You can sum up the AS/400 Division’s strategy when it comes to Microsoft’s new Windows 2000 operating system in one simple sentence: Embrace the Win2K Professional client; coexist with the Win2K Server on the Integrated Netfinity Server (INS); and compete with Win2K Server, Advanced Server, and Datacenter Server for mindshare and marketshare for supporting applications in the midrange at large. This was the battle cry from IBM Rochester as it participated in the Windows 2000 launch in San Francisco in mid-February. Although the Netfinity crowd at IBM logically has lots of reasons to be excited about Win2K—IBM reckons that 76 percent of its current Netfinity customers will upgrade their hardware as they move from WinNT 4.0 to Win2K—it may seem paradoxical that the AS/400 Division would be trying to promote Win2K sales. But given the fact that WinNT 4.0 is the only operating system supported on the INS and that Windows 2000 is the only future operating system that will be supported, as far as we know, the AS/400 Division has little choice but to be excited by Win2K, since tight Win2K integration will be one of the key differentiators for client/server and e-business workloads for current and future AS/400 processors.

I say AS/400 Division when, politically, I should be saying Mid-Market Server Division. I am doing so out of force of habit and because the name rolls off the tongue better than MMSD. But MMSD, the marketing and sales organization within the Enterprise Systems Group, serves all but the 1,500 largest IBM accounts and specifically must balance OS/400 against WinNT/2K, Linux, AIX, PTX, UnixWare, and even OS/390 among the bottom 99 percent of IBM’s vast customer pyramid. Later this year, IBM will throw Monterey/64, the AIX-on-Itanium (Intel) UNIX variant that IBM is developing with Santa Cruz Operation, into the mix. The challenge for MMSD is to come up with a clear and consistent marketing message that allows it to peddle all of these different operating system platforms into the midrange customer base while at the same time maximizing profits for IBM and its Partners. For existing AS/400 accounts controlled by IBM or its AS/400 Business Partners, that means selling OS/400 for database serving (and thereby competing against Win2K) and selling Win2K for print-and-file serving (what WinNT has always been good at).

When it comes to Web serving and application serving, the situation gets a little more complex. IBM and its BPs will want to push OS/400 as the application and Web servers wherever possible because that sells more AS/400 iron. At this point, both OS/400

and Win2K are unknowns when it comes to Web serving performance, but if Win2K is anything like WinNT, it will be a very inexpensive, if somewhat unreliable, application server. But with application-serving mirroring, Win2K is probably going to stomp the tar out of WinNT as well as OS/400 in terms of raw performance and bang for the buck. I’m not saying that AS/400 shops should use either WinNT or Win2K as their application servers. I am saying that many will—particularly because IBM tells them to.

Here’s a case in point. Last November, IBM signed a big alliance with customer relationship management (CRM) software market leader Siebel Systems. IBM promised to use Siebel’s software internally and to lead all of its CRM sales efforts with the Siebel 99 or Siebel 2000 (due any day now) CRM suites; Siebel agreed to port its code to all of IBM’s strategic platforms, including the AS/400. IBM had been hoping to announce more specifics about the availability of Siebel’s CRM software for the AS/400 in late February during the Rolling Thunder campaign. That didn’t happen. In the presentation to the press and customers, IBM’s Suzi Shaw-Lyons, AS/400 Global Services CRM segment executive, proactively answered the Siebel question before anyone on the thunderbolt Webcast had a chance to ask it. She explained that IBM and Siebel would have the Siebel products running on the AS/400 by the end of the year, if not earlier. But, from my conversations with AS/400 Business Partners (who are keen on pushing Siebel’s products because they are the market leader in the CRM space by a long shot and because the CRM market is growing at more than 50 percent per year), I learned that Shaw-Lyons was a little more specific with BPs when she told them that IBM and Siebel were still working out how to port the CRM suite to the AS/400 and when it would happen.

IBM’s and Siebel’s initial plans apparently call for the use of Integrated Netfinity Servers as well as outboard regular Netfinity PC servers as Siebel application servers and for the use of the AS/400 as a database server for the CRM suite. The vast majority of Siebel installations are running on WinNT, and, although Siebel is working on a port to IBM’s AIX UNIX variant, that AIX implementation, which was expected around March, may not run in OS/400 V4R4’s Portable Application Solutions Environment (PASE) AIX runtime environment. No one knows for certain what Siebel develops its applications in, but odds are it is C++, which does not port so easily to the AS/400’s ILE C compilers. In other words, a native Siebel CRM suite may be problematic to deliver. And in that case, IBM will push WinNT or Win2K as adjunct platforms because it wants to increase the amount of transactions running on those hundreds of thousands of AS/400s sitting out there in data centers the world over.

