my physics degree and math minor. Talked about how I knew how to solve problems and I got an offer to come in here and work for IBM. And I thought it was going to be a job, and it's become a career that I've absolutely loved and have been so blessed to have for the past 27 years.

Kurt Schroeder: Oh, that's awesome. Where did you go to college?

Wayne Bowers: Bemidji State University up in-

Kurt Schroeder: Oh, that's right. Yeah, you mentioned that the other day.

Wayne Bowers: North Central Minnesota. Yeah. Beautiful, beautiful campus.

Kurt Schroeder: Beautiful part of the state too. It's kind of real Minnesota when you have lakes.

Wayne Bowers: Though, nothing to sneeze at where you two went to college there in University of Minnesota Duluth. I mean that North Shore of Lake Superior is, I think, right up there with some of the most beautiful parts in the entire country.

Kurt Schroeder: It is. It's beautiful.

Alex Marquis: I agree.

Wayne Bowers: Yeah.

Alex Marquis: You know how I decided to go to UMD? I was in high school, or maybe it was middle school, but we were driving through Duluth on our way to the Bounty Waters to go on a fishing trip, and I was like, " Is there a college here?" And I decided right there I wanted to go UMD based on the look of Duluth all by itself.

Kurt Schroeder: Well, there's a lot to recommend it because when you're driving into... You probably went into Duluth through Superior, right?

Alex Marquis: Yeah, yeah, we went over that huge bridge.

Kurt Schroeder: Yeah, so you come over the bridge and what do you see? On the one side, you see this mountain thing and you can tell that's probably a ski mountain, right? You got Spirit Mountain right there. And then you have the beautiful bay with the lift bridge and the boats going in and out. There's a lot to recommend it.

Alex Marquis: Oh yeah.

Wayne Bowers: Oh, absolutely. If you want a little piece of Boston and Northeast of the US, come to the North Shore of Lake Superior on the Minnesota side, it's a little taste of that.

Kurt Schroeder: So Client Access, so you have been... So interesting, I've been around to different areas of support.

Wayne Bowers: Yeah.

Kurt Schroeder: At IBM, I was in print, I was in Power VC. I've been in a couple small projects along the way. Now I find myself in Save Restore. But you and Alex have more been focused on the Client Access and data access part of the system for a long time. How did that come about that you wound up there and wanted to stay?

Wayne Bowers: I don't know if it was the same for you guys, I interviewed with three different managers here in the support center that had openings available, and it was the Client Access manager that either won the... I don't know if they won rock paper scissors or they lost rock paper scissors to get me.

Kurt Schroeder: I think they won.

Wayne Bowers: But I ended up in the Client Access support team and, I don't know, you would say I've been doing... And Alex, you can chime in here, I've been doing Client Access my whole 27 year career, but man, has that changed. I started out supporting Client Access on DOS and Windows 3. 1, OS/ 2 devices, Windows 95. Then we got NT and we had to support Twinax and SNA connections and learned a little bit about... Oh, there was that NetWare specific protocol we supported too.

Alex Marquis: Oh yeah.

Wayne Bowers: IDX or something like that? So much different technology that you need to know to support this simple client connecting up to this amazing business server operating system of the AS/400 iSeries System i IBM i. And it's continued to grow. I mean had a long run there with really loving supporting Access For Web, which is now gone by the wayside, but ACS, Access Client Solutions, still providing what our customers need to interact with the IBM i in a completely different way. And so it's constantly changed throughout that 27 year career.

Kurt Schroeder: Now, Wayne, let me just interrupt there. You said that ACS is doing this in a completely different way. But from where I sit over in Print and in Save Restore now looking at it, it feels like it's just kind of a new version and that they renamed Client Access and they're now calling it Access Client Solutions, but that's not it.

Wayne Bowers: No, it's very, very different, particularly in the areas that I support, but even somewhat in the data access providers is we, other than that one mention of OS/2, our products have tied our cart, hitched it up to the Microsoft Windows horse. And that's how we got everywhere is we were reliant on Microsoft Windows. And that was perfectly fine for our customers for nigh on 20 years or longer than that. I remember, I'm going to say in the early 2000s when Mac became a little bit more prevalent, but it was pretty much in your marketing, advertising, graphic design area or maybe some of your executives, I don't know, Alex, if you had this experience, I'd have customers call in and say, " Do you have a Client Access for Mac?"

