2 Kenyan Students Shine At IBM Master the Mainframe Competition

L;Raphael Kiminya, R;Margret Adhaimbo Pose For
A Picture In front of MainFrame50

Two students from local universities made it to the final of the IBM Master the Mainframe Contest and emerged at positions 7th and 29th globally.

Raphael Kiminya, a database administration student at Strathmore University, took position 7 while Margaret Adhiambo Ondeng, a major in software engineering at Kenyatta University, was ranked at position 30 globally.

The students say they self taught the programming and application development to participate in the competition as not even their lecturers have such knowledge studying till deep into the night to balance the contest requirements and their school work.

According to team leader for the initiative in Kenya Felix Orondo, the students have leapfrogged in the market as the computers become more popular.

"Mainframes have always been at the center of the global economy as well as the backbone of most cities infrastructure. Today mainframe are growing in popularity as technology evolves, demanding more open, scalable and secure solutions and platforms for cloud, mobile and big data analytics," said Orondo.

By competing in the competition, the contestants gained hands-on experience with a wide array of mainframe technologies including REXX, Java and Linux on System Z.

IBM is also offering the students an opportunity to secure mainframe jobs and has already created systemzjobs.com.