Chuck Losinski
Chuck Losinski, Director of Technical Solutions for the Robot product line, has been with Fortra for over 25 years. He has over 40 years of experience in IT, including 30+ years on the IBM i platform.
Chuck's background covers a wide variety of technical responsibilities, involving system implementation, programming, operations, training and support. Chuck has helped numerous customers automate their IBM i business applications, processes, and monitoring. Also, he is on the advisory board of the IBM i user group, QUSER.
External Resources from Chuck
- IBM i Gets No Respect
- 2023 IBM i Prediction, Part 3
- IBM i Horror Stories (And how to avoid them)
- Fortra’s Youtube: Inside the Integrated File System
Q & A with Chuck
What’s the most interesting or impactful project that you’ve had the chance to work on?
I would have to say helping clients automate their AS400/IBM i processing is the most impactful thing that I do on a regular basis. Manual processing is error prone, mundane, and time consuming. So when we’re able to successfully implement automation, it feels good knowing that you’ve truly helped free a client from a great deal of every day struggles.
What would you say is your biggest accomplishment that you’ve achieved in your career?
Over the course of my career working with this platform, I’ve learned so much that it would be a shame to not share that knowledge with the greater community. So, I think the collection of webinars, recorded tips, and other pieces that I’ve contributed to over the last 25 years is my greatest accomplishment. To leave a legacy of material for the next generation of IBM i specialists.
How do you think the IBM i landscape is going to change in the coming years?
The biggest change will be the movement towards hosted/cloud environments. Today’s businesses want to focus more on business processes rather than day-to-day administration and system security tasks. Hosted/cloud environments allow them to offload some of those responsibilities and I think that’s very valuable to a lot of organizations.
How would you say the work you do impacts the broader IBM i market?
Well, for one, we collaborate with IBM to develop products such as PowerHA – so we have a direct influence there. But I also think the educational content that we create really resonates with the IBM i community to an extent where there’s a lot of word of mouth referrals that take place regarding our tools and our content when employees that are familiar with us move to another organization.
What are some of the biggest ways that you’ve seen the IBM i change since you got your start?
I think there’s two major ways that the IBM i has changed. The first being that the low-end Power Server has far more horsepower than even the top end of the early models. The second is the ability for IBM i to host multiple types of workloads and languages – batch, green screen, browser, and the latest and greatest SQL, PHP, Python and other language technologies – while still supporting the legacy RPG code. It’s been simply amazing to witness.