Alex Marquis: Yeah, we hear more interest in the Linux clients, I would say.

Wayne Bowers: True. Yeah. Yeah. Europe, there's been customers more so in Europe that they were like, "Yeah, I don't know if Windows is where we want to go." And they went with Ubuntu Linux desktops, right, Alex?

Alex Marquis: Yeah.

Wayne Bowers: And they replace their Windows with Ubuntu Linux. And then with the advent of Java- based development environments like Rational Developer for i and other environments like that, actual IT programmers, users, IT staff were able to do their jobs. Again, what I saw more was the desire from the Mac operating system. And they gave a bunch of feedback to us through common advisory console, through log, through other ways where the IBM i is known as an environment that we really listen to our customers and try to give them what they need. They're like, " You can't just ignore Mac any longer." So we are really looking at that niche of Linux replacement, the need for Mac, while still needing to support probably the core of still our users on Windows. How do we do all of that? Do we continue to write a separate Windows client and then develop a better Linux client and then write a brand new Mac- specific client? And the development team decided, architected to go with a Java- based product for most of the end- user functions for Client Access. And so that's where you have the Access Client Solutions, what I like to call, the base product. It relies on Java. Now my development team writes their product to, quote, unquote, " the Java" operating system, and then we let Java take care of that interface with the individual Mac, Linux, Windows operating system. So it allows us to provide that suite of capabilities and function to our users, regardless of what operating system they want to use. But only invest in supporting and developing one application environment, for the most part.

Alex Marquis: I should just add, because it's a point of confusion for a lot of our customers, there are still the OS specific pieces of the pie, the data providers. The data providers are OS specific. So my team, we spend a lot of time working with customers that want to make an ODBC connection from Linux or Windows and, on a very rare occasion, Mac. And so we do have the... They're called ACS application packages, where all the data providers are delivered.

Wayne Bowers: And I have customers talk to me about this is, " Why did you do that? Because that now makes it more complex." I need to look at a PC and a user and say, " Do they just need the base client, the Java client, and then within that Java client, do they just need 5250 emulator printer output? Do they also need data transfer, et cetera? And then also on this PC, are they running any software that would require them to have the ODBC or. NET data provider? And now if they need both, I have to install two different applications." But on the other side, I'm sure you've had customers, Alex, over the last 25 years that are like, " Why do I have to install this whole product when I only need to install a server for a data provider?" And now-

Alex Marquis: Yeah, I just need the data provider.

Wayne Bowers: ...that back- end server, you can just install the data provider. So yes, there is an increased complexity, but there's also an increased flexibility. So there's two sides to that coin. It's just a conversation we need to have with customers. And I find that I get a lot of traction by just sharing the story. And I've shared that story and I've had customers say, " Well, why do I care whether IBM saved development dollars by writing one common Java client for the user- related functions instead of writing three clients?" And I said, " You do care. Because you wouldn't the capabilities that are there in run SQL scripts and visual explain in the client if the development time had to be split across writing three separate clients just to give you a 5250 emulator." And so because of that common development environment, we've been able to provide much better and continue to provide enhanced functionality to our customers across the scope of what they need to interact with their IBM i environment.

Alex Marquis: Yeah, it was a great idea. It simplified it, made it easier. I mean in a way, we've standardized on that one Java client, which, as you said, it's made it a lot easier to focus on delivering functionality to our customers. Kurt, previously you used the term Client Access.

Kurt Schroeder: I did.

Alex Marquis: Yes. And that is a no- no, because that product no longer is supported, right, Wayne?

Wayne Bowers: Yeah. Correct. I mean Client Access eventually got renamed into IBM i Access for Windows, but the key part is that Windows in it. And yeah, that was... Well, a couple of things. Even before, earlier, it was never supported on Windows 10. So that's like 2015 standpoint. If you were on the latest Windows operating system, we didn't support you in that environment.

Kurt Schroeder: That's true.

Wayne Bowers: And then in 2019, we withdrew all support of that access for Windows client and said, " The Access Client Solutions environment that we've talked about is your solution." And how long do you think Access Client Solutions had been fully supported and generally available to our customers come April of 2019 when we drop support of access for Windows? You have a guess, Kurt?

