System iNetwork

March 31, 2008

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 at March 31, 2008 8:42 AM