Re-Energizing ISVs Is a Tough Chore for IBM

by Alex Woodie

With the iSeries community of ISVs descending upon Chicago this week for the semi-annual COMMON conference, IBM's iSeries Initiative for Innovation will be front and center. This program to bolster the iSeries is the biggest move IBM has made to shore up its ISV and application base in years, but does it go far enough to inject new life into the ecosystem? Some say it's a good move, but they add that it comes too late to stop the inevitable slide.

Doug Fulmer, who heads up IBM's worldwide sales for e-business infrastructure, says that, counter to the worldview, the iSeries ISV channel has not shrunk that much over the years. "There are some who have faded away, but there are some that have joined the fray," he says. "Total number of applications is down some, but not much."

The heyday of OS/400 application development, Fulmer says, was the 1988 to 1991 timeframe. "Nobody has a solid count, but we had 8,000 to 10,000 ISVs at that time," he says. "Now we're focusing on 3,000 or so." This is the so-called "i3000" group that IBM is targeting with its Series Initiative for Innovation. The 300 biggest ISVs, called the i300, already had extensive support from IBM.

Fulmer's main focus isn't on recruiting new ISVs to the platform, although that is a part of his job, too. Instead, he wants to make sure that the platform's current applications have the type of features users are looking for. In large part, this means having a graphical interface instead of a green screen interface. While those who use it swear by the green screen, it's a major drawback to the uninitiated who grew up on Windows and are accustomed to a GUI.

"Rather than adding one more ERP package, we need to figure out what kinds of potential improvements we can make to them," Fulmer says. "We need to shift the focus. Not everything needs to be GUI, but text applications are not going to fill the bill. The general problem is a lot of ISVs have fallen into the trap of not making changes."

This is where waving up to $50,000 in tools, assistance, and incentives at the smaller ISVs comes into play. Not only is IBM asking ISVs to make improvements, such as adding a GUI, to their applications, but it isn't requiring them to use IBM tools to do so. This is perhaps the most intriguing part of IBM's announcement. Sure, IBM is committing to spend hundreds of millions of dollars over and above what it had previously budgeted for the next two years. But this money is not specifically tied to supporting WebSphere. Rochester has finally gotten the WebSphere monkey off its back.

That's not to say WebSphere isn't still a crucial component of IBM's strategy. "At the IBM eServer level, we'd like for ISVs to write in Java and deploy on WebSphere, because it's cross platform," Fulmer says. "We're still focused on opening up all physical servers, so Java and WebSphere is the way to do that. That doesn't mean however, that an RPG ISV or Cobol ISV is not going to be getting any help."

The first incarnation of the iSeries Developer Roadmap was very closely (although not entirely) tied to WebSphere, but that's no longer the case. "The idea is to get them to modernize the application," Fulmer says. "IBM would like them to use WebSphere, but we understand not everybody is going to use that."

For example, for some things, Microsoft .NET may be the best approach for exposing OS/400 applications to the Web or to other applications, Fulmer says. "I think there's a fresh new willingness to look at technologies like .NET," he says. "We have a lot of customers who use .NET in one form or another."

That IBM would (sort of) endorse its biggest rival's development tools shows how serious the company is about keeping the ISV ecosystem in a state of health, no matter how that's done. There is at IBM willingness to do "whatever it takes to make those applications more competitive in the 21st century," Fulmer says. "There are a lot of ISVs willing to sit on stuff they have. We need to generate a little sense of urgency among those customers."

Plugging Along

Jim Duggan, a Gartner analyst who specializes in application development trends, says IBM's movement away from WebSphere with its developer roadmap was a good one, but that it could be too late to spark any type of sustained growth in the OS/400 application and ISV ecosystem.

"The first version of the roadmap was for those people with money. But the reaction from the client base was pretty poor," Duggan says. "I think the Toronto guys, and old school AS/400 guys in Rochester, knew that the Java story more expensive and difficult than much of their community could get at," he says. "Now they're trying to revive the vendor community, and muster the supporting cast. I think they're a bit late."

While $20,000 to $50,000 in tools and services can provide a big boost and incentive for smaller vendors to modernize their applications, and could bring a fresh crop of small vertical packages to the platform, IBM's new iSeries innovation program doesn't do enough to generate new interest in the iSeries from ISVs outside of the platform, Duggan says. The last major IBM-sponsored effort to bring an ISV to the platform, SAP's port to OS/400, was made in the late 1990s. A similar effort with PeopleSoft's Enterprise suite was started at the same time, during the Y2K bubble and the excitement to install ERP systems, but PeopleSoft eventually cut down on supported platforms to save money and pulled the plug on OS/400 support.

"If IBM had kept it up all along, it could have kept the momentum up," Duggan says. "But it's much harder to restart the interest in the platform that's so clearly past its peak in terms of sales." ISV interest in the iSeries peaked at the same time that iSeries sales peaked, Duggan says. "As long as those numbers were going up, vendors felt good about new investment on the iSeries," he says. "Once that starts to tail off, and the number of license contracts drops, I think that really had a big leverage affect on whether to build for the iSeries, first, if at all."

The problem isn't the iSeries hardware, software, or technology, Duggan says, but marketing and branding. "The loyalists are uneasy about the commitment from IBM, and the [new attempts at] marketing will help the loyalists hang on longer. I still don't see anything wrong with the platform," he says. "But their track record is clumsy, in terms of branding. I'm amazed they went from AS/400 to iSeries. They couldn't have lost the identity any faster."

At the end of the day, the platform's ties to RPG and the skills issue that entails will also hurt its chances at achieving any kind of sustained growth or revival, Duggan says. "The new roadmap makes it easier and less expensive [to develop for the iSeries], but the game ends up the same at the end of the day. How long does it take before RPG is major handicap if the best they can do is stretch it out? I really don't think they can revive it. [The best they can do is] make it an unobjectionable platform to stay on."

The persistence of this kind of talk is not news to IBM. What is different now is the sizable investment IBM is making to prevent this from happening. And who's to say Big Blue can't make it work? For years, IBM has been told that the AS/400 is dead. When expectations are that low, there's nowhere to go but up.