Kurt Schroeder: I'm going to guess 10 years.

Wayne Bowers: Oh wow, you're optimistic. I was expecting more of the three year timeframe. It was actually 2013, so we had a full six years of the product be out there and being fully supported alongside of Access for Windows still being fully supported before we pulled the plug on access for Windows and said it's time to move completely to the Access Client Solutions environment.

Kurt Schroeder: What's funny about that is that as coming from the print standpoint where I started, I mean we would help people install it, but really to us it was all kind of a gray area because as long as they had Client Access and it was kind of running, it was kind of fine.

Alex Marquis: How many IT administrators have, " If it ain't broke, don't fix it," tattooed on their brain?

Wayne Bowers: Absolutely. Absolutely. And there is some truth to that, right, Alex? You don't want to be stirring the pot just to stir the pot. But yet, you have to balance that with staying current and relevant. Many customers don't know that when you install that access for Windows client, if you still have that running on a... Actually, I have customers that are still running that on Windows 11, even though it was never even supported on Windows 10. You're installing a Java 6 runtime. Do you know how many security exposures, vulnerabilities and issues there are by having Java 6 runtime sitting on your Windows 11 environment?

Kurt Schroeder: That is a good point.

Wayne Bowers: Let alone me not wanting to support you, you have enabled or exposed a security of exposure vector into your environment by having that client still running there. Not to mention that client cannot negotiate more secure TLS handshake algorithms to get secure connections to your system across a network. So there's other things, there's reasons to stay current it, right?

Alex Marquis: Yeah. And I thought it was really interesting, I don't know how many years ago, maybe eight, nine years ago when support for IBM i Access for Windows ended and development took the step, which at the time I thought it was kind of unusual, they made the decision to not even offer an extension of support. AS/ 400, it goes out of support and you can purchase an extension for support there. But that option does not exist for the IBM i Access for Windows client. It is not supported. And if customers call in with problems on that old unsupported product, I explain that to them, " It is not supported," and you just laid out the best reasons for why it is not supported and they've really got to get upgraded to a supported software version, Access Client Solutions.

Kurt Schroeder: Well, and it doesn't make sense that a product like the Client Access product would be easier to be able to say, " No, we're not going to support this," because customers can, within an hour or much faster if they're good at it, very easily install the latest thing and be good. But you can't say that about a system. So it kind of makes sense that they would be able to say, " Yeah, we're not going to support this. You got to upgrade." But we do have a lot of customers that are running a lot older versions of that software.

Alex Marquis: Hey, Wayne, so I understand, we talked to Carl on our last podcast, from the comm team, and my understanding is all you guys on the Client Access team... Oh my God. See what you've done, Kurt, you've got me using the old product name now.

Kurt Schroeder: Yeah, it's so hard to get out of that Client Access mindset.

Alex Marquis: It really is. But anyway, Wayne, everyone on your team, they're training for comm these days too, right?

Wayne Bowers: Yeah, they are. And I came up with a new abbreviation for my team. It's the Access Navigator Telnet team, so it's the ANT team. So you can just start referring to me as Ant- Man if you would like to.

Alex Marquis: Ant- Man.

Wayne Bowers: No, please don't. But yes, we are in a process, and it's not everybody, it's a handful of the more senior people on both teams, four from each team, that are being cross- trained from the Access Navigator Telnet Console team and the communications SNA, TCP/IP, that team, we're cross- training there. And we currently have four people from my ANT team that are on and taking calls in the Communications area. And there's four people from the Communications team that are on and taking calls in my ANT and Console area. And we're just trying to broaden our scope, have more experience across a broader group of people. And then also from a functionality perspective have a few more people on pager rotation. That was a big thing of it because having only four people on a pager rotation gets a little less than ideal for work- life balance. So we hope to by the end of 2025 be to the point where we're on an eight- person pager rotation.

Kurt Schroeder: I've actually been on a two- person pager rotation before and, yeah, I can attest that that's not a good way to get great sleep.

Wayne Bowers: Yeah. I did listen to a bit of your last podcast with my friend Carl, and he talked about being able to touch parts of the operating system, like touching a front panel that he hadn't before for setting up some of that console stuff. I'm really enjoying it because really it's an area that I enjoy supporting and developing. Yes, I'm supporting the client side, but what is between every client PC and the IBM I? A network of some sort.

