At the Spring COMMON Conference in Minneapolis, the big news was IBM's twin announcements that PHP and Voice over IP (VOIP) would be deployed on the newly renamed System i platform. In case you missed this news, Zend Technologies will deliver a native version of its Zend Core PHP engine for i5/OS, and 3Com will deliver a version of its VOIP technology to run in a Linux partition on the System i. Lee Kroon's article last week gives a good overview of what is being offered and its significance.
These two announcements highlight parts of the strategy that IBM General Manager Mark Shearer is following to win new customers to the System i. This variegated strategy aims to bring new workloads to the System i, while simultaneously increasing the value of the platform by attracting new ISV talent with new, cutting-edge technologies.
A Drop in the Bucket?
Of course, the question on everyone's lips at COMMON was "Can any strategy bring new customers to the System i?" IBM's Elaine Lennox told us several weeks ago that the System i gained 2,700 new customers last year, in addition to having a good year with loyalists. Mark Shearer says that the System i has garnered over 1,700 new applications for the system, with 240 "ServerProven" tools and 70 new tool vendors. And, most importantly, for the first time in a decade, the System i market actually grew.
But realistically, isn't this just a drop in the bucket? Twenty-seven hundred new customers doesn't seem like a large number, considering the size of the IT industry, and as a percentage of market share, it's miniscule.
Yet IBM is adamant that it will not abandon the System i customer base and that it is serious about breaking into double-digit growth for the platform. It insists that it understands the AS/400/iSeries/System i customer space and says that it has a comprehensive plan to return the brand to popularity and profitability.
The Marketing Model Beyond Commodity-Priced Hardware
Part of that strategy relies upon the movement of the IT industry away from the economic model of commodity-priced computing hardware. IBM accurately points out that the cost of purchasing any server hardware represents only 25% of what a customer spends: The other 75% will be spent just keeping these "cheap" solutions running after personnel costs have been factored into the equation. The System i has a significantly better track record at lowering those personnel costs.
So, instead of competing against commodity-priced hardware, the IBM strategy builds an economic model with standards-based computing atop a bulletproof proprietary hardware platform, fueled by an advanced, integrated operating system that can run any application from almost any other operating system. Analysis by nearly every leading IT industry group—from Forester Research to Gartner Group—points to the overall cost-savings and IT management advantages of moving toward an integrated platform like the System i.
However, to make this strategy function, IBM must foster new relationships with ISVs that will bring their new technologies and applications to the platform to enhance the value proposition of an integrated computing platform. And that's where the System i Initiative for Innovation comes in.
Is New Technology Enough? The Skeptics Speak.
According to IBM, "The System i5 Initiative for Innovation is designed to foster growth of new, innovative solutions for customers—unleashing the combined talents of IBM and IBM ISVs to help enable business growth for our mutual customers."
But can IBM actually attract new customers to the VOIP technologies that 3Com is developing? Will Zend's PHP engine—natively implemented on i5/OS—actually lure the 20,000 developers who currently script with PHP?
For many non-System i IT executives, this proposition seems patently absurd. In their minds, the System i is—and always has been—an AS/400: a relational database machine designed for accounting and materials requirements planning (MRP). For these IT decision-makers, you can't teach an old dog new tricks. For them, it is going to take more than a white-smocked engineer wiring up the box for tin-can telephony or some goofy-looking child programmer scribbling PHP code in the source libraries. In their minds, implementing any new technology on any "foreign" (read: non-Windows/non-UNIX) platform must have significant up-front cost savings with service guarantees that reduce the risk of a catastrophe.
Yet IBM fully recognizes that these additions to the System i technology suite are not door-openers to new customers themselves. In Mark Shearer's mind, these technologies are the bait to attract a new generation of ISVs who, by partnering with 3Com and Zend and other traditional System i ISVs, will bring new integration and functionality to System i application base. Why does he believe this? Because, if history is any measure, this sort of strategy has worked before.
Lotus: A Synergistic Benchmark
For example, in the mid-1990s IBM bought the Lotus Corporation. Within a year, IBM Rochester announced that it was going to port the Notes/Domino groupware suite to the AS/400. Within five years, the AS/400 became the fastest-growing platform for Lotus, and the top revenue-generator for Notes developers. Today, Lotus Notes/Domino is still neck and neck with Microsoft for market share of installed email client licenses, and it's gaining ground primarily on the back of the System i.
Mark Shearer sees a similar path for VOIP on the System i: The System i can enable call-center ISVs to integrate their telephony products and conferencing services into IBM Workplace and Lotus Notes/Domino applications, thus eliminating entire racks of non-IBM servers from the IT machine room. The cost savings in integrating these loosely coupled services into comprehensive application suites could be enough to sway the most skeptical of IT decision-makers, especially if the entry cost is competitive.
