System iNetwork

July 2, 2007

On Staying "Alive for 25" in the Computer Industry

It's July and System iNEWS's long-awaited anniversary month has arrived. Just 25 years and one week ago, nobody'd ever heard of us! While we're proud of lasting for a quarter-century in an industry that's famous for celebrating technological obsolesence every 18 months or so, we're hardly alone in reaching silver-anniversary status. IBM's classic midrange platform and many other business enterprises associated with it have defied the odds of Moore's Law over the years right along with us. Today I want to celebrate some of those companies who've been our companions over those years and speculate a little on what it is that has kept so many of them thriving.

Actually, we have to start with IBM. If we think back over the decades, there have been several times when the market thought IBM was going to fail, or at least be broken up into pieces. But particularly during the tenure of Lou Gerstner, and typified not least by the System i itself, IBM successfully managed to reinvent itself and remain a major force in computing. Despite its size, its tendency to become overly bureaucratic, and its long corporate lifecycle, IBM is still formidable. By reformulating its hardware, software, and service offerings in significant ways over the decades, IBM has remained the elephant in the room even as it was criticized, often rightly, for lack of vision, nimbleness, and marketing savvy.While undoubtedly some of those changes could have come earlier, IBM has showed a knack for "just in time" overhauls that have kept it in the game, although of course its sheer momentum and market capitalization have undoubtedly also helped.

Business Computer Design International (BCD), gets the prize for longest keeper of the faith for our publication. Our first advertiser, it's been with our publication every step of the way and was also among the first vendors to have its products covered editorially in our pages. At least some of its success is due to its unrelenting focus on the developer community for the System i and its predecessors and its ability to provide solid tools for helping with application development. Its Docu-Mint has been a mainstay in program documentation for more than 25 years and the company remains on the cutting edge today with such products as its most recent offering, WebSmart PHP, an IDE for web application building.

BCD isn't the only development tool provider to thrive for our entire history, of course. Michaels, ross & cole ltd. (now mrc), Amalgamated Software of North America (now ASNA), California Software (now Infinite Software), and Kisco Information Systems have all been around for as long, or nearly as long, as our oldest subscribers have read our pages.

Help/Systems is sort of a fraternal twin for System iNEWS. Both our endeavors were launched in the same month, so Help/Systems is also celebrating its 25th birthday in July. This company's success has been in another area of vital interest for our readers, that of systems management and automation. Its ROBOT38 was a pioneer in systems automation by letting system managers and operators run programs or CL commands at prescheduled times on the S/38 and its ROBOT product line is a major player in System i automated operations today. Help/Systems' recent absorption of Advanced Systems Concepts, another longterm player in our market, should enhance its longevity even further.

Another venerable player is Hawkeye Information Systems, whose Pathfinder is still around as a system documentation tool. Pathfinder was originally launched as a System/3 product. While Help/Systems shares our birthday, Hawkeye practically shares our magazine's birthplace, its headquarters being located just a few miles up the road from our offices in northern Colorado.

Application software products are the most numerous kind of solutions available for the System i and there are many companies that have been successful at offering those options, too. Global Software, HarrisData, Lawson Software, and New Generation Software, are "historical" providers of accounting, business-intelligence, and reporting solutions for all of the System i's incarnations.

I mustn't forget to mention J.D. Edwards (JDE), of course. Founded a mere 45 miles from our offices, and despite its purchase by Peoplesoft and then Oracle, JDE remains an identifiable entity within vast Oracle because of the comprehensiveness of its enterprise resource planning software and the loyalty it engendered, and still maintains, with thousands of System i users.

"Last but not least," I should mention several other market players of long standing that I haven't gotten to yet. These include Fax*Star, I-O Corporation, Midrange Performance Group, Para Research, Tango 04/Computing Group, Vision Solutions, and WorksRight Software. If I've forgotten any, please post a longevity reminder for all of us.

What has kept so many companies thriving for so many years in a computing market that, at least in the mind of the general public, has apparently been overshadowed by the mainframes, PC clones, Apples, and Blackberries of the world? I suppose it's almost too obvious, but I'll state it anyway. It's paying attention to your audience.

None of these companies, ours included, would still exist if IBM hadn't provided and maintained a computing platform that is still the best system for SMBs in the world and if the rest of us hadn't correctly observed what users of that system needed and provided it consistently well. The System i market may not be the largest in computing, but it's been one of the most loyal, and that loyalty is rooted firmly in the excellence of the system and the software tools that have been made available for use on it. If the System i were to drop off the face of the earth tomorrow, this collective achievement by our market would still stand, I think for quite a long time. It's an example of what can happen when people of intelligence and industry focus their attention on their customers' needs, and then meet those needs with a genuine desire to help and to provide products of quality.

Posted by at July 2, 2007 10:27 AM