IBM would rather have an entirely native CRM implementation, which might encourage customers to buy lots of AS/400 upgrades, but if it has to peddle Netfinity servers or INS cards until the native implementation is ready, it will gladly do it. That’s how Notes and Domino got their start on the AS/400, and thousands of customers went for an INS-based Domino implementation because it worked great and was, as it turned out, much less expensive than native Domino. If the AS/400 Division truly is the Mid-Market Server Division, it may be sorely tempted to just forget about the native Siebel implementation altogether. But Domino has accounted for more than $1 billion in AS/400 hardware sales since February 1998, so look for IBM to eventually push native Siebel 2000 on the AS/400 quite hard.

The AS/400 Division may be excited about Windows 2000, but it knows enough about Microsoft’s programming practices (as do you and I) to be wary of jumping in feet or head first on the bleeding edge of a new operating system version. AS/400 customers don’t want to have buggy software running in production, and IBM doesn’t want the support nightmares. With a reported 63,000 bugs in Win2K—a number that Microsoft vehemently denies, saying that many of these problems aren’t bugs, just graphics and spelling mistakes on screens as well as suggested changes in how features work—the AS/400 Division is carefully testing Win2K Server to make sure it is solid enough for production use in conjunction with the AS/400. Given the fact that Win2K will not be supported on the INS until “sometime in the second half of 2000,” according to IBM’s Ian Jarman, who heads

AS/400 product marketing, it is reasonable to assume that IBM doesn’t feel that Win2K Server is ready for prime time yet. That said, IBM was demonstrating Win2K running on the current 333-MHz INS card at the Win2K launch, so it does have the OS/400 features tweaked to load Win2K on the INS and to allow it to interact with OS/400’s Integrated File System (IFS) and the AS/400’s disk arrays.

Incidentally, for those of you who already have an INS card running WinNT 4.0, don’t go trying to load Win2K on top of it—it won’t work. OS/400 V4R4 does not yet recognize Win2K as a legitimate INS operating system, although there’s probably a way to hack it onto the INS (with or without IBM’s help) if you really want to.

IBM’s Jarman says that approximately 20 percent of current AS/400 sales have an INS sale related to them and that INS cards are particularly popular on Model 170s for small businesses and on Model 720s, which can have up to 16 of the INS cards attached to them and have lots of disk storage available to support them. (The Model 170 offers a tiny amount of disk space by comparison.) The 720s, with lots of INS cards, are popular combos for midsized businesses that want to consolidate their WinNT workloads onto INS cards.

IBM says that AS/400 Client Access Express for Windows was updated on January 24 to support Win2K Professional, the desktop edition of Win2K. Similarly, AS/400’s NetServer “Network Neighborhood” feature in OS/400 V4R2 and higher releases has been tweaked to support print-and-file sharing with Win2K desktops and servers. The Client Access for Win95/NT client, a prior generation of the Client Access code that supports SNA as well as TCP/IP, has not been updated to support Windows 2000, and it will not be. (Check out APAR II11853 for more details on this.) What IBM will support on Windows 2000, to give AS/400 users functionality that is equivalent to the old Client Access, is Express client with the optional PC-5250-terminal-emulation program, which costs $275 per seat according to IBM. That said, Howard F. Arner, editor of the Microsoft Computing section of this magazine, says that he actually got the old Client Access/400 running on Windows 2000 using TCP/IP networking, but he also says that it doesn’t run very well. There’s not much point in using an unsupported product that doesn’t run well, so if you are tempted to save some money by not moving to Express client, don’t bother.

