Midrange Stuff, OS/400 Edition

IBM Global Services yesterday rolled out three new iSeries-based hosted service offerings designed to get customers quickly up and running on SAP, Siebel Systems, and WebSphere applications. Big Blue also took the opportunity to announce its first iSeries customer win under the new programs. The retailer Things Remembered has migrated its e-commerce site, www.thingsremembered.com, to WebSphere Commerce running on an iSeries server located in an IBM data center in Raleigh, North Carolina.

Things Remembered decided to upgrade its e-commerce site because its older Windows NT-based system could not keep up with online demand, said Dennis Benvenuto, a Things Remembered vice president in charge of channel relationships. "It didn't allow us the flexibility," he said. "We'd maxed it out."

Another incentive for migrating the Windows system to a more scalable box was that Things Remembered is starting to form strategic relationships with other major retailers, Benvenuto said. With other companies pointing customers to Things Remembered's Web site, it was important to have a system that could handle sudden spikes in demand.

The decision to move the Web site to an iSeries box was bolstered by the fact that Things Remembered was familiar with the OS/400 platform. The company, which operated 777 stores across the country, uses JDA Software Group's fulfillment software, and also runs MQ Series software on the OS/400 platform.

While Things Remembered's IT department was familiar with the iSeries' scalability, the company didn't want to host the new Web site itself, and wanted a system that could be brought online and upgraded in a hurry, making the new Web application a natural candidate for outsourcing. Today, under IBM's "Application Hosting for WebSphere" program, Things Remembered's Web site is able to rapidly scale to meet spikes in demand because the iSeries Web server features processor-on-demand capabilities.

In addition to hosting WebSphere Commerce Professional Edition 5.4 and WebSphere Application Server 4.0 applications on iSeries, IBM Global Services announced that its data centers are now hosting SAP and Siebel applications on iSeries servers. IBM already offered hosting services for these WebSphere applications running on xSeries and pSeries servers.

IBM says that as part of its new "Application Hosting for SAP" program, it will be capable of running customers' R/3, mySAP.com, and industry-specific mySAP modules on iSeries servers and allow customer to access them over the Internet. Similarly, IBM's new "Application Hosting for Siebel Systems" program covers customers' general Siebel 7 CRM applications, as well as their industry-specific Siebel modules, and provides users access over the Internet. An IBM spokesperson said that these programs will also apply to IBM's other platforms.

For all three of these new iSeries service offerings, IBM intends to sell complementary services, including end-to-end application development and lifecycle management services through its Business Innovation Services and Application Management Services practices. Backed by technicians with SAP- and Siebel-validated skills, IBM is offering to handle customers' ongoing application maintenance, customization, and user-support needs. Alternatively, customers can sign up for IBM's "Services Anywhere" e-business on-demand offering, whereby customers keep their servers in-house but rely on IBM technicians to manage them.

Lately, IBM has been rolling out plenty of outsourcing and application service provider (ASP) offerings. Earlier this month, IBM announced Linux Virtual Services, a new service whereby an IBM-hosted zSeries mainframe is partitioned into hundreds of individual Linux "virtual servers." Customers can run any Linux application on these virtual servers, and IBM takes care of all the network, storage, and maintenance required to manage the infrastructure. IBM, in turn, charges its customers a flat fee, in much the same way that utilities bill for their services. (Read more about this offering in "IBM Rents Linux Partitions Under Utility Sales Model.")

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