IBM Promotes Future Power7 Unix Boxes in Ads

Published: January 25, 2010

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

I can hear the gnashing of teeth and see the clenching of fists already from the AS/400 midrange faithful as they rightfully ask: Where's the i in the Power7 advertising budget?

As The Four Hundred reports elsewhere, the cat is out of the bag and IBM is gearing up to launch Power7-based Power Systems in February, probably sooner rather than later. And last Thursday, on the very morning that Oracle announced it got regulatory approval from the European Union to acquire Sun Microsystems for $7.4 billion, it was no surprise that IBM let loose some advertising in the Wall Street Journal to promote the forthcoming Power Systems.

In case you missed the ad, here it is:

Unless you have microscopes for eyes, you can't read the text clearly. So let me tell you what it says:

Power your planet.

In February, IBM will introduce the next generation Power Systems--the first of a family of systems and storage designed to meet the demands of a smarter planet. From the chip and virtualization capabilities all the way through to the operating system, middleware and energy management, Power Systems from IBM are integrated to help support the complex workloads and dynamic computing models of a new kind of world.

Power Systems--the future of Unix servers. They're coming. Smarter systems for a Smarter Planet.

ibm.com/poweryourplanet

If you follow that link, it bounces you to another page, which adds that the next generation of Power Systems are "designed to support the complex workloads and dynamic computing models of a new kind of world." And that the "new systems will be the first of a series of systems and storage that will play a vital role in creating the smarter systems required of a smarter planet," and they "will be the future of Unix servers by redefining the meaning of server performance - moving from a simple performance-based view to a systems view by providing the depth and breadth of capabilities required to solve complex challenges."

IBM then goes on to brag about how over 2,100 companies have migrated to Power Systems from other platforms in the past four years, with more than 1,000 coming from Sun Unix boxes and more than 800 coming from HP Unix boxes, and that IBM's share of the Unix server market (in terms of revenues) is now pushing 40 percent. A level that HP never hit (either by itself or if you backcast HP and Digital together, is my guess) and a level that Sun might have hit at the peak of the dot-com boom.

Hooray, AIX! There's an i in that, right? Close enough. . . .

Not.

I have warned at the very highest levels of the Power Systems division that the AIX folks who have taken over what's left of the AS/400 platform had better start giving i/OS and its capabilities some airplay, some love, and some marketing money. Clearly the marketeers at Big Blue don't share our view--at least not during the week when Oracle will be cleared to eat Sun. They have their own uManifest thing going on, and they don't want to hear anything about iManifest. Maybe when the Power7 machines are out things will be different. Maybe there are a lot of i-specific marketing efforts and i-specific tweaks to the Power7 line on the way. We'll see. But this advertisement is not a very auspicious turn of events for the Power Systems i platform.

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