Alex Marquis: Comm layer, yeah.

Wayne Bowers: And so I've developed a set of skills, and actually still one of my favorite calls is working with customers on a network connectivity issue, pulling communications traces off of the IBM i, now Wireshark pieces off of the traces off of the PC or even formatted Wireshark traces off of the IBM i, and showing, " Hey, this side sent that packet that that side didn't get. That side's retransmitting packets that that side didn't get. Here's what's going on. Oh, it was working fine until there was a period of idle time. Something in your network is disconnecting idle conversations." And so I'm able to build on that experience to go deeper into how do you configure that networking on the IBM? How do you make it resilient? So I currently support Telnet and the IBM access host servers. Now I'm getting to learn how to support FTP and SSH and some of those other protocols and servers on the IBM i. So I'm really enjoying it. To me, it feels like just an extension of some of the skills I have already built over my 27 year career.

Alex Marquis: What do you think is the most effective method of providing education for your teammates for this new knowledge corpus?

Wayne Bowers: Honestly, I'm a huge proponent of getting enough basics so that you can ask a good question and gather some data and then just start working cases and getting help from the senior people on your team. Motorheads say there's no replacement for displacement, but I like to say there's no replacement for experience and just on the job learning. I can give you presentation after presentation, I can talk through scenarios, but until you're on actually working a customer case, it just doesn't connect the same way until you're looking at that real data working that real problem. And so you need the basis, so we have to have some way to get you basic information. So we had probably 10, 12 hours of education from each side to the other side. And then to get some of those basics just so you understand, " Oh, this is a technology that's available, here's some of the basic questions you ask, get started with and here's how you collect the data." And then doctors, they say they practice medicine, they don't know medicine. I'm going to say I practice supporting the IBM i. Because every case I am refreshing, enhancing those skills that I've built, yes, but that I need to keep using. So yeah, the number of cases you need to be good at supporting something like this is one more than you've already taken.

Kurt Schroeder: Yeah, I think that's a really healthy way to look at that. And speaking of taking cases and getting started with stuff, when you were starting, what was it like as far as did they pair you up with a mentor or were you listening into cases or how did that when you got started... Because we all get started and we're like we... At least when I got started, I didn't know anything about print.

Wayne Bowers: Well, I didn't know anything about the IBM i or AS/400 at the time at all. I don't know if any of you experienced this. My first two weeks with IBM were sitting alone in a empty classroom listening to a whole set of tapes on the AS/400-

Kurt Schroeder: The ATS tapes.

Wayne Bowers: The ATS tapes on the AS/ 400 operating system. That was brutal.

Kurt Schroeder: I thought they were good. I thought they were good. They had good labs to go through. And maybe I'm weird that I like those.

Wayne Bowers: Yeah, I don't know. I guess evidently you like monotone droning on, guess that's why you like talking to me. And then we had a great foundations class. But yeah, I got paired with a guy, he still works here. He's actually in one of the areas you used to work on, Bob Crawford.

Kurt Schroeder: Oh, sure.

Wayne Bowers: Who's now one of our HMC experts within IBM Support. And he was my mentor for Client Access Support. And I sat with him, listened into calls. And then I remember, I want to say it was either Thanksgiving day or the day after Thanksgiving, I'm the newbie, I had no vacation time to take, so I'm sitting there in the office, and I'd never taken a live call yet, and there was a blinking light. We had blinking lights on the phones back then when a call was waiting. And I'm hitting that little button next to the blinking light and it's like 10 minutes, 15 minutes, 20 minutes, 30 minutes. I'm like, " You know what-"

Kurt Schroeder: Basically watching the wait time come up for a little bit.

Wayne Bowers: I was. I was debating with myself-

Kurt Schroeder: The amount of time the customer had been waiting.

Wayne Bowers: "What do I do?" Because I wasn't, quote, unquote, " cleared." I wasn't sold, " All right, you're supposed to start taking live calls now." And I said to myself, " If I'm that customer, I'd rather talk to an idiot like me than listen to more hold music."

Kurt Schroeder: Right.

Wayne Bowers: So I went available and took my first call. And I don't even remember what the problem was. But that was kind of good because it's like, " You know what? Just take a call."

Kurt Schroeder: Just take calls.

