System iNetwork

March 2008

March 31, 2008 8:42 AM

Shearer Throws Down at the COMMON Opening Session

Mark Shearer, IBM's vice president of marketing and offerings for the IBM Business Systems group, thew down the gauntlet from the stage at the COMMON Opening Session in Nashville yesterday. By the end of this week, Shearer told the crowd, "If you're not hanging from the ceiling with enthusiasm, send me an e-mail."

I'm sure he was just using a metaphor -- the ceilings are quite high at the Gaylord Opryland Resort -- but Shearer was serious about the e-mail. How he came to this throw down, however, the context, is worth backing up for.

Rewind

"IBM's objective this week is to have you return to your companies at the end of the week from Nashville thinking that this has been the best week for our i clients since the launch of the AS/400 twenty years ago," Shearer said.

"So that's the standard you can measure me against . . . and I know you will," he added. "But this is an extremely, extremely important week."

Shearer then covered the last few years of System i-related activity in an attempt to frame the most recent year . . . and to provide a basis for the next twenty years of the System i. "I really have always characterized the System i evolution as a multi-year journey," he said.

Fast Forward to 2007

The most important points came in 2007, where Shearer talked up how IBM has been working on repackaging the System i and focusing on more favorable "price-to-value" ratios, which a lot of customers have been clamoring for.

As examples, Shearer mentioned the System i 515 and 525 models and user-based pricing, the CBU boxes for backup purposes that cost less than production boxes, and the POWER6 i570. Interestingly, the 515 and 525 drove a 20 percent increase in volumes shipped to SMB clients last year, and Shearer said we'll see more of the "pay for what you use philosophy" from IBM.

"We made some material progress," he said. "But I know you want additional progress."

A Slipped in Clue -- The New Logo?

As Shearer was showing a slide that listed some of the hardware, there were photos of System i boxes and some BladeCenter hardware, as well as a logo that I've never seen before. IBM has been using a cool green ribbon "P" logo, which you can see at Power.org in the upper left corner, but this new logo was in the shape of a vertical rectangle. At the top, I believe it said, "POWER6", followed by "Built On" in a green bar, followed by the "P" logo with "Power" underneath.

Is it a logo linked to Wednesday's "The New Power Equation" Town Hall Meeting and IBM's announcements? Shearer didn't mention the logo in his presentation, but price-to-value was a big theme with Shearer in the opening session, so there's a good chance that this logo accidentally made it into Shearer's presentation. Then again, Shearer is a smart guy and I'm positive that IBM knows a thing or two about subliminal messaging and marketing, so I'm willing to say that the inclusion of the logo has at least a 30 percent chance of being entirely intentional.

Cool stuff, actually -- I can hardly wait for the official details.

VIP Making Progress

Shearer also noted that the Vertical Industry Program (VIP) "drove well over $100,000,000 in System i revenue last year, and it's on a very rapid growth path." Shearer pointed out that the VIP program's niche-focused approach to solution selling was "every bit as important as technically enabling solutions" and that we'll see more activity in this area going forward.

Stockholm Kids

One of the funniest anecdotes came when Shearer described a 17-year-old kid in Stockholm who was passionately going off on Shearer about how ridiculously difficult it was to set up and install a System i -- and that the thick IBM manuals were terrible and so on. The kid didn't know who Shearer was -- "he probably thought I was a developer from Rochester," Shearer noted; but the point is, the little chat hit home to Shearer, who took the experience to IBM's usability lab.

"I was bound and determined that I was going to set up a 520 . . . and now I have some construction criticisms of my own," he deadpanned -- to the delight of the crowd.

Delivering the Future

Shearer's presentation, overall, was enthusiastic, and at times it seemed as if he was on the verge of saying more . . . often referencing IBM's "The New Power Equation" Town Hall Meeting on Wednesday. At one point he told the crowd to check out the price-to-value equation of the BladeCenter S and i5/OS later this week, then pulled back from the topic almost ruefully, noting "They won't let me say more...."

"We're looking to deliver the future of the System i, and I hope you like it as much as I do," he said.

