Even though its vital signs are strong by anyone's measure, some folks are again preparing to fall to rest on bent knees over the System i. This most certainly seems like déjà vu, and it makes me wonder if déjà vu has any purpose.
Fifteen years from now and after two more name changes, the System i will be represented in vast numbers. Its TCO will be lower than ever, system uptime will be stellar, leasing terms will be attractive, and ISVs will be plentiful and will fill out the solutions portfolio. Only the badly conceived TV commercials will have faded, and techies with still-vibrant "iSeries. My series" tattoos on their arms will be a reminder of those days.
Yup, I think its fair to say that in 15 years, the death knell will have sounded for other seemingly watershed technologies but not the System i. It will be a System i world much like it is today. We're inescapably surrounded by services that are delivered to us with the help of IBM midrange technology.
Here is what I mean by a "System i world": Yesterday, I hopped in my car, which, in part, is built with steel supplied by Michigan-based MacSteel Corporation, and drove to Walgreen's to pick up a prescription, a Pfizer product. Then I stopped off at Circuit City to buy the new Arctic Monkeys CD on EMI (for my niece, not me), and moved on to Costco, where I bought some groceries and a bottle of wine (for me). At that point, I needed gasoline, so I tanked up at Quik Trip and went home. In two hours, I interacted with seven companies that rely heavily on System i servers. Had I stopped at the ATM to get some cash, it would have been eight.
The number of unique iSeries/i5 customers is now supposedly around 220,000. The number of machines in use is nearly 500,000. Imagine going to Google Maps, entering "IBM System i5 installations," and having it produce a map with a half a million red map pins. For those who are going to try this, let me just say that you'll get roughly four pages of System i stuff and some map pins but not the secret metrics that IBM guards so closely.
Granted, at times the progenitors of the System i have stumbled. Users and partners said IBM didn't listen attentively when they spoke, but IBM has gone to great lengths to fix these problems like only a giant corporation can. If IBM does such a lousy job of listening to the market because, supposedly, it sees the System i as a cash cow, then why can't I turn around without bumping into a System i box? These machines are responsible for billions of dollars that flow through the global economy each day, and it's hard for anyone not to interact with one at a low degree of separation.
So Who Keeps Winding the Doomsday Clock?
Sales activity for most products is cyclical. Hundreds of factors sway computer buyers. These days, it happens to be geopolitical turmoil, crude oil prices, and inflation. When quarterly sales numbers are down, angst levels go up. And when sales are up, everyone is afraid to set their fear aside for a day and have a picnic. Part of the planning process is analyzing what went wrong in the past, but at times the process of identifying problems perpetuates itself. Criticism becomes a form of stimulation and satisfies the need for intellectualization and control.
In 2005, year-over-year growth for this platform jumped 1 percent in Q1, 10 percent in Q2, and 25 percent in Q3. IBM has also shored up its marketing efforts by spending more than $125 million on its ISV development program. Better support for partners means more opportunity and a broad spectrum of solutions for users. A strong ecosystem, such as the one that surrounds the i5 platform, has a lot of momentum, and cynicism won't slow it down.
Faster processors, cheaper disks, and improved interoperability have kept IBM's midrange offering in good stead with more than a couple hundred thousand businesses around the world. In January, IBM announced a new member of the System i lineup aimed at small and midsize businesses. This system uses the POWER5+, a dual-core chip that runs at up to 2.2 GHz, which is a 33 percent increase in performance over the previous POWER5-based System i models. IBM also announced i5/OS V5R4, which runs Linux, AIX 5L, and Microsoft Windows applications on the same system. I think the appropriate response to this information is, "Wow! How did they do it?"
Déjà vu could be caused by an abnormal delay in the time that information is passed between the area of the brain that processes sensory information and the area that makes sense of this data in real time. This extended delay makes the event seem like it happened before. In my humble opinion, like dire prophecy, it serves no purpose.
Robert Gast has reported on technology and business since 1986. Robert is Managing Partner at Evant Group and can be reached at
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