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» VIEW ALL POSTS Jul 18 2007   4:06PM GMT

System i revenues drop again



Posted by: Mark Fontecchio
System i revenue

Once again, every hardware platform that IBM sells gained revenue except for the System i, which dropped double digits.

Big Blue released its second-quarter results today. System i is down 15 percent from the same period last year. Meanwhile, System z is up 4 percent, System p is up 7 percent, and System x is up a whopping 16 percent.

This is not just a blip in the radar — System i year-over-year revenues have gone down seven quarters in a row. That’s almost two years. And even though IBM has recently claimed that it’s focused on System i customers and not System i sales, one still has to admit that this doesn’t look good.

Is there anything good that can come out of this? Let me know what you think.

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Steve Richter  |   Jul 23 2007   11:44AM GMT

A good outcome of this terrible news would be IBM finally selling off i5/OS to an outside party that believes in its viability. Sadly, IBM looks to be splitting the i5 product line so it no longer has comparable prior year sales to be judged and measured on. It is burying the product line.

The reporting I would like someone to do is find out why IBM stopped improving OS/400 back in the late 1990s when the AS400 was successful.

The lack of long object name support in OS/400 is an obvious and necessary improvement. Without it we lose the advantage of the integrated database because two sets of table and column names have to be maintained.

IBM also shutdown work on ILE ( ILE being the framework which controls programs and procedures on the system. ) ILE was a great advance for the system in that it brought service programs and procedures to the mix. But for some reason, needed improvements to ILE were never implemented. Come on i5 journalists. Find out why! ;)

The ILE programmer needs to provide two source code files when compiling an ILE module. The procedure source code in one file, and the procedure declarations in a 2nd file. This is a duplication of work and it also complicates the process for the programmer. The missing improvement is what the .NET and Java programmer have - meta data ( also known as reflection ) stored in the created service program. In .NET and Java, the programmer does not have to supply a header file to the compiler that the RPG, C and C++ programmer is required to do.

-Steve


 

Dave  |   Jul 23 2007   1:41PM GMT

After being on IBM Midrange since the 80’s and seeing no change in IBM’s Marketing strategy….

I think IBM should sell the ISERIES LINE (whatever you want to call it) as/400 iseries I5 Sytem I etc. to MICROSOFT..

At least Microsoft knows how to market it’s products.


 
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