Posted by cmaxcer on March 31, 2008 at 8:42 AM | Comments (6)

March 30, 2008 11:49 PM

Business at the COMMON Opening Session

For the first part of the Opening Session at COMMON in Nashville on Sunday, it was business as usual: COMMON President Randy Dufault welcomed the crowd and reminded everyone that COMMON was more than just an industry-leading conference -- it's a user group meeting, too, where COMMON leaders and members alike conduct the business that keeps COMMON running.

And in the spirit of user groups, Dufault asked the crowd for a show of hands of those who had already upgraded to V6R1, which has been available for barely a week, and the question itself drew hearty laughs and few -- if any -- could show their hands.

Still, the point Dufault was getting at was clear: when it comes time to install V6R1 or make any IT-related leap, you want the collective experience, tips, tricks, and advice that can only come from an active group of users on your side.

Three Pillars

Dufault reminded the crowd of COMMON's three pillars, Advocacy, Education, and Community, that form the basis for the COMMON mission, and used the pillars as a frame to cover COMMON's ongoing activities, such as educational offerings outside of the yearly main event.

One particularly interesting achievement is the sellout of the IT Executive Conference, which is a concurrent event that's dedicated to high-level IT decision makers. It's now in its seventh year, and for the first time, all of the available spaces -- 40 of them -- were taken. They were filled by executives from all over the world, from all sizes of companies, and they come to network with their peers and share their System i problems and solutions. Sure, these executives get a chance to go golfing or spend some quality time on a massage table in the spa, but there's a bigger point here: Developers may do the real work in the System i world, but it's the advocacy and support of decision-making executives that enable the System i to exist in companies around the world -- the cold hard truth, no doubt, but group enthusiasm, mindshare, and their signatures on IBM non-disclosure agreements are all good things for the i-loving enthusiasts who make up the COMMON rank and file attendees.

Top-Notch Speakers

COMMON, of course, continued with tradition and recognized the best speakers from the previous COMMON, trotting the experts up on stage to accept awards that were calculated by the reviews of the attendees at their sessions. The winners are filled with System i luminaries. Al Barsa, Jr., Larry Bolhuis, Jim Chambers, Kim Greene, Laura Knapp, Kevin Mort, Randall Munson, Jim Sloan, Bob Tipton, and Paul Tuohy took home gold medal awards, with Richard Dolewski, Susan Gantner, Skip Marchesani, Jon Paris, Trevor Perry, Debbie Saugen, and Larry Youngren picking up silver medal status.

Judging by audience reaction, though, more than a few attendees appreciated Best New Session - 2007 winners Larry Bolhuis and Kevin Mort, who delivered, "Pimp My i, Extreme System i Engineering".

In other award news, David "midrange.com" Gibbs took home COMMON's Distinguished Service Award, and he did it to the sound of thunderous applause.

The Quad-COMMON Guy

Mark Shearer, IBM's vice president of marketing and offerings for the IBM Business Systems group, as well as former GM of the System i prior to IBM's radical reorganization, seemed genuinely excited to be in Nashville for his fourth consecutive COMMON conference -- if not positively energized. Shearer discussed the last few years of System i-related activity in an attempt to frame the most recent year . . . and provide a basis for the next twenty years of the System i. "I've always characterized the System i evolution as a multi-year journey," he said.

Shearer covered quite a bit of ground, so I've broken out coverage of his presentation in a separate post, "Shearer Throws Down at the COMMON Opening Session."

As for the a keynote speaker, which has been absent in previous COMMON events, but returned due to member interest, IBM's Dr. Jurij R. Paraszczak, an IBM Research Director for Industry Solutions, shared some of the challenges that IBM's massive research organization is busy tackling day in and day out.

One challenge, for example, comes back to power consumption in the data center, and how it's directly related to the shrinking of microprocessors, which has been the key method behind increasing computational speed, which, to use the purely scientific term, is all about raw horsepower. If I understand what Paraszczak was illustrating, the gate in a microprocessor has gotten so small -- down to a porous layer of atoms -- that it allows energy to be consumed by the processor even when the processor is passive and isn't being fully utilized. We're reaching the physical limits of miniaturization, he said, which has led to the power consumption (and cooling problems) many companies are experiencing in their data centers.