Wayne Bowers: You don't need to have all the answers right on that call. Customers are looking to talk to somebody that can help them get to the answer. They're not necessarily expecting you to have the immediate answer every time.

Kurt Schroeder: Not every time.

Wayne Bowers: And the rest is history. So yeah, that was my first call around.

Kurt Schroeder: That was your first call.

Wayne Bowers: Thanksgiving of 1997.

Kurt Schroeder: Alex, what was your first call?

Alex Marquis: I have no idea. I don't remember. But it was probably not too different from what Wayne just described. I mean, I was so bored of listening to education that I was desperate to start doing actual work. And yeah, I mean I wanted to get on the phones and start doing the actual job. And I did it as soon as I got the green light, I started taking calls. And I'll say those first calls, I mean, you're sweating, right? Your hands are sweating, maybe you have beads dripping down your forehead. But I think that scenario, the nervousness, it helps you retain the information that you gain while working those cases.

Kurt Schroeder: I think that's probably true. Although, my first call was done within five minutes, the customer was given the exact right information and we closed the call. The reason for that is because when I took my first call and I picked up the phone, I literally could not speak. I was paired up with Connie, we were on one of these dual headset things. I picked up, she's like, " Okay, it's time to take your call." There was a light was flashing, I hit the button, I picked up the phone and my mouth did not work. And she's looking at me like, " Say something, you idiot." Just nothing would come out. And after 10 seconds of this craziness, Connie quickly flips the button, " IBM i Global Support, this is Connie. How can I help you?" The customer tells the problem, Connie works through the issue, like I said, less than five minutes. Printer works great. Connie says, " Thanks for calling. We'll close your call." She hangs up and I turned to Connie and said, " Well, we fixed that one, didn't we?" And from then on, it's been a little better. But the look she gave me me, I will never forget that., I just must had this complete look of hopelessness. It's just really funny.

Alex Marquis: Deer in the headlights.

Kurt Schroeder: Man, total deer in the headlights, unable to do anything. Oh my God.

Alex Marquis: I think that's what happened to my son as he was going down the sledding hill backwards.

Wayne Bowers: How big were his eyes looking at you as he was going down that hill?

Alex Marquis: I couldn't see him. I was following behind him and we were gaining speed so quickly. No, it was terrible.

Wayne Bowers: You can cut this if you want, but I'll share. When I was probably a year or two into taking calls, some of the feedback, you guys remember the PBC 360 feedback that our peers would evaluate us on?

Kurt Schroeder: Yeah. Yes.

Alex Marquis: Oh yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Wayne Bowers: Which part of me really likes that. Though it did get to be a little bit of a, " If you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours," type of a thing.

Kurt Schroeder: Sure.

Wayne Bowers: Find three people that are going to give you a good review and you give three people a good review, whatever. But I actually tried to listen to what was in there. And some of the feedback I got is, " Wayne is really becoming technically adept, but he's really dry on the call. It's all about the problem. It's all about the facts. It's getting to the solution. He is very impersonable," when they listen to calls or whatever.

Kurt Schroeder: Really? That's interesting.

Alex Marquis: Wow.

Wayne Bowers: And so I tried to throw in, what do we talk about in Minnesota? The weather or the Vikings. Or if you're from Wisconsin, maybe the Packers. So I started to try and I thought I was building a rapport with customers and I thought I was a budding comedian for a period there on cases. And I had a customer called in, " Here's the problem. It's a known issue. You have to get this service pack or PTF." I forget what it is. " You need to install that. It's the only way to resolve this problem." And they're like, " Well, I don't want to install that fix. You have to give me another way to resolve this." And I'm like, " I'm sorry, that's the only way." " You need to give me another way." And I said, " Well, I'm sorry I left my magic wand at home today. If I would've brought it, I would've given you another way to fix a problem. But otherwise you have to install this fix." There was about a five second pause and a, " I need to speak to your manager." And I thought" Oh no. I crossed a line there." And that ended my budding comedic career when I was taking cases.

Kurt Schroeder: That reminds me of the time a customer described this really complex problem that I knew that they had gotten themselves into by shooting themselves in a foot with a Gatling gun, and my immediate response was to say, " Hold on, let me fix this with my Jedi mind powers."

Wayne Bowers: Yeah. You got to know your audience too I guess.