Old Reliable—Well, Probably Not

Regardless of the timing and pricing issues (see “Win2K Can Be Very Pricey” on page 38 for more on the costs of upgrading to Win2K), the central concern on the minds of most midrange customers is whether or not Windows 2000 is more reliable than Windows NT
4.0. The fact that Microsoft can say, on Win2K announcement day, that companies are committed to deploying Windows 2000 on 2 million PCs and servers (with about 15 percent of those licenses being on servers, if history is any guide) doesn’t necessarily mean that they will upgrade all of their NT installations to Win2K in one big bang. In fact, most of the analysts at International Data Corporation, Gartner Group, Giga Information Group, and META Group, just to name a few, expect the Win2K adoption rate, particularly for servers, to be quite slow. (Win2K Professional has been stable for more than a year. The server versions of Win2K, which are much more complex, are where troubles will crop up.) The prevailing advice is to wait at least until Service Pack 1 is available for Windows 2000 Server and Advanced Server before installing either. I would add that it probably makes sense to install Win2K on new machines supporting new workloads earlier than that—there is nothing to upgrade in this case, and your shop can gain experience with Win2K while waiting for the bugs to shake out.

Because we are all acquainted with Microsoft’s less-than-rigorous coding practices and its tendency to bite off more than it can chew featurewise, Win2K is not expected to really pick up until later in 2000 and probably won’t really take a run at the installed base of NT machines (of which there are tens of millions of PCs and servers) until 2001. Gartner Group says that it expects only 3 to 6 percent of the installed NT base to move to Win2K in

2000 but that it also expects about half to have upgraded by the end of 2001. Maybe they should have named it Windows 2001.

Although that sounds like an abysmal adoption rate, it is quite good. Only about a fifth of the current AS/400 base is at V4R3 or V4R4 after about the same amount of time. Unfortunately for Microsoft, the reason that the Win2K adoption rate will climb in late 2000 and 2001 is not so much that Win2K is great but that WinNT 4.0 is sorely lacking in areas of reliability and scalability. These are areas where the AS/400 has historically beaten the tar out of Windows NT and, regardless of the reliability improvements in Win2K, will probably continue to do so. Nonetheless, Win2K customers surveyed by Giga and Sunbelt Software say that Win2K is an improvement over WinNT 4.0. More than half of survey respondents said that Win2K Professional was an order of magnitude better in terms of reliability, and another 22 percent said that it crashed about half as much. Those using Win2K Server indicated that it was less reliable than Win2K Professional but still better than NT Server 4.0. About a quarter of respondents said that Win2K Server was an order of magnitude more reliable than NT Server, with another quarter saying that it crashed half as much. Only 7 percent of Win2K Professional users and 21 percent of Win2K Server users said that these operating systems had about the same reliability as the equivalent WinNT versions. That sounds like improvement, but, of course, we would all like to see independently audited reliability benchmarks running real-world applications to prove it.

Windows 2000 vs. UNIX and Linux: The Battle for Server Bucks

Windows 2000 had better be better than Windows NT in the server space, or UNIX and Linux are going to make it difficult for Microsoft to recoup its $2-billion-plus investment in development of Windows 2000. If Microsoft had gotten Win2K out the door a year ago, as it should have, maybe it would have been able to slow down the new operating-system juggernaut, Linux. And thus far, serious e-business plays into the hands of the UNIX vendors, not Microsoft’s. Microsoft has plenty of fast talking and bug fixing to do to get a bigger slice of the server operating system pie than it already gets.

As shown in Figure 1, according to International Data Corporation, Microsoft’s Windows NT got 38 percent of the 4.4 million operating systems shipped in 1998. And in 1999, Microsoft’s growth exactly matched that of the overall OS market, which grew at 24 percent, and therefore still got only a 38 percent share of the 5.4 million operating systems shipped in 1999. Linux, after growing at 212 percent in 1998, grew at nearly four times the industry rate to account for 25 percent of server operating systems shipped. If 1999 growth rates persist until the end of 2000—Microsoft growing at 24 percent, Linux growing at 93 percent—Linux will match WinNT/2K in the server space. I’m not saying this will happen. I’m just saying that it is possible. I am also saying that this possibility should be enough for IBM to perhaps begin reconsidering its AS/400-Linux strategies.

2,500,000

2,000,000

1,500,000

1,000,000

500,000

0

Source: International Data Corp.

Annual Network OS Shipments 24% 93% 6% 1% -25%

Windows NT Linux NetWare UNIX Other

Note: Percentages are year-to-year growth rates.

1998 Shipments

1999 Shipments

Figure 1: Linux is giving Microsoft serious trouble in the server space, and NetWare continues to be popular despite rumors of its demise.

Also Read

The Effects of COVID-19 on the IBM i Ecosystem

Dissecting the HelpSystems IBM i Marketplace Survey

IBM i Receives Package Manager Support