But back to this issue of increasing processing horsepower, the answer has been to have multiple processors work in parallel in multi-core solutions, but most IT applications, for example, haven't been developed to work with multiple processors simultaneously. And while some industries are becoming increasingly hungry for solutions that can process massive amounts of complex data, the next big leap in microprocessor design hasn't yet been figured out -- but IBM is working on it.

Overall, Paraszczak's presentation was a departure from standard System i-focused fare, but the kind of broader perspective he delivered -- as Dufault noted afterward -- was an example of why COMMON attendees wanted the return of conference keynote addresses.

But anyway, for the System i-focused core of the opening session, see "Shearer Throws Down at the COMMON Opening Session."

Posted by cmaxcer on March 30, 2008 at 11:49 PM | Comments (0)

March 26, 2008 8:38 AM

The Calm Before the COMMON Storm

The annual COMMON conference will kick off Sunday, and indubitably it's a great time of year for the System i world. IBM and its Business Partners will take advantage of the event to show off new solutions, vendors will announce their latest and greatest, and many attendees will get a boost of adrenaline in the form of education and inspiration. For now, though, the System i world is in the eye of a hurricane, and it's eerily calm . . . there are just a few minor news items, such as the Lawson Conference and User Exchange (CUE) event that took place last week to the tune of 5,000 attendees, which far eclipses COMMON these days . . . does anyone not believe it's an application-centric world?

V6R1 shipped out last Friday, and IBM will be able to show it off at the Expo at COMMON and talk about it in sessions. There has been a lot going on since the last COMMON, not the least of which is IBM's restructuring and a Town Hall Meeting that's shaping up to deliver even more game-changing news. Mark Shearer will no doubt talk about the "secret sauce" that is i5/OS, and the next generation of POWER6-based systems should deliver a powerful combination with V6R1.

Then there's RDi and RDi SOA and how the System i in-house development world will respond. I can see both renewed interest in IBM tooling as well as a renewed interest in third-party developer solutions as customers are able to see the cards IBM is holding and become more willing to bet on others. I think IBM's RDi announcements might be a catalyst for action in those organizations that have been playing a System i game of poker but have been consistently folding their hands, not willing to risk making a move.

How about a BladeCenter on the IBM Expo floor? Just seeing a new piece of hardware in person, in three dimensions, and the change of metaphor in how you approach IT with a BladeCenter might give a lot of attendees reason to pause and think to the future.

Will Mark Shearer talk about how IBM can vastly increase its sales with Windows and Linux through System i-based organizations that can utilize the BladeCenter to simplify and consolidate their other servers? Will Shearer ask COMMON attendees to take this idea home or will he just plant the seeds? Will IBM mask the cost of i5/OS on a blade by bundling it with an overall solution that's expensive to acquire but smart over the long haul? Or will i5/OS and related pricing actually drop?

Next week we'll learn many answers and find new questions, and we'll likely come home full of disappointment as well as excitement.

Posted by cmaxcer on March 26, 2008 at 8:38 AM | Comments (2)

March 19, 2008 7:49 AM

The Mysterious Town Hall Meeting: What's Coming Our Way?

On Wednesday morning (April 2) at the COMMON conference in Nashville, IBM will host a mysterious special town hall meeting. All of COMMON's promotions on the matter are vague -- simply stating that Ross Mauri, IBM's general manager of IBM Power Systems, and Mark Shearer, IBM vice president of Marketing and Offerings for the Business Systems Division, will make a special announcement titled, "The New Power Equation." The COMMON announcement does say, "On the agenda is news you will want to hear and an opportunity to dialogue with IBM executives." Anyone want to take some guesses?