Kurt Schroeder: Got to know your audience.

Wayne Bowers: Guess I wasn't reading my audience very well.

Kurt Schroeder: You got to read the room, I guess.

Wayne Bowers: Read the room.

Kurt Schroeder: But no, I'd say now if anybody said, " Name someone who's personable in the support center," I think you'd be right up there, man.

Wayne Bowers: Yeah, it's grown. 27 years gives you an opportunity to grow and to build and change. Yeah, it's been really great.

Kurt Schroeder: On this podcast, we don't talk about things that are... We never actually in support talking about things that are up and coming and things that customers don't know about. But you've known and worked with the Access Client for a long time. What are some of the new functions and features of it that you think might be underutilized or overlooked by customers? For me, it's once I started learning about run SQL scripts, I've been trying to use that as much as I can for PROM determination and other issues. What are some things you might tell a customer, " Hey, this is what the Access Client is good for besides just display sessions and printer sessions"?

Wayne Bowers: Yeah, a couple of things. One, I'm going to branch into Alex's backyard a little bit. And that is, I don't know many of our customers are doing things where they are using the Client Data Transfer capability to pull data off of an IBM i into a Windows XLS Excel spreadsheet format. And then they're pushing that XLS spreadsheet up to an IFS directory on the IBM i so that it can be shared with other partners, whether that's like an inventory listing, whatever that might be. And I don't know how many of our customers know that since ACS is a Java client, you can run the ACS data transfer via command line set of parameters on the IBM I. So you can query your IBM i database table to get that data into an Excel spreadsheet file on the IBM i IFS natively.

Kurt Schroeder: Really?

Wayne Bowers: Yeah. And I think that's just something and a piece of automation that could really help some of our customers that are doing some of these... I'm trying to think of the machine, the perpetual motion machines that some of them have built to query data on a PC and then get that file up into the IBM i to be shared.

Kurt Schroeder: Yeah, kind of a perpetual motion machine versus... What's the name of that cartoonist who had all those pieces all hung together?

Alex Marquis: Rube Goldberg.

Kurt Schroeder: Oh, a Rube Goldberg machine.

Wayne Bowers: There you go. Yeah.

Alex Marquis: Yeah.

Kurt Schroeder: Customers get so used to using things, and they have so many other things that they deal with that once something works... We talked about it before about if it's not broken, don't fix it. If they know how to do something and it's reliable, then that's a reliable way for them to get something done. And yeah, one thing they're not thinking about is, " I have something that works-"

Wayne Bowers: "How do I make it better?"

Kurt Schroeder: Yeah.

Alex Marquis: Well, on that subject, I got to add to what you mentioned there, Wayne, about generating Excel spreadsheets. Because just recently we've had a lot of cases regarding this new Db2 function called generate spreadsheet. So you don't even have to use a command line, you can use an SQL interface, like run SQL scripts, and you can make a Db2 function call to generate spreadsheets. And that function in the background on the IBM i will make the Java call, it'll run ACS Launcher and generate that spreadsheet for you all from an SQL interface. It's pretty wild. And a lot of customers are starting to use that functionality. We're ironing out the, I won't call them bugs because there's always

Wayne Bowers: Growing pains. There's some growing pains.

Alex Marquis: Yeah, growing pains, sure. Users won't have authority to the directory that they're writing their file to or something like that. But yeah, we see more and more customers using that. So it's a really cool new functionality.

Wayne Bowers: Really cool.

Kurt Schroeder: That sounds kind of like a run remote command where someone would kick off something on the IBM i and then something else happens with the Access Client. Is that actually happening to the Access Client on their PC or is that all happening within the IBM i?

Alex Marquis: All in the IBM i.

