When Buell Duncan and his management team spoke to customers in an iSeries Nation briefing last month, they did more than tell us about their marketing priorities for 2003. They also revealed what they will do to position the iSeries as favorably as possible within IBM when it converges with its sister POWER server--the Unix-based pSeries--in 2004.
As I mentioned in my article last week, Duncan took pains during the briefing to characterize the iSeries as the eServer of the future. To support this point, Duncan revealed that IBM is using the iSeries as its central server for the intraGrid, a network of roughly 160 grid-connected servers that IBM's research and development teams use for internal collaboration. He also noted that the intraGrid's manager told him that he is using the iSeries because it is the only server that can run "blades of Unix, blades of Windows, blades of Linux, and soon blades of AIX."
Who Is the Audience Here?
While I am glad to hear that IBM's research teams are using the iSeries in their server grid, I have to wonder why Duncan would emphasize this fact with customers. I don't know of any customer who plans to integrate the iSeries into a grid, much less build one around the server. For that matter, I don't know of many customers who use or even plan to use the iSeries to run three or four operating systems in the logical partitions (LPARs) that Duncan is now calling "blades." As such, I have to wonder who the audience is for these statements. The only conclusion I can draw is that the audience is IBM itself.
Allow me to explain why I believe this to be the case. To put it plainly, the iSeries-pSeries convergence holds tremendous potential to both help and hurt the iSeries community. The benefits to the iSeries are obvious and include the following ones:
- Instead of lagging behind the pSeries technologically, iSeries customers will get the latest upgrades to POWER processors and other hardware at the same time that pSeries customers get them. This will considerably improve the performance and scalability of applications running in OS/400 partitions on the converged server.
- Instead of paying higher prices for servers, feature cards, and peripherals, iSeries customers will likely enjoy the lower prices that pSeries customers currently pay for these items. Duncan hinted at this in his statements during last month's briefing.
- By joining with the pSeries, the iSeries could benefit from the much greater marketing and sales resources that IBM pours into its Unix server. Those resources could make thousands of IT customers more aware of the benefits that iSeries technologies--not to mention iSeries applications--have to offer their organizations.
Please notice, however, my use of "could" in the last bullet, because I use it for a reason. While the iSeries offers a unique set of benefits that has helped to create a loyal community of customers and developers, neither the server nor the community has high visibility within much of IBM. For years, sources within the iSeries organization have privately complained to me about the lack of respect the iSeries gets from the rest of Big Blue. For instance, while much of the technology within the xSeries' Enterprise X-Architecture comes from the iSeries, the xSeries organization regularly attributes these technologies to IBM's mainframes. The same thing happens in the pSeries group, which talks about its mainframe-inspired capabilities while deriving much of its logical partitioning technology from Rochester.
IBM's lack of attention also extends to iSeries customers and software vendors. While the company has declared that small and medium-size businesses are one of its five "big plays" for 2002, most of its management teams are still fixated on large enterprises and the first-tier software vendors that serve them. This is still the case for much of the pSeries organization, which derives the bulk of its revenue from companies with more than 1,000 employees that purchase high-priced solutions from companies such as SAP, Siebel, and PeopleSoft. By contrast, the typical iSeries customer is much smaller and purchases software from vendors that rarely appear on the evaluation lists of enterprise customers.
It is this lack of attention that is motivating Duncan and his management team to promote the iSeries to the rest of IBM. Once the iSeries and pSeries converge, Big Blue will have to make some big decisions about the development, marketing, and sales resources it will dedicate to each constituency within the combined customer and developer communities. Those decisions will largely be made on the revenue potential of each constituency. What does this mean? To be blunt, it means that if the iSeries community does not buy lots of OS/400 LPARs and modernized OS/400 solutions on the converged server, the operating system will compete poorly for funding and management attention. As a result, the lion's share of IBM's resources will flow to the other operating systems and the developers that write to them. This would effectively relegate OS/400 LPARs and applications to the role of "legacy systems" that provide data and some transaction processing support to all the modern, Web-aware solutions running on other operating systems and LPARs within the server.
This is why Duncan and his management team are so intent on reconnecting with customers and software vendors. They know that to gain attention and funding from IBM, iSeries developers and customers will have to do two things. First, developers will have to aggressively modernize existing solutions and will probably need to use IBM middleware technologies such as WebSphere to do so. Second, customers will have to enthusiastically buy those Web-enabled solutions. And whether we like it or not, this means that the iSeries community will have to make significant investments in new technologies and skills. If it does not, Duncan and his team will not have the evidence they need to prove to the rest of IBM that the iSeries is indeed the eServer of the future rather than the green-screen AS/400 of the past.
I realize that these words may be tough medicine for some in the iSeries community to swallow. However, we have to face the fact that IBM, like any company in a free-market society, puts its money where it will get the best return. As such, the iSeries community needs to respond to Duncan's campaign by investing in its server of choice, even though investments are tough to make in an economic downturn. If we do not make such investment, the merger with the pSeries will bring us fast and cheap hardware, but little else.
Lee Kroon is a Senior Industry Analyst for Andrews Consulting Group, a firm that helps mid-sized companies manage business transformation through technology. You can reach him at
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