It's possible that this town hall meeting may be more of a meet-and-greet in which the new IBM exec stands up and says something like, "Hey, I'm Ross, and I know most System i pros don't know who I am, etc, but the System i is awesome and you're a great, amazing community, and I'm proud to be part of it." Then he takes off his jacket and rolls up his sleeves and says it's going to be a great year for the System i.

I think IBM is cooking up something more interesting than that, though, and I doubt that either Shearer or Mauri would be willing to weather the embarrassment of standing up and reiterating announcements that we already have -- V6R1 and the new RDi tooling from the IBM Rational group, for example, even though V6R1 is big enough to have some conversational legs.

So what's your guess? Aren't we due for some new POWER6 hardware to hit our lineup? What about new pricing models? Isn't the act of pricing out a new System i box one of the more difficult issues, on a par with solving complex chemical equations? What about the future of i5/OS? Think IBM is working on a new big software initiative? Alternately, what might you really hope for?

Our equation is, The Power of Many Minds = Answers. Either way, we may get a read on the System i Pulse heading into COMMON . . . so post your thoughts!

Posted by cmaxcer on March 19, 2008 at 7:49 AM | Comments (17)

March 10, 2008 8:46 AM

"Hair on Fire" with System i Security

In the results of its fifth annual review of the state of security on the System i platform, PowerTech reports that System i security is often poorly configured and poorly managed by companies that use it. This is in spite of the fact that IBM has architected the System i with industry-leading security capabilibies. To get the data for this year's study, PowerTech performed more than 200 system audits during the past 12 months. The System i is used by more than 90 percent of the Fortune 1000, and it often hosts sensitive and confidential data such as credit card and Social Security numbers. PowerTech uncovered many security issues, but these common eyebrow-raising problems drew the company's notice this year -- and would surely raise flags for industry auditors:

• 68 percent of systems let any user to change data on the System i using PC applications such as MS Excel and MS Access. These systems also did not audit this vulnerability, which effectively hides it from oversight.
• Out of an average of 751 users, 9 percent have privileged (root level) access authority.
• 30 percent of systems are not using the system security auditing tool inherent in the system.
• Over half the systems have more than 16 users with default passwords (Password = User name) that could be easily determined by any attacker.

"Not Getting Better"

"I guess what's suprising is that things are not getting much better," noted John Earl, PowerTech CTO. "Everybody is talking about security, about compliance, and we keep hearing people get really concerned about security, but when you look at the System i space in broader view, things are not getting dramatically better -- they are getting incrementally better."

PowerTech has been conducting these audits for years and publishing the results with a pretty good rate of dissemination to the System i community. I was wondering, did PowerTech expect more improvement by now?

"I think I did . . . and I've been waiting for one of these press interviews where I could say, 'You know what, in this particular area we've gotten so much better since the last survey' . . . but we haven't really seen that yet," Earl said. "I think a lot of that is inertia on the part of the System i shops. What we've found is they want to do something better, but they don't know what to do to make it better, and they are hamstrung because they certainly don't want to go in and tweak security and disrupt the whole organization."

Security Level 40

"People say, 'We're at security level 40, so we must be secure,' . . . and what that tells me is they don't have a clear idea of what security level 40 does for them and what it does not do. Essentially it protects your operating system against rogue programmers, but it doesn't protect your data," Earl explained.

What about actual hacks? Breaches of security? Rogue programmers? Has PowerTech seen any of these kinds of definitive failures?

"A lot of times when people decide to address a security issue, it's because of an outside influence -- they've had a data loss or they think they've been broken into or an auditor has come in and slapped them around the data room and they're reeling from that and want to make things better," Earl said.

"We do see the outside breaches, and there are a lot of outside breaches that we don't see. We get engaged with customers where it's clear to me that something really bad has happened and they're not going to talk about it and they don't even want to share it with us, but their hair is on fire and they are going to get something fixed by Tuesday," he added.

"What's amazing in those kinds of engagements is that you've got folks who have been in the organization for eight or ten years and they've been afraid to make the slightest change, and we'll go in and help them make a bunch of changes by Tuesday and everything still runs -- it's not the disaster they feared. The System i folks tend not to want to tweak things because they don't know what the effects with be," Earl noted.

