The i5 Gets SAP, Clear Technologies Solution Editions

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

IBM is once again expanding upon its special i5 550 Solution Editions, which are special discounted i5 servers that are purchased specifically to run applications that have been pre-qualified by the company. This week, IBM is adding two more variants for this offering, one aimed at SAP's ERP suite, the other at a CRM setup based on OS/400 and Domino from Clear Technologies.

The Solution Editions of the i5 were announced back in August 2004, when IBM came to the realization that the four-way i5 550 "Squadron" server had the right oomph for many midsized customers but the wrong price. Yes, it was a little too high compared with competitive Unix, and independent software vendors were asking IBM to do a little more to make the i5 server platform absolutely and unquestionably attractive compared with Unix platforms. (I did not say Wintel or Lintel platforms there because IBM is not trying to pitch the i5 directly against these boxes, which have pricing models that are less similar to that of the i5.)

A regular i5 550 with two 1.65-GHz Power5 processor cores activated and one of them running i5/OS Enterprise Edition costs $266,000. (Enterprise Edition is the i5/OS edition that can do online transaction processing using the 5250 protocol, as opposed to i5/OS Standard Edition, which cannot.) With the Solution Edition, IBM chops $60,000 off the cost of this base i5 550 (that's a 23 percent discount) and then removes some OS/400 features that smaller companies buying ERP suites do not require, including DB2 Symmetric Multiprocessing, Tivoli Storage Manager, Tivoli Monitoring, and a few other items that come in the Enterprise Edition.

Last year, Clear technologies, Integrated Distribution Solutions, International Business Systems, Intentia International, Lawson Software, Manhattan Associates, MAPICS, PeopleSoft (now owned by Oracle and only invited by virtue of the J.D. Edwards software suites that run on the iSeries) and SSA Global were invited to participate in the Solution Edition offering. The special i5 550 offered under this promotion does not include the actual application software. You still have to buy that separately, and to get the i5 Solution Edition you have to prove to IBM that you are buying new software from one of these vendors. In September 2004, IBM and these partners began rolling out their offerings.

IBM and its partners are continuing to tweak things, and that is why the new i5 Solution Edition from SAP and Clear Technologies are a bit different from deals IBM made last year. The SAP solution runs on i5/OS Standard Edition, not a cut-down Enterprise Edition, since the mySAP suite does not make use of the 5250 protocol. And the new Clear Technologies offering includes Domino and other related products that are part of the company's C2CRM suite.

The i5 Solution Edition for mySAP ERP comes in two different configurations. The first is a two-core i5 550 with OS/400 Standard Edition activated on both cores, while the second has all four cores in the i5 550 activated. (Just to be clear, this SAP Solution Edition is not based on i5/OS Enterprise Edition.) Both SAP setups use the 1.65-GHz, dual-core Power5 chips that are also used in the p5 550 AIX-based and OpenPower 720 Linux-based Squadron servers. With the two-way setup, the machine can have the remaining two cores in the box activated to run AIX or Linux, but they can't be upgraded to run i5/OS Standard Edition. Customers will have to upgrade to the four-way version, which has all of its processors set up to run i5/OS Standard Edition. Oddly enough, both machines have support for WebFacing, which would seem to suggest that either mySAP is making use of WebFacing (which seems unlikely) or that it is there so that customers who want to mix mySAP with other RPG applications have a means of Web-enabling those applications. A base i5 550 with i5/OS Standard Edition costs $74,000, and with OS/400 turned on a second core, it costs $129,000. The two-way SAP box will sell for $59,000, a stunning 54 percent discount. The four-way SAP box, according to IBM, will sell for $96,000, offering the same 54 percent discount. To upgrade from the two-way to the four-way SAP server costs $37,000. "This is the first time SAP has sponsored a hardware announcement," explains Jim Herring, director of product management and business operations for the iSeries line. "And this shows they are dead serious." Herring concurs that the idea behind the Solution Edition is to get an i5 implementation of mySAP for dozens to hundreds of users on par with a similarly sized Unix platform.

Doreen Anderson, data center manager for Ball Horticulture, a flower grower based in West Chicago, is certainly one of the first, if not the first CIOs, to adopt SAP's R/3 ERP suite for the AS/400 platform. Back in April 1997, just as SAP was finishing up its port of R/3 to the AS/400, Ball had made the decision to get rid of its hodge-podge collection of third-party RPG applications (which had been heavily customized by in-house programmers) and move to the SAP suite. Ball wanted to get out of the software maintenance business and also had a Y2K problem that was looming. Once the decision was made to move to R/3, Anderson and her team looked around at alternative platforms and decided to stick with the OS/400 platform, because even though the move to SAP was tough, those OS/400 skills were still pretty valuable and useful even after the move to R/3 was complete. Anderson rolled out the R/3 suite in one year, and did it on time and under budget. As Ball has grown, expanding its flower business into international markets, the OS/400 data center has been upgraded through several generations of AS/400 and iSeries machines (including the specialized SAP SB1 and SB3 application servers IBM launched in the late 1990s). Today, Ball is using an iSeries 870 for development and testing, and an iSeries 890 for production to support its mySAP installation.

While Ball is not today the type of customer that the Solution Edition is aimed at, it certainly was the right customer back in 1997, and that is the whole point of the Solution Edition approach, to get customers into the iSeries fold and make them happy. "The more, the merrier; that's what I say," quips Anderson, who has turned into one of IBM's staunchest advocates for SAP on the iSeries. "SAP is the difficult part, and it can be a beast, even if it is worth it in the end," she says. "But the iSeries is easy." Along with IBM, she is hopeful that the SAP Solution Edition will spur sales of that ERP suite on the iSeries. It probably won't hurt that SAP will be chasing former PeopleSoft accounts now that Oracle has prevailed in its hostile takeover. Not everyone is happy that, over the long haul, Oracle is apparently not supporting RPG, DB2/400, or OS/400 for its Project Fusion suite.

The Clear Technologies offering is distinct among other Solution Editions in that it not only includes i5/OS Standard Edition licenses for one processor core on the i5 550, one bare core activated (which can be used for AIX or Linux, or, if you shell out $45,000, then for i5/OS), and licenses for Domino Utility Express Server for two processors. The setup also includes 100 seats of Lotus Sametime instant messaging. The Domino Utility Express Server is a cut-down version of Notes/Domino that is made to support applications like C2CRM, and it does not include e-mail and calendar boxes for users. This setup costs $199,200, which is still a bit lower than the $206,000 price tag of an i5 Solution Edition for other platforms that does not include the Domino software.

IBM is taking orders for the SAP and Clear Technologies Solution Editions immediately, and will begin shipping them on February 18.