Likewise, 3Com sees the advantage of bundling its VOIP technology with other System i ISV applications when 3Com's equipment is sold as a part of the package.
Can System i Attract PHP Developers?
A similar argument can be made about Zend's native i5/OS engine: Zend's PHP Studio client software stands to reach a wider customer base if it can penetrate the Fortune 1000 boardrooms on the back of the System i. The draw for IT will be the thousands of open-source applications written in PHP that can now begin to penetrate the System i market space. Meanwhile, ISVs with PHP applications that use Zend's source obfuscation module can protect their intellectual property while simultaneously opening a new market space for their wares.
Calculated Risks for the System i Developer Community
For Zend Technologies, moving PHP to the System i is a win-win scenario, but for Shearer, it's a calculated risk that might actually alienate the traditional System i developer community.
Many traditional System i programmers would prefer to see RPG given a new name as a scripting language and have IBM actively develop and promote the language on a cross-platform offering. They would rather have this happen than face yet another language learning curve in order to maintain unsupported open-source applications written in PHP. Others still would rather see more effort placed on increasing J2EE performance on the System i.
Clearly, Shearer is trying to attract new blood into the System i developer community, but no one is quite clear whether these new developers will ultimately become System i converts—as most RPG programmers and Lotus Notes/Domino developers have become—or whether they will merely leave a mess of poorly constructed PHP code for others to clean up later.
Backlash from System i Community?
Thus we come at last full circle to one of the conundrums that IBM executives found themselves facing at the COMMON Conference in Minneapolis: The stalwart and loyal System i customer base is beginning to vocally resist all of the new changes.
For instance, these customers complain that IBM has changed the name of the platform from AS/400 to iSeries to System i5 and now to System i all within the last five to six years. It seems to them that the platform has had as many new names as it has had IBM general managers and marketing executives. Moreover, IBM hasn't even been able to keep its documentation up-to-date, calling the platform one thing in one manual and something else in another. Even IBM's product Web pages have not kept up with the changes.
In addition, in these customers' minds, expanding the technological base of the platform has not actually added new functionality for their companies, but has instead added confusion about how to obtain education, how to inform their management, and how to obtain talent for in-house projects. To some degree, it was easier to get things done before IBM added partitions, added the hypervisor, changed the platform's name, and threw a bunch of new applications in from other foreign operating systems. What happened to the AS/400 that they knew and loved?
Moving Ahead
Of course, this has been IBM's problem with the platform since it evolved from the days of the System/38: How do you satisfy a loyal customer base while attracting new customers? How do you turn the System i from a niche information system product into a force within the computing industry without leaving the loyalists struggling with the effects of rapid change?
How the System i team solves these customers' concerns doesn't seem to be much on IBM's mind at the moment. Instead, IBM is focusing on the new opportunities with ISVs to gain new market share and new customers, and it isn't going to be distracted by the complaints of traditionalists.
From our perspective, this is the right move, and it's long since past due.
Thomas M. Stockwell is Editor in Chief of MC Press Online, LP.
More than ever, there is a demand for IT to deliver innovation. Your IBM i has been an essential part of your business operations for years. However, your organization may struggle to maintain the current system and implement new projects. The thousands of customers we've worked with and surveyed state that expectations regarding the digital footprint and vision of the company are not aligned with the current IT environment.
TRY the one package that solves all your document design and printing challenges on all your platforms. Produce bar code labels, electronic forms, ad hoc reports, and RFID tags – without programming! MarkMagic is the only document design and print solution that combines report writing, WYSIWYG label and forms design, and conditional printing in one integrated product. Make sure your data survives when catastrophe hits. Request your trial now! Request Now.
Forms of ransomware has been around for over 30 years, and with more and more organizations suffering attacks each year, it continues to endure. What has made ransomware such a durable threat and what is the best way to combat it? In order to prevent ransomware, organizations must first understand how it works.
Disaster protection is vital to every business. Yet, it often consists of patched together procedures that are prone to error. From automatic backups to data encryption to media management, Robot automates the routine (yet often complex) tasks of iSeries backup and recovery, saving you time and money and making the process safer and more reliable. Automate your backups with the Robot Backup and Recovery Solution. Key features include:
Business users want new applications now. Market and regulatory pressures require faster application updates and delivery into production. Your IBM i developers may be approaching retirement, and you see no sure way to fill their positions with experienced developers. In addition, you may be caught between maintaining your existing applications and the uncertainty of moving to something new.
IT managers hoping to find new IBM i talent are discovering that the pool of experienced RPG programmers and operators or administrators with intimate knowledge of the operating system and the applications that run on it is small. This begs the question: How will you manage the platform that supports such a big part of your business? This guide offers strategies and software suggestions to help you plan IT staffing and resources and smooth the transition after your AS/400 talent retires. Read on to learn:
LATEST COMMENTS
MC Press Online