It's Not Like a Car

"Data is not like a car. If you're car is stolen, you're going to know about that immediately -- you're not going to be able to drive home," noted Brendan Patterson, PowerTech vice president of marketing and product management. "With data, you can have someone taking it and you might not know about it for years."

The most notorious example of extended data loss comes courtesy of T.J. Maxx, in which hackers stole data connected to more than 45 million credit and debit cards.

"I don't have any inside knowledge -- I know that T.J. Maxx has AS/400s, but I don't know for a fact whether those were among the various systems that were compromised -- can't imagine that they weren't, but I don't know any particular facts of that case," Earl said, noting that many banks had to reissue credit cards and wanted reimbursement for their expenses, which led to massive direct expenses associated with the hack.

The Study

If you're interested in reading the complete results of PowerTech's study, check out http://www.powertech.com/study2008.asp.

Posted by cmaxcer on March 10, 2008 at 8:46 AM | Comments (1)

March 7, 2008 9:53 AM

One Happy System i Developer

A reader sent me a note today, pointing out a pro-IBM blog post -- which can sometimes be few and far between when humans have such powerful inclinations to criticize. Anyway, I thought I'd pass it along. The post is from Pete Helgren, from his Pete's Wordshop blog:

"If you are not a developer that develops applications for IBM platforms, particularly the System i, then you are living an impoverished development life. IBM has huge amounts of resources dedicated to developing high quality applications for its platforms and it has many, many avenues for development support."

Posted by cmaxcer on March 7, 2008 at 9:53 AM | Comments (0)

March 5, 2008 7:27 AM

Shearer, Mauri, Dufault Have Chance to Set Tone at COMMON

COMMON's most important sessions are finally taking shape, and with them come great opportunity: to set the tone for 2008 and beyond for System i customers, many of whom have seen a once powerful division in IBM slowly shrink, let industry influence slip from its grasp, and ultimately transform into part of something larger that most customers still don't quite understand. If the System i's most loyal folks are clients, too, how then do they fit into IBM's new client-focused strategy? If multiple executives now have their hands on or at least near the System i, how will anything groundbreaking get done?

Change can bring fear or excitement, and COMMON and IBM have a chance to channel excitement. The previously unknown opening session/keynote speaker plans for COMMON have now been announced, and there will be a town hall meeting that looks a lot like it's heading in the right direction. Here are the details:

COMMON's Opening Session

COMMON President Randy Dufault will kick off the opening session, hand out awards, and with Mark Shearer, IBM's new vice president of Marketing and Offerings for the Business Systems Division, jointly present the 2008 COMMON/IBM i5/OS Innovation Awards.

COMMON reports that Shearer will then "turn a spotlight on some of the major milestones from the first 20 years of the System i platform, leading up to the introduction of i5/OS V6R1 and pathways into the future."

Then, the opening session keynote speaker, Dr. Jurij R. Paraszczak, who is IBM's research director for Industry Solutions, will provide highlights and entertaining insights from the IBM Global Technology Outlook.

Town Hall Meeting

On Wednesday morning, IBM will host a special town hall meeting, where COMMON says Shearer as well as Ross Mauri, who is IBM's general manager of IBM Power Systems, will make a special announcement of an important initiative, "The New Power Equation."

All in all, Shearer, Mauri, and Dufault have an opportunity to shape the tone of 2008 for the System i world -- and I for one am definitely looking forward to a turning point.

Posted by cmaxcer on March 5, 2008 at 7:27 AM | Comments (1)

March 2, 2008 11:47 PM

Shearer Wants to Mainstream i5/OS by 2009

Last week my colleague Rita-Lyn Sanders and I spoke with Mark Shearer, who is now the vice president of Marketing and Offerings for the IBM Business Systems unit. The topic? The "i" in 2008. Obviously, the major change affecting the System i world is IBM's reorganization and the customer rather than product-oriented approach to selling IBM solutions. Shearer mentioned that he's been wanting IBM to go in this customer-focused direction for about seven years.

