i

What “i” want in 2009

Over the years the “i” people have wanted  for many things. The want list is long and heavy every year with the same things, and every year like a fat person on a diet for the first two days of the year, it falls apart the first time you drive by Krispy Kreame and the “HOT” light is on. Every year at COMMON we get what we want and hear what we need to hear and then NOTHING happens.

We never get what we wanted, to be slimmer, more wildly accepted and everyone’s best friend. Now I am not saying overweight people can’t have friends, but what I am saying is every year we ask for IBM to do something special this year with the IBM i (or AS/400, iSeries, System i, & i5/OS) and make it a stand out year with everyone wanting to join IBM i’s Facebook page, but I think in 2010 we will be asking again for the same things all over again just like that diet.

IBM needs to evaluate the entire marketing team behind POWER systems. I am anti-losing your job, but when you are not doing your job, you need to lose it. IBM also needs to re-think every stuck up know it all executive that is holding back anything that could potentially sell the IBM i. I know I am asking for drastic measure, but for over 20 years the IBM i has been suffering and not because of people like me who love the system, because IBM fails to do anything right by the system. We need a guerrilla marketing campaign, and not two months of yo-yo marketing and the dry spell for the reast of the year.

IBM need to take a page out of a few other companies play books and figure out for once how to market the most stable, easy to administer and flexible system on the market today, and I am not talking about convoluted Linux or UNIX, I am talking about the IBM i. It’s just too damn simple and to powerful to ignore.

The next thing that needs to happen is every CIO and Director of IT that has every dismissed the IBM i for being junk or not UNIX like needs to be sent home and without any money. They are all in fact morons and have no idea what a powerful and consolidate-able server they are trying to remove from their IT shop. If you have file servers and they are on Windows, you are wasting your money. If you have print servers and they are on Windows you are wasting your money. If you have Database servers and they are on anything but the IBM i, you guessed it, you are wasting your money. If you have Websphere Servers and they are on anything but the IBM i, you are wasting your money. If you have Web Servers with PHP and HTML, and they are not on the IBM i, you are again wasting your money. If you have web applications that need LAMP, and they are not on the IBM i, you are, yes I am going to say it, wasting your money. If you run Domino on anything but IBM i you are wasting your money. Are you getting the picture? Once large IBM i system can do all this and integrate it all with each other and has Single Sign-on for all systems.

More “C” level morons every day keep buying Windows, and Linux and all kinds of systems to confuse and grow IT. You grow it to a point where no one can mange it and most companies hate having big IT departments anyway. What if you have a data center with ONE, yes ONE IBM i Server? That would be so smart and long term would save you loads, I mean loads of cash. Who in this economy can throw away money? Is your CIO or Director of IT wasting money with many Windows OSes when he could only need one OS license? How many virus prone, unstable Windows Servers do you own vs. the one IBM i server that has a very strong security system with no way a virus could infect it? How much do you spend on Anti-virus software for all those severs?

Most medeium to large comapnies haveover 30 Windows Servers doing lord knows what. Sometimes you have to have Windows servers, but my guess would be you really don’t need them if you didn’t want them. Everyone of the Windows servers needs to be managed by another server and they need Anti-virus licensese. Now your talking even more expense, and every so often Microsoft releases a new version which is included with the support cost on the IBM i and is not for the Windows, so there you go needing to buy 30 new Windows licenses to upgrade. This is getting expensive.

Then you have to have a server to manage those servers, and fail over servers. Be fore you know it you have entirly to many servers from one MCSE to handle and you then have to hire ore people and those new people all want to buiold more server, so then you have 40 and then 50 servers and your costs are now out of contol. In IBM i land you have one server that can grow as needed and one ail over server that can grow as well. One OS, and no servers to manage your server to manage your applications.  IBM can provide you an IBM Hot spare for a fraction of the cost and you don’t have to pay for another complete license for the OS, all you do is pay for what you own.

Lastly, why can’t IBM get this kind of detailed hard hitting information in front of CIOs, not because is all made of or a lie, but because it’s the truth and would end up making them look like fools, and who wants to invite in a sales person who is going to point out the last five years of the CIOs time at some company he was doing nothing but make bad, uneducated, crappy decisions that are costing them hundreds of thousands of IT dollars, in some cases millions.  It takes a big man to admit they made all the wrong moves, wasted millions and need to be fired for fraud, waste, and abuse.

IBM, you need to stop playing Mr. Nice Company. Stop sugar coating your offerings, lower the price and play hard ball with the IT world. If today you sell 500 IBM i 515 Series boxes and you lowered the cost a bit so that you sold oh, 2000 that would in fact be better, becasue long term those shops would see the value of the IBM i and might invest more into larger boxes to consolidate more servers. I am sure someone at IBM has said that, then all the top level smarty pants point out he is wrong and sent him packing. Well smarty pants executive, you are wrong and he was right!

