System iNetwork

It is great that Ross Mauri provided the open letter to emphasize the strategic importance of IBM i to IBM and that IBM will continue to develop the product.



The assurance from Ross Mauri is most welcomed.

One point I didn't mention: There's a good chance that Mauri is thinking of IBM i worries and perception heading into IBM's October 16 financial report . . . where IBM will likely note that System i revenue is way down and "converged System p" revenue is up. By posting a public letter, Mauri can at least call out what's going on with System i and new Power Systems sales these days in a positive, if vague, way.

While it's nice to see some positive noises from IBM, I note with interest that no such assurances are deemed necessary for the other platforms. It would be great if the IBM i business didn't NEED these assurances to begin with, by being visible in the market to the degree that its technical superiority warrants.
The best news I've heard in ages about the IBM i isn't anything out of IBM, but the YiPs group. I want the long haired, loud music listening, semi-bearded, latte sipping, sushi eating, fast thinking, iPod carrying gen-Y group to get turned on to this masterpiece of forward thinking.
That's when we'll see the world take notice.

Frank Soltis once told a group of IBM i (then iSeries) devotees that every time IBM uses the "strategic" word to describe an IBM product it means that IBM is about to let it slip off the IBM offering table and henceforth pretend it never existed. It's like reading in the financial or sport pages that someone has "the complete support of the
management/board". You know it means they will be gone within a month.

I don't know but to me a computer is hardware and the operating system is software. These are things that all computer systems have and its very difficult to argue one system being better than the other.

The different thing about the i is the management system included in the micro code of the OS. the i has a robust management system that has the lowest Total Cost of ownership in the Business when you include in the salaries of all the people needed to run these other systems. Yes salaries because without people to run the systems the systems aren't any good to anyone.

My idea is somehow we need to convince finance or the powers to be to have the I.T budgets broken out by systems. Its absolutely no good the way I.T budgets are being presented now; which is 1 I.T budget for all Systems. With 1 I.T budget the Business never gets a real picture of how much a system actually costs.

Business people blame the system for all their troubles and start listening to the market trends. They spend millions moving to another ERP trying to change all the bad things about there existing ERP only to find out that if they would have hired a few more good people and listened to them they would of saved millions. Good People and a good ERP add up to large profitS. Why give all your profits to the next great sales person that can tell a good story. People believe salespeople because they don't know their Business and/or don't trust their people. Its your profit; learn your Business and trust your people; keep your ERPs and Computer systems and you will earn profits on your current computer system.

"...One point I didn't mention: There's a good chance that Mauri is thinking of IBM i worries and perception heading into IBM's October 16 financial report . . . where IBM will likely note that System i revenue is way down and "converged System p" revenue is up. ..."

... which is very creative of him. Can he apply these talents to making IBM i a superior OS? I dont hear anyone at IBM acknowledging the problems ( why it does not sell ) and how to excel in the marketplace.

An adhoc report from the programming battlefront ... I had a grand plan yesterday to write some sql functions that would (1) decrypt a credit card account number and (2) resubmit credit card charges that had been rejected the past 2 weeks because of coding and config errors. Select from the file of rejected transactions, use my decrypt_acct_nbr function to get columns containing the actual acct nbr and exp date. On a 2nd pass of the data, call the sql function to submit a new credit card charge, using the actual acct nbr and exp date gotten on the 1st pass.

Problem was, it was very difficult to get it all coded. I had to write the sql functions, correctly code the interface to the backend rpg code, work around the naming limitations in IBM i where half your code objects are limited to 10 char names. I have srvpgm procedures which do a lot of the business logic I needed done, but if it is possible to code an sql function to call a srvpgm procedure, I haven't been able to figure it out yet. Then there were performance issues concerning sql functions that call RPG code, and a lot of challenges debugging the entire complex.

My point is there are a plethora of improvements that can be made to the programmability of the system. Mauri says we will not see a new release until 2010. And there are no specifics as to what the new release will contain. The programming languages on the system - COBOL, C, RPG, Java, SQL, CL, PHP - are all barely compatible with each other.

-Steve