"From our clients' point of view, they are so happy we are moving to more of a consultative approach, taking all of our systems capability to them as a portfolio rather than having different product teams, dealing with them separately, competing with each other in front of them . . . so this client-oriented approach is something I really believe in. It turns out that the System i client base is probably our single most important client base in our general business space," Shearer said.

"More than 90 percent of the System i clients fall into our general business segment definition, and my role in this business systems division is that I'm responsible for marketing and the offerings, all of the product lines -- System i, System p, Blades, and System x, storage, and System z for the small and medium business-sized clients . . . but the System i franchise is certainly our largest and most prevalent client base, so I will continue to be very engaged with the i community," he added.

The conversation was a quick half-hour, covering a lot of ground, and I'll share the key excerpts and do a little after-the-fact deconstruction of Shearers comments -- sort of like reading between the lines.

Shearer:

"In my first two and half years in System i, I got an awful lot of feedback from clients that they wanted to pay for what they use, that they wanted us to improve the price-to-value ratio . . . and we relaunched our entire entry-level product line back in April -- that ultimately drove more than 25 percent volume growth last year in System i."

CM Note:

25 percent volume growth . . . definitely a nice uptick in sales. Volume is far different from revenue, of course, especially as the price of small systems edges lower.

Shearer:

"I got very positive response to the idea of this, 'Let me pay for what I use' in very granular elements or capacity . . . our offering structures going forward, we're going to continue to do the kinds of things we introduced last year in terms of the operating system itself, and in our larger systems, we're going to continue to make it more granular, by engine, by capability, so that people can pay for what they use. On the low end of the product line, we're going to continue to offer an end-user-based approach to i5/OS pricing because that seemed to play very well in the marketplace."

CM Note:

The idea of System i customers paying only for what they use is fantastic for some but a total transformation for others. Some customers expect "everything" to come bundled together in one solid, cost-effective package, and this change may spark some resentment, some feelings of being nickel-and-dimed. As long as the nickels and dimes create a favorable sum total, this won't be much of an issue.

Shearer:

"One of the things I'm really excited about . . . is the support of our BladeCenter product line. A lot of our clients have an awful lot of Wintel systems beside their System i, and the ability to run i5/OS in an IBM BladeCenter and integrate it with the Wintel or Lintel systems, I think it's going to spark the imagination in a lot of our client base. When all is said and done, I really think the secret sauce of the System i is the operating system, and we'll continue to focus on that discreetly."

CM Note:

There are two key points here: 1) IBM sees major SMB market opportunity in using the BladeCenter model as a consolidation and simplification play in SMB organizations that have the System i in place. Where the System i failed to capture market share as a consolidation box, the BladeCenter, which doesn't have a clear OS bias, may reign supreme in these organizations. If IBM can capture sales that would have gone into, say, a Dell box, IBM will not only better serve its customers, but it'll also rapidly scale the overall IBM share of the SMB's budget. Smart move, really. 2) Shearer is saying that i5/OS is the secret sauce and that IBM will focus on i5/OS. What does this really mean? Nothing that hasn't already been happening. IBM will continue to build hardware capable of running both AIX and i5/OS . . . and the System i as a system will likely cease to exist . . . while i5/OS will continue on. Important point: Shearer didn't say this. I'm reading between the lines, and this is what I think is going to happen.

Shearer:

Shearer said he thinks the i-focused industry is waiting for the POWER6 version of IBM's i5 systems in both the low end and at IBM's very high end, noting that the 570 has been very well received.

"The other thing that's going to be interesting for our i client base is PowerVM and really leveraging the virtualization capability of our hypervisor. You'll notice with the POWER6 introduction, we make the financial equation significantly more attractive for virtualizing Unix and i5/OS on the same system, and I think we're going to get a lot of interest there."

Shearer referenced a survey of IBM's larger clients, two-thirds of which said that if the economics were more attractive, they would want to virtualize their i5 and Unix capabilities.

CM Note:

OK, here's another point: IBM's larger clients want i5/OS and Unix on the same box. It doesn't take a private investigator to figure out that p and i are heading toward pi.