IBM you also need to learn who the bloggers are and when something new comes out you need to send them information, let them hard test the hardware of software and get them to do your bidding. I have been asking IBM for years to send me a 515 or anything to review and IBM being the stuck up fortress they are can’t seem to see the benifit of me or System i News from taking a new thingie, testing it and talking about it. FREE marketing, but yet they fail to see that, so in 2009 please send me some hardware to review. Send me something to review. Hell just call me and tell me NO, but all I every get from IBM is “no comment” and “NO, we dont do that”….

What about the SMART CUBE, would that not be a great place to start. Send out some Demos to the IBM i bloggers out there and let them talk it up. Unfortunantly IBM does not see the value in this tryp of marketing. Word of mouth marketing is I guess “crap” to them. I am also trying to get the Lotus group to send me a Ltus Foundtation server for me to demo and maybe present  session at COMMON about it, but he talks have been slow and  am still waiting to hear back from them. I think I have a better chance of getting a Lotus Foundations thanks to the free thinking Lotus people.

Now I am no fan of SUN, and I think they have blown it big time and are down on their Solaris luck right now. The all know Jonathan Schwarts, who I think is a hard pill to swallow most days, in 2006 offered up a FREE Sun Server to anyone who would write up a review. I am not asking to for IBM to do the same, but at least putnew product in the hands of the people who an talk it up.You can even take it back after a period of time, but there proof your marketing is failing you and proof that bloggers are the furture of community and people marketing.

You also don’t sell as many small IBM i servers as you would like, but that never stops you from being a crappy marking company either? Send me a demo and I will tell the world what they are missing. It’s hard for me to sit here all day telling every how great the server is and I have nothing to back it up. Bloggers need to review products, show they touched it and it’s awesome. Blogging is not something I do to make sure all my BFFs all know what I had for lunch. We are doign this to better the community, to answer question, make the hard press when something stinks and shout when something rocks! People listen to what we have to say too, and we need IBMs support to make it happen as well. Thel Lotus Bloggers has huge IBM support while the IBM i and POWER bloggers stuggle and claw in hopes to build up a comminuty of IBM i and POWER based bloggers talking about new and exciting stuff.

I could have been nice about this and not beat up IBM, and I am sure they could care less how I approch his subject. I love IBM, I think Lotus and IBMs products are far more market ready then anyone else in the same space. I love the POWER hardware, and I can’t get enough Lotus 8. All of these things rock, but IT Manager and CIOs are not getting it. I know those people read what I have to say and they have admins and developers who read these blogs and they go back and share. If I was to review a 515 I am sure someone would say, we need that for a project I am working on and buy one, maybe two. I reviewed, a while ago, a new System i 570 and our fail over system, I think it was a 550. I still get email to this day asking about that review and what I would recommend or how we did HA? IBM are you getting this. I can do things with this blog you only dream about? The crazy part is I pulled it sometime ago becasue the company that owned the server asked me to. It’s archived somewhere and people find it and email me questions. What would they do with a real post about a new 515, Smart Cube or Lotus Foundtation Server?

In 2009 I want the IBM i to get traction, I want to review POWER based systems, and I want Lotus Products to out sell the competitor. It’s all possible and I am willing to help, are you IBM willing to make it happen?

Send me your POWER Systems, your blades, and your smart cubes and I will review them all. Be fair and help you increase sales.

Running Domino on the IBM i - Please update

Dear IBM,

Please update this page for 2009. (LINK TO PAGE:: IBM i Benchmarks) If you plan on making sales of hardware and software you need to keep your stats current. This web page you provide was relevant in 2003, but is not some 5 years later now that we are on Domino version 8.0.2, and 8.5 is right around the corner.

That is all,
David Vasta

Why isn’t IBM building things like this for the IBM i?

We need sales to go up, we need exposure to go up, we need education to go up and we need CIOs to know that the IBM i is the most reliable, dependable and most ROI system on the planet! Yet if you were to look at what IBM is doing to get that word out you would think they were the ones needing the education. IBM built this little video for Lotus and Mobile Collaboration. It make sense and it’s easy to understand. WHY WHY IBM can’t you seem to do this for the POWER Platform?

LINK TO VIDEO

IT Jungle - IBM Cuts Deals on CPU and i5/OS for 550, 570, and 595 Boxes

Link :: IBM Cuts Deals on CPU and i5/OS for 550, 570, and 595 Boxes

“We’re almost into the fourth quarter and just finishing up the last couple of business days in the third quarter, and that means IBM is looking to cut some deals on CPU cores and i5/OS licenses to make some dough out of the System i installed base.”

The Little Extras in IBM Director - System i Network - Greg Hintermeister

Greg Hintermeister over at the System i Network points out all the littel extra fun stuff in what s going to be a great product for managing your POWER platform. IBM Director Site.

LINK  :: The Little Extras in IBM Director - System i Network - Greg Hintermeister

20 Years of the “AS/400″ Road Map from IBM

So it’s been 20 years of the old AS/400, iSeries, System i, and now the IBM i. Over the last 20 years lots has changed along with the name.

LINK :: IBM PDF about the last 20 Years of AS/400

System i Network - Server consolidation article - Recommended reading

I try to stay up to speed on all things IBM i, even if they confuse me from time to time. Server consolidation has never confused me and it should be on your list of things to do, or at least think about in the next 12 months. IBM is pushing it hard and it just makes sense. I am going to link you to a really well done article over at System i Network and hope you enjoy it.

