System i5 GM Shearer Chats with iSociety Members

Published: February 12, 2007

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

The iSociety user group devoted to the System i platform is beginning to come out of its shell, and hosted its first "fireside chat" with Mark Shearer, the general manager of the System i5 division, on February 1.

If you missed the chat--which I did because iSociety did not notify me of it even though I am a member, unless of course my passport has been revoked--you can read the chat at this link on the iSociety. My thanks to the iSociety for posting a script of the chat for myself and for readers of The Four Hundred who may have also missed it.

The topics of conversation in the fireside chat cover a lot of the same ground as we often go over at the Town Hall meetings at the COMMON user group meetings. With COMMON being cut back to a once-a-year event, that means that GMs like Shearer and the System i5 team are only in the hot seat half as much, and Shearer is to be commended--as are past AS/400 and iSeries general managers--for making himself available for questions when this is not only not the norm among his server peers at Big Blue, but in the industry at large. The people who run multi-billion server units at the major server makers talk to analysts, consultancies, and a few journalists at the major trades--if at all. The OS/400 and i5/OS community has always been one that questions authority, right to its face, and authority often speaks right back. This is a good, almost democratic thing. At the very least, it is two-way communication, of which I heartily approve.

During the chat, Shearer indicated that IBM would be getting back to basics, fomenting a base of applications that run on the i5/OS platform that drive sales, much as in the heyday of the AS/400 10 and 15 years ago. (It is getting on 20 years since the AS/400 was launched with a raft of applications and thousands of independent software vendor partners, which is hard for me to get my head wrapped around sometimes.) Shearer reiterated IBM's Vertical Industry Program, which was profiled in this newsletter last week, which matches ISVs to particular and often small niches where the System i5 has a chance to win deals because other platforms are neglecting customers and these ISVs have solutions that match their needs. IBM will be pushing PHP and telephony, too, according to Shearer.

Shearer, like AS/400 and iSeries GMs in years past, seems to understand that IBM has left its lower flank open to attack from Windows servers by not having more aggressively priced entry i5 servers.

"This requirement..... for a more competitive entry level offering...... is COMPLETELY UNDERSTOOD BY ME!" Shearer typed. (Well, he didn't actually say it, any more than I am saying this story. Except inside my own head, of course, as I type it.) "I hear this in the U.S.... .and very loudly in Europe. Watch this space. I hear you loud and clear." When asked about when we might expect such machines, Shearer merely repeated, "Watch this space.  :-D"

To which I say: "Get your space in gear, man.  ;-{P>"

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