Wayne Bowers: IBM i. Yeah, yeah. They're able to cut any ties with client interaction, they can have it so it all runs on the IBM i. So that's cool. Now, another area that I've really enjoyed getting into is Access Client Solutions now provides the go- to tooling for installing, updating open source packages on the IBM i. So if you want to run Python, if you want to run cURL, if you want to run Node. js, a Git repository, some of those things on your IBM i, Access Client Solutions provides that open source package manager that is a really usable GUI interface to administering those open source packages on IBM i. So I could personally barely spell Python, but I can help anybody get that Python 3. 9 package installed and updated on the IBM i so that they can let their developers go off and write Python code to run natively on the IBM i. So I've really enjoyed branching off and learning more about managing and supporting those Python packages and, well, other open source packages too on IBM i. And we've had open source on IBM i for a while. It came via licensed program product for a long time. And then 2019, that all got drop support. 2019 was a big year for some reason. And now you're doing stuff via RPMs and YUM and Access Client Solutions. And in the last, I'm just going to say, five years, we went from supporting about 20 open source technologies on IBM i to supporting over 300 open source technologies on IBM i. Now granted, that's not me, I just help you click on stuff and get it supported. But using that mechanism has allowed our development team to provide so many more open source technologies that customers could choose to leverage in their IBM i environment. So that's been a lot of fun, something that I've enjoyed digging into.

Kurt Schroeder: Yeah, that's a big deal. The open source technologies are always something that is talked about, I think on the Common and POWERUp conferences and it's pretty popular. Now, you've also been going to those POWERUp conferences for a while. Is that the same way you got invited to the Common ones or they're kind of part and parcel?

Wayne Bowers: Yeah, so Common is POWERUp.

Kurt Schroeder: Oh right, yes.

Wayne Bowers: So they just went through a little bit of a naming change. So it's the Common POWERUp Conference. It used to be the Common Annual Conference and Convention. And so they just came up with that POWERUp. So yeah, I've been doing those types of customer related speaking engagements and conferences since spring of 2009. So approaching 15 years now. Had a really serendipitous opportunity to where somebody was moving on to a new role that had been doing all of the customer speaking for the IBM i Access or Client Access family of products, was moving on to a different role and nobody else really in the development side of the world, which does most of this, wanted to take that on. So a manager over there that I'd worked with contacted my manager and asked if I would be interested in doing this customer speaking engagement role. So for the last 15 years, I've had the amazing opportunity to travel out for two to four conferences a year, meet with, have very good, interesting interactions with our customers, present on our technologies. And it's been a lot of fun. We have some great customers. I've built some friendships from those in- person experiences, so it's been a lot of fun. A highlight of my career.

Kurt Schroeder: What's the next conference you're looking forward to attending?

Wayne Bowers: So the POWERUp Spring Conference in May of this year. I just submitted actually about eight presentations for that. And we'll see how many fit into the schedule. But I'm expecting I'll be out there for a handful of presentations at the Disneyland property in Anaheim in May of this year.

Kurt Schroeder: Oh, great. That sounds good.

Alex Marquis: Cool.

Kurt Schroeder: Well, that's cool, man. Good. I'm glad you're out there making us look good.

Wayne Bowers: I don't know look good, but sound good.

Kurt Schroeder: Stop it. Wayne, I just want to thank you for coming on the podcast today. Alex, I'm trying to think of anything else I have a question with. Probably, I'm going to get back to my desk, get a call from a customer and I'm going to need to conference in Wayne immediately.

Alex Marquis: Well, we'll put it in the addendum, the text addendum.

Kurt Schroeder: Well, say, Wayne, before you go, you mentioned a couple of things that I think our customers would be interested in. One of them was that open source package management and the other one was, and Alex, I think you touched on it too, the ability to create a spread-

Alex Marquis: Yeah, generate spreadsheet.

Kurt Schroeder: Yeah, the generate spreadsheet. Are there documents for those two items?

Wayne Bowers: Yeah, absolutely. There's documents on those that we can definitely include in the information about the podcast on getting started with open source package management and Access Client Solutions, and also on using that generate spreadsheets SQL service.

Kurt Schroeder: Great. I'd like to do that. I think that'd be really useful.

Wayne Bowers: Excellent.

Kurt Schroeder: Well, Wayne, thanks again for coming on the podcast. Alex, do you have any more words of wisdom to leave us with today?

Alex Marquis: I don't know. Wayne provided a lot of words of wisdom already, so I'll just leave it at that.

Wayne Bowers: Yeah, it's been fun chatting with you guys. And I've always enjoyed working with both of you. And let's continue to make the IBM i Global Support Center the best experience for our customers that they can get anywhere in the industry.

Alex Marquis: Awesome. Sounds good to me.

Kurt Schroeder: Sounds good to me too. Thanks, Wayne.

Wayne Bowers: Yeah. Bye.