LINK:: System i Network ::  Server Consolidation: It’s Not Just for Data Centers Anymore

Search400.com - Open Source on i

Today in my mail box I received the newsletter from the folks at Search400.com and this is what it said:

FROM THE EDITOR
Open source for i
[Leah Rosin, Associate Editor]

Last month I attended OSCON in Portland, Ore., and learned from Bernard Golden that open source utilization in the enterprise is on the rise. At the conference, IBM featured its free DB2 Express-C version of DB2 9. When I asked Rav Ahuja, the strategy manager of information management at IBM, whether this would work on i, he explained that it would if you run a Linux partition. All of this was a great primer on the implementation of open source and, specifically, Linux on i. And now the first of a three-part series of Linux on i is here.

Let us know what you think. And if you run or develop open source apps on a Linux partition on i, consider writing a tip or submitting a guest column.

RELATED INFORMATION:
> System i Blogger: Linux Foundation launches killer development tool
> System i Blogger: Getting started with Zend PHP

Firs I am humbled that they linked to my blog on ITKE, thank you Leah!, and second lets talk about this for a bit.

It’s all about the money is it not? I am pro open sourced dude, but let’s face it if your not making money or able to support your code writing habit then it’s all a wash? While the Linux community is best known for their OPEN projects, the IBM i has not seen this kind of energetic code writing.

There have been attempts at OPEN SOURCED projects for the IBM i over the years but it’s been scarce, and nothing out there that could change the face of a buisness. I would love to see an open sourced web site for all IBM i projects with many many active projects.

There should be CRM and ERP projects for the IBM i, and there just aren’t.Projects like this would do two things, drive people to contribute and wake up CRM and ERP software offerings to kick them in the tend bits so that they know they need to step up the code they are working on because there is a FREE open sourced equivilant that is coming and could replace them. It does create competition, even if it is frustrating.

I don’t see this being something that is going to happen anytime soon. The community does not lend itself to lots of after hours late night coding. For one the IBM i is not a platform you can just get at your local Best Buy and write some code for at home with your newly open i/OS. If that were the case I think we would see more OPEN projects.

I would still like to see IBM really rethink how they sell the smaller IBM i systems. I would love to be able to put down less that $2,000 USD and get and IBM i that I could work on, or maybe IBM takes a really large IBM i and places it in Rochester and lets you have a partition to write code on and stuff. That would cost them little to nothing but would foster community growth. They should offer it for FREE and more over allow any student in college a larger chunk of the machine than you would let me have, and IT professional. I can’t afford to have a new 520 at home, but I could afford to log into a partition that was FREE, then I could create a project, open source it on SorceForge and let the world help me build it and make it better. Sadly I don’t think IBM is that “hip” yet and they never will be.

If you are looking for IBM i Open Source Projects check these links:

Link :: Open Source for i

Link :: The iSeries-Toolkit

If you have a good project idea then let it be known! If you think IBM should build a sandbox for us all, say it. They are reading this blog and they do wonder what we are thinking. I would love to build a CRM package for the IBM i that is open sourced and free.  I am sure some of you out there have done it a thousand times but never like you wanted. Now is your chance.

Help/Systems acquires PowerTech

The Four Hundred is reporting that Help/Systems has acquired PowerTech, an large security firm and software developer, in a move that shows the IBM i space is still active and changing.

“The consolidation of the midrange continued last month when The PowerTech Group, a leading developer of i OS security software, was acquired by Help/Systems and Audax Group, the private equity group backing the i OS utility developer. Few details of the deal are being released, as the companies are privately held and therefore under no obligation to spill the nitty gritty. What is known is that PowerTech will continue to function as a completely independent entity.”

“By all indications, PowerTech has become a powerhouse of i OS security software this decade. Whereas many of its competitors had been acquired by large firms with nary a new product release to be heard of again, PowerTech’s 800 customers have been treated to a steady diet of new products and upgrades, integration with third-party products, the industry’s only i OS-focused conference, annual “state of security” reports, and numerous white papers, educational events, and Webinars. PowerTech customers could feel safe in the fact that PowerTech lived and breathed i OS security, and were active in the midrange community.”

Read More here at The Four Hundred

Search400.com - Linux for IBM i: Introducing Linux to IBM i people

Link :: Search400.com - Linux for IBM i: Introducing Linux to IBM i people

The IBM i is a great platform. Not many of you out there will argue that point. It’s solid, robust and very powerful. Part of that power is just that power or the hardware that we now call Power. The operating system (OS) is nothing unless it has rock-solid hardware to run on. So part of the IBM i’s stability is the hardware. Another fine example of a powerful OS that runs on Power is AIX. The problem is that not everything needs an IBM i or an AIX partition. Sometimes, you just need a file and print server or maybe a DNS or mail router. Of course you could do this all on Windows, but that gets really expensive and it does not run on Power. So, what do you do? Linux on Power: It’s easy, cheap and very powerful, much like its AIX cousin.