On January 9, 2003, IBM announced that Buell Duncan, General Manager of eServer iSeries and pSeries, had accepted a new position within IBM as General Manager of Developer Relations, replacing retiring Robert Timpsom. In Duncan's place, Al Zollar--formerly the General Manager of IBM Lotus Software--has now become General Manager of eServer iSeries.

Buell Duncan's contribution to the eServer iSeries brand has been substantial, leaving the iSeries platform in its strongest technical position in decades. But the legacy of Duncan's success still leaves many challenges for Zollar to face. What did Duncan accomplish? How will Zollar handle the "misfit" iSeries challenges?

The Buell Duncan Legacy

Two years ago, Duncan roared onto IBM's PartnerWorld stage dressed in a racing jump suit and a crash helmet, with a promise to turn heads toward the new IBM iSeries and pSeries brands of midrange computers--and that's exactly what he did.

Not since Bill Zeitler's tenure as General Manager of the AS/400 had the newly branded iSeries found such enthusiastic support. Duncan proposed significant changes in how the iSeries would be developed by engineers and how it would be marketed through its Business Partners. He also promised to increase the levels of support that its customers experienced with new operating system releases and performance. At that time, many analysts were once again predicting the demise of the AS/400 platform. It was a platform that ran an operating system that heralded back to the days of the IBM System/38 on hardware composed almost completely of pSeries components. Analysts asked how Duncan could keep the renamed server relevant. In response, Duncan rolled up his sleeves and dove under the hood.

Building the iSeries Brand Image

Duncan consulted with hardware and software engineers, long-time customers and loyal analysts, trusted Business Partners and savvy marketers to devise a plan that he hoped would uniquely brand the iSeries server in the minds of mid-market customers. That plan stressed power, performance, customizability, and an unparalleled standards-based flexibility to handle the needs of a unique customer set. His target customers were those in the mid-market who needed to run multiple operating systems, who connected to multiple computing platforms within a supply chain, who handled tremendous transactional workloads, and who had few technical IT resources for support. In a time when other hardware platform vendors were vying to build up the customer's server farm, Duncan's plan for the iSeries was to simplify, consolidate, and reduce the expense of running an IT shop by providing a machine that could do as much as possible in a single footprint with few IT personnel.

The SUV of the Mid-Market

In addition, Duncan took aim at the most profitable sector of the mid-market: the high-end midrange customer. Instead of stressing the iSeries' ability to compete in the low-end commodity server marketplace (where Duncan's predecessor, Tom Jarosh, had invested R&D dollars), Duncan called for an SUV type of mid-level mainframe that ran OS/400, Unix, Linux, and Windows applications all in a single box. The phrase "the mainframe for the mid-market" was aimed at the ear of customers whose growing businesses were moving their shops into the resource-intensive realm of mainframe computing. These customers didn't want to spend big dollars on IT personnel: They wanted control of their IT environment with a system that maximized the personnel resources they already had.

But Duncan's plan to promote this expanded vision of the new iSeries brand to a skeptical mid-market audience was hampered by limited IBM marketing resources for the platform. The key question was, how would he attract new customers to the unique iSeries servers when corporate IBM was set upon a path of marketing its entire spectrum of servers--many of which competed head to head with the iSeries?

Finding and Inventing Community

Duncan's solution--inspired by IBM's famed marketer, Malcom Haines, was to enlist an unexpected resource. Instead of trying to convert the "unwashed" masses of the mid-market to embrace a radical iSeries design with expensive media communications, Duncan built a support community of loyal iSeries IT professionals who could vouch for the resiliency of the platform and act as the frontline promoters of the system. This strategy fostered the launch of the iSeries Nation, a loose confederation of iSeries customers and proponents who knew the strengths of the machine and could answer the critics. The goal of the iSeries Nation was not to spend expensive marketing resources trying to convert Windows or Unix OS bigots but to find real customers with real business problems who already believed that the "radical" kind of computing represented by the iSeries platform was actually what business computing was supposed to be about.

iSeries Success in a Tight Economic Time

Duncan's vision of the product proved to be relatively successful, and though analysts bemoaned "the worst IT recession in history," the iSeries platform not only maintained its established customer base, but expanded that base with a modest supply of new customers and converts. As a result of Duncan's leadership, the image of the iSeries brand has been significantly enhanced, its underlying technology refreshed, and its position in the mid-market substantially solidified. And even though all of Duncan's long-term design plans have yet to be realized (Unix and Linux application support is still somewhat limited), the pathway to those achievements has been well mapped out for engineers to complete.

Al Zollar's Challenges: Crash Course in Server Economics

The position of General Manager for the eServer iSeries brand is now Zollar's, who was previously General Manager of IBM's Lotus Software division. Zollar took over at Lotus after founder and CEO Jeff Papows left in June 2000.

By far the greatest challenge facing Zollar will be the differences between managing a software company and managing a hardware/software brand.

Sales of iSeries boxes are still not where they need to be to ensure continued long-term IBM support of the platform. And though the iSeries technical profile is quite robust, developers are still reluctant to invest major dollars to bring new and unique business solutions to the platform. This means that the value statement to attract new customers rests solely on the shoulders of Business Partners, who must better communicate with new customer prospects about the underlying benefits of the versatile iSeries server.

However, the decision to purchase a particular brand of server seldom rests these days upon the solid business logic principles that have traditionally been the iSeries bread and butter. Instead, that purchasing decision often is determined by the software developer's choice of operating systems or by the IT department's biased experience with Windows or Unix. And, in a business climate where Microsoft dominates the minds of IT personnel, overcoming this obstacle will not be easy. If the iSeries is to succeed in these tight economic times, Zollar must continue to invent new reasons to buy it, addressing both the technical and the business marketing arguments that make the system unique and relevant.

Yet Zollar's experience with Lotus' cross-platform products--Domino/Notes, Sametime, QuickPlace, and LearningSpace--may give the iSeries the edge that it needs. Lotus has enjoyed increasing business share despite a market dominated by Microsoft Corporation. If Zollar can transport the lessons learned in that competitive software market segment to the hardware server marketplace, the iSeries may stand a good chance of surviving and thriving through tight economic times.

And though we may not expect Zollar to show the race-track enthusiasm that typified Duncan's tenure as general manager, perhaps he'll ask Duncan for one favor: In the event that he doesn't succeed, perhaps Duncan will lend him the crash helmet.

Thomas M. Stockwell is the Editor in Chief of MC Press, LLC. He has written extensively about program development, project management, IT management, and IT consulting and has been a frequent contributor to many midrange periodicals. He has authored numerous white papers for iSeries solutions providers. His most recent consulting assignments have been as a Senior Industry Analyst working with IBM on the iSeries, on the mid-market, and specifically on WebSphere brand positioning. He welcomes your comments about this or other articles and can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..