Shearer:

Shearer pointed out that quite a bit is happening in 2008 -- a new version of i5/OS (V6R1) and a lot of new POWER6 hardware.

"This is my fourth year associated with the System i, and ironically some of the things I started working on five years ago are coming to market this year," he said, noting that he introduced the BladeCenter five and a half years ago, and he wanted i5/OS support back then.

"At the end of the year, what I want our i clients to feel and feed back to me is that i5/OS is absolutely a mainstream operating system supported on IBM's hottest products, and I think we've got some pretty exciting steps we'll take over the course of the year."

CM Note:

First of all, Shearer wants i5/OS to succeed in the market, and it's clear that his vision for how this is likely to play out will be the transformation of i5/OS onto "IBM's hottest products" . . . which will likely head toward being OS-neutral, for all intents and purposes. Personally, I see this as a double-edged sword -- to put i5/OS on a blade in a BladeCenter is to make i5/OS just another operating system, which mainstreams it; but at the same time, if you put i5/OS on a blade, it has a chance to shine next to the other operating systems that also live on blades in the BladeCenter.

Shearer:

"The truth is, these i clients are spending three times as much on those Wintel systems -- they are spending a huge amount managing their Wintel environment, their SANs, and if we can simplify the whole environment instead of the part that already runs beautifully, I think we can really help our clients."

CM Note:

Shearer is likely thinking of how the BladeCenter can do this. This comment, of course, reinforces the idea that IBM's sales growth play will veer heavily toward convincing System i shops to buy more IBM products via the IBM BladeCenter.

Shearer:

Shearer noted that the Business Systems group is focused on a lot of products and will definitely go after new SMB customers -- for example, via Vertical Industry Program (VIP) types of initiatives.

"I do think System i is right at the heart of some of the BladeCenter S and POWER6 products that we'll be introducing."

CM Note:

No real comments here, but at this point in the conversation, I asked how IBM plans to introduce the solutions. Through a larger direct sales force? With more IBM feet on the street? How will IBM get in front of i5 shops with the broader message?

Shearer:

He said IBM would continue to work through Business Partners, noting that the SMB space is highly fragmented and can best be approached by invigorating local Business Partners and Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) through efforts like the VIP program.

"It's actually having a material impact in revenue and volumes, and we'll continue that approach rather than having IBM 'blue suits' calling on these clients because we need local expertise, we need industry expertise, we need product expertise, and in many instances we need to create a little consortium to make that work."

CM Note:

This is a good method. The more people who are invested in selling IBM solutions, the bigger the ecosystem IBM will be able to service.

Shearer:

"If we take an IBM-wide approach, I can create these local ecosystems with i5/OS, Unix, Linux, or Windows applications, and because of our more integrated product families with POWER systems and BladeCenter, we can combine these in a single infrastructure more smoothly."

Shearer went on to discuss how IBM's clients -- the business executives rather than technology managers -- are not particularly hung up on the technology . . . that clients are looking to buy business functions -- solutions -- more so than technology.

CM Note:

The "System i" as a complete box, in and of itself, as a technology solution best suited to run a particular application or type of application, as being better at anything than another system . . . I don't think we'll be hearing that kind of message from IBM.

Shearer:

"One of the messages I want the industry to hear this year is that i5/OS is going forward. We have used different processors, we've had different names, but we've protected our clients' investments in their applications for a couple of decades. When I really listen to what our clients are asking for, they want to move forward with systems but they want protection of their investment. We're trying to prepare i5/OS to be the secret sauce that allows them to exploit new offerings like Blades or POWER systems but still have the benefit of coming forward with their applications."

CM Note:

This message seems really clear to me. I don't think IBM is going to be explicit in saying this any time soon, especially with all the POWER6 systems that will hit the market this year, but the System i as we know it, as a black box, is disintegrating . . . and what's left -- the piece that will rise from the rubble -- is i5/OS.

Posted by cmaxcer on March 2, 2008 at 11:47 PM | Comments (14)