Has planning your IT initiatives on i ever felt like playing darts blindfolded? A new survey reveals what 350 of your peers on the platform are doing.
Historically, the IBM i marketplace has had very little exposure, with few independent analyses of the way businesses use the technology. While IBM has funded studies from International Technology Group (ITG), organizations like Forrester and Gartner have considered this market to be similar to that of the mainframe: stable and not changing. On the highest level, that's nice to know, but those of us who are using this platform with SAN, VIOS, VTL, Java, PHP, and other modern technologies need a little more meat.
At HelpSystems, we speak with IT professionals regularly about their IT infrastructures and platform changes. We've seen firsthand their frustration over the lack of information available, and we recognized the need to foster a deeper understanding of the state of the IBM i platform. With no other source for this information, we teamed up with IT Jungle and PowerWire.eu to gather it ourselves.
The first annual IBM i Marketplace Survey, conducted in fall 2014, independently and anonymously surveyed 350 organizations and IT professionals around the globe that use this platform day to day. We focused on three main categories—the data center, IT initiatives, and the outlook for IBM i—and the results were a pleasant surprise, even to us!
IBM i in the Data Center
To sketch a more complete profile of IBM i data centers, we asked for the model and quantity of Power servers, as well as the number of partitions and which version of IBM i they're running. We also asked which (if any) other operating systems and servers they run alongside IBM i, including AIX, Linux, and x86 (Windows and Linux). Of course, no portrait of the data center would be complete without information on staffing, from operators and administrators to developers and even managed service providers (MSPs).
IT Initiatives
The bulk of the study centered on completed, current, and upcoming IT initiatives, such as application modernization, SQL database access, document management, business intelligence, and more. We found that most of the organizations surveyed shared concerns about high availability (HA), IBM i skills depletion, mobile access, and data growth over the next five to ten years. Further questioning along these lines fleshed out the prevalence of VIOS and SAN data storage technology, VTL and FlashCopy backup technology, as well as IASP and other HA technology.
The results indicated that running a web server on IBM i is a popular choice, likely because it doesn't require change management approval on the desktop and administrators don't have to worry about server and desktop compatibility issues. The results also showed that while 87 percent of new development is still in RPG, another 38 percent also uses Java, with significant percentages for COBOL, PHP, .NET, and others.
General consensus showed IBM i to be a good platform for business intelligence, data analytics, and data warehousing. It also still proves to be highly securable and highly automatable, with most organizations running unattended and using tools to send notification of problems.
IBM i Outlook
Overall, the many encouraging responses all speak to a user community that's committed to building on the power of IBM i by keeping current and utilizing modern technology. We found that 89 percent of users have no imminent plans to leave the platform, and an overwhelming 94 percent believe that IBM i servers provide better ROI than other servers.
The safety of your data is priority #1 for CIOs worldwide, and the recoverability of that data is a close second. With the growth of data and the need to secure it, the Power server is a great fit for most data centers. It really comes down to how well IBM is able to sell this technology and compel end users to invest.
Marketing is certainly an issue, but at the end of the day it's the applications that keep the platform rolling. Can the application vendors keep the community happily trucking along? Vendors like Infor think they can, and as a matter of fact they believe the server has a unique advantage to their competitors like Oracle.
A panel of industry experts, including Timothy Prickett Morgan (IT Jungle), Ian Jarman (IBM), Alison Butterill (IBM), and Tom Huntington (HelpSystems) will provide insight on the survey results in a live webinar on March 26. We hope you can join us!
In the meantime, be sure to download your free copy of the complete 2015 IBM i Marketplace Survey Results, and stay tuned for your opportunity to participate in the IBM i Marketplace Survey for 2016.
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