Mario Bezzi

Mario was born in Italy in 1962 and has been a mainframe person for his entire working life. He has 35 years of experience in MVS (yes, he still calls it MVS) both as a customer and in various technical support positions. Mario started his cooperation with Watson and Walker in 2018, as a developer and consultant.

During his career, he worked on topics like z/OS tuning and programming; System and DASD hardware technology; High availability solutions design and implementation; Parallel Sysplex configuration design, tuning, and programming; GDPS, and Assembler and C programming. Lately, he has fallen in love with Linux and Open Source technologies like Python, SQLite, KVM, and Docker. One of his favorite topics is SMF data analysis.

He started his career as a junior System Programmer in 1983 at a customer site. This was a small environment, which gave him the opportunity to touch on different topics. Here he began learning about MVS, Assembler, Fortran, PL/1, CICS, and Adabas, with MVS system programming being his preferred topic.

In 1989 he moved to Hitachi which then marketed PCM mainframes and DASD subsystems. In his technical support position with Hitachi, he worked with hardware development and customers on early product introduction programs, compatibility topics, and System and DASD performance. His responsibilities included running CPU and I/O benchmarks for the labs, and writing synthetic workloads. As part of the introduction of Hitachi’s Coupling Facility, he was tasked by Hitachi development with writing a CF exercising tool to exploit XES services.

After 10 years with Hitachi, Mario had the opportunity to join IBM in 1999 and worked there for 18 years. In 2004 he had the privilege to meet Frank, and since then he co-operated with the ITSO team in Poughkeepsie, teaching and writing books.

Within IBM, Mario has been a Lab Services I/T Specialist and zChampion, working with customers worldwide, focusing on system performance and optimization, infrastructure design, high availability solutions design, education development, and delivery, and technical writing. In his role, he worked closely with all major mainframe development teams inside IBM.

Mario eventually decided to leave IBM to work with a small team of friends. In addition to working with Watson and Walker, Mario plans to keep supporting a handful of customers he enjoyed working with over the last 20 years.