When Calder Sacks talks about SHARE, he doesn't start with the technical sessions. He doesn't start with product announcements, emerging technologies, or even the presentations he's delivered over the years.

Instead, he starts with the people.

"It's getting out there and interacting with the community," says Sacks, an architect and longtime mainframe professional with Morgan Stanley. "That's why we come to SHARE, to interact with the other customers."

Morgan Stanley has a long history with SHARE, but after a period away from the conference, the company renewed its engagement several years ago. Since then, Sacks has become a regular attendee and presenter, making the most of multiple SHARE conferences each year.

For him, the real value is not just confined to the technical sessions.

Learning From Others Who Face the Same Challenges

Technology conferences are often assessed by their sessions, agendas, and speaker lineups. While Sacks appreciates the formal education opportunities, some of the insights that have stayed with him the longest came from less structured moments.

"Where I find some of the biggest value, to be honest, is in the hallway conversations," he says.

Those discussions often reveal something many technology professionals rarely see in their day-to-day work: confirmation that other organizations are wrestling with the same challenges.

"You always think that you're doing something different or trying to solve problems in isolation, and you don't realize that other people may have the same challenges," Sacks explains. "Sometimes they've approached it completely differently, and you think, 'That's an interesting thought. I didn't think about it that way.'"

For mainframe professionals, those exchanges can be especially valuable. Many organizations operate large, complex environments that look unique from the inside. Speaking with peers often reveals common patterns, shared obstacles, and alternative ways of solving familiar problems.

Those perspectives can be difficult to find without a community willing to openly share experiences.

A Platform That's Always Evolving

Sacks has spent more than three decades working with the mainframe, and one theme runs through many of his SHARE presentations: helping the platform participate fully in the broader technology ecosystem.

Whether discussing Git, Visual Studio Code, Python, APIs, or AI, his focus remains consistent. "My main focus is integrating the mainframe across the board so that it's no longer considered an isolated black box,” he says.

For Sacks, modernization is not about replacing the mainframe. It's about ensuring it remains connected to the tools, workflows, and development practices that organizations expect today.

"The mainframe is a great platform," he says. "I've worked on it for 30-something years now. It is an excellent platform, and I want to see it support our future."

That belief shapes many of the ideas he shares with fellow attendees. He sees the mainframe as part of a much larger ecosystem rather than a separate environment operating under different rules. "The mainframe is part of this large ecosystem," he says. "It's not one way or the other. You have to do both."

The Value of Shared Experience

At the heart of Sacks' perspective is a simple idea: the community benefits when practitioners share what they're learning and achieving with the platform.

"The opportunity to share our story with other customers and have an open dialogue, that’s where I get the most out of SHARE events, like SHARE Pittsburgh,” he says.

That exchange of knowledge creates value for everyone involved. Practitioners learn from one another, new approaches and perspectives emerge, and vendors gain a clearer understanding of the challenges organizations are trying to solve.

"It's not just for the customer audience," Sacks explains. "I'm also looking at it for the vendor audience, where I can show them, this is what we're doing and ask them how they can help us get there."

For Sacks, the most impactful discussions go beyond what technology can do and focus instead on what organizations are trying to achieve, creating opportunities for customers, vendors, and the broader mainframe community to move forward together.

Rather than simply hearing about what technology can do, the conversation becomes focused on what organizations are actually trying to accomplish.

Building the Future Together

As AI, cloud technologies, modern development practices, and new integration approaches continue transforming enterprise IT, Sacks believes the future will depend on collaboration. The technology landscape will continue to evolve, and so will the mainframe.

And the value of connecting with others across the ecosystem remains constant.

Calder Sacks is an executive director at Morgan Stanley, where he leads mainframe integration and cross-platform technology initiatives. With more than two decades of experience spanning mainframe and distributed environments, he has held a variety of technical and leadership roles, beginning as a natural programmer before moving into database administration and engineering leadership. Prior to his current role, Sacks led Morgan Stanley’s database engineering team for more than 10 years. Today, he focuses on integrating modern technologies and development practices with the firm's COBOL and Db2 environments, helping position the mainframe as a fully connected component of the enterprise technology ecosystem. Throughout his career, he has championed mainframe modernization initiatives, including early Java-to-mainframe integration, distributed database connectivity, API-driven access to Adabas and CICS, and Kafka-based event streaming between IBM Z and distributed platforms.

A frequent SHARE presenter, Sacks is passionate about bringing modern development workflows, cloud connectivity, AI capabilities, and open technologies to the mainframe while helping organizations maximize the value and longevity of the platform.

If the best ideas come from sharing experiences, why limit that opportunity to just a few employees? Corporate Advantage Membership helps organizations bring the power of the SHARE community, learning resources, and industry connections to more members of their team.