The Four Hundred

Early last Monday morning, about 350 people braved the brisk winds and 11-degree temperatures to attend the iSeries Nation town hall session. COMMON organizers didn't schedule classes until about noon that day in order to encourage attendance at the town hall meeting and the expo session that followed. However, it would seem that many attendees chose to stay in their warm beds and get some extra rest rather than go to the town hall.

It was the fifth town hall meeting since IBM introduced the iSeries Nation organization at the New Orleans COMMON show in the spring of 2001; it was also the first town hall for iSeries general manager Al Zollar, who joined the iSeries organization a few months ago. Zollar had, in fact, joined the iSeries team exactly 61 days before the meeting, he said by way of introducing himself (not that he's counting, he added).

Zollar kicked off the town hall session by sharing with the audience some of the acronyms that he had learned since arriving in Indianapolis, including CUDS (COMMON user discussion socials), MOM (meeting of the members), and HOBO (honorary board official). "So I figure I need to go to CUDS, because I need to meet some of the MOMs and the HOBOs, to talk to them about EBOD," he said, referring to e-business on demand, IBM's new strategic direction for computing.

Then Zollar got down to business. The January 20 announcements position the iSeries as a premier implementation of the concepts behind EBOD, Zollar said. Specifically, Zollar described the capabilities that that announcement brings, by way of a three-sided "cost cube." The three sides of Zollar's cost cube reflect the costs associated with acquiring technology, the on-going maintenance of that technology, and preparing for a transition to new technologies.

In terms of acquiring new technology, Zollar pointed to the on/off Capacity Upgrade on Demand (CUoD) capabilities of the new Model 825, 870, and improved 890 servers, in which customers can activate dormant processors and then turn them off when they don't need them. "You only pay for the processors you need," he said. "That is really, really cool."

To show town hall attendees how easy CUoD is to use, Zollar, who hails from Kansas City, Missouri (the "show me" state), did a quick little demo on the two giant screens that flanked him up on the stage. The application was a fractal geometry program, a very un-iSeries-like application, but an excellent choice for its bright, colorful patterns and its CPU-intensive requirements. The fractal was moving very slowly down the screen when Zollar initiated CUoD through his Windows interface. After about 10 seconds of configuration, Zollar hit the OK button, and the fractal zoomed down the screen to completion. "We didn't see any complicated setups, no IPL," Zollar said. "This is an incredible capability, and it's truly an industry-first."

Zollar demonstrated the second face of his cost cube by way of the iSeries's capability to help eliminate the "incredible challenge" of maintaining server farms through server consolidation. Since the January 20 announcement, iSeries customers will be able to manage those environments even better, with some of the Tivoli systems management software that IBM is including for "free" in the enterprise edition of OS/400, Zollar said. "There's an incredible set of software value put into the enterprise package, to take any workload and bring it to an iSeries environment," he said. To get customers started with server consolidation, IBM is including "free" pre-installed Integrated xSeries Servers (IxS) cards and SuSE Linux partitions on some iSeries boxes.

It was harder to demonstrate the third face of Zollar's cost cube, the transition to new technologies, without divulging Big Blue's secret roadmap information. The OS/400 platform's ability to adapt to new technologies is arguably its single greatest strength, and perhaps we haven't seen the full range of possibilities. IBM is determined to transition the iSeries into a management platform to run Windows (through IxA and IxS features), and OS/400, Linux, and AIX workloads natively, and the Rochester labs will do it through a new hypervisor that is planned for the iSeries with the debut of the Power5 chips in 2004. We have written much about the future "Squadron" Power5 servers and their capabilities over the past year, and IBM didn't say anything readers of The Four Hundred do not already know. The news is that IBM is finally saying what is coming, and that is a commitment, which is harder to divert from than a roadmap.

"We are on a powerful technology roadmap," Zollar told iNation town hall attendees. "We have a smooth path into the future, in stark contrast to two unprofitable PC companies," he said, in reference to the merger of Hewlett-Packard and Compaq and the difficulty that HP is experiencing in moving its customers to the 64-bit Itanium-based architecture that it codeveloped with Intel.

Then Cecelia Marresse, vice president of iSeries marketing, took 10 minutes to describe what IBM is doing to promote the iSeries. In addition to running advertisements in major IT and business publications, including CNET and Forbes (she didn't mention the iSeries ads that have been running in online editions of The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal), Marresse said IBM has been getting traction through other media, too, including iNation "chats" held over the telephone, and even Web radio, which is a first for iSeries advertising. Marresse also briefly described IBM's new "urban legend" marketing campaign, which will showcase several amazing stories surrounding the OS/400 platform's near-legendary stability.

What people will not be seeing is television ads for the iSeries, Marresse said. The chorus of iSeries devotees who want to see their box on TV was considerably louder in Indianapolis than it has been at past COMMON conferences, most likely in reaction to the series of high-profile commercials touting "magic business beans" and "universal business adapters" that IBM has been running in prime-time national network spots, and getting rave reviews for. The iSeries is being associated, somewhat loosely, with a bunch of advertisements featuring a magic lamp--which shows a certain amount of gumption, considering the flap IBM had to take for the Magic Box ads it ran a few years ago. Some people will like these ads, some won't. But IBM doesn't care; neither does its ad agency, Ogilvy and Mather. Here's why.

What has been clear for years is that IBM is more interested in maintaining its name recognition and its larger umbrella brands, because this makes it easier for its sales reps and partners to get their feet in the data center door, and then take a look around and see what they can sell after they assess the politics, culture, and technology at that site. This tactic is not about pushing products so much as taking the path of least resistance. And, unlike in days of old, IBM is using humor to wiggle into the conscious and subconscious minds of its customers. This is something that the self-proclaimed chief imagination officer of the iSeries, Malcolm Haines, is clearly good at. And he is always interesting and amusing. Some of us get the feeling that all of this cleverness is really about misdirection, an old magician's trick, to keep our eyes off of what is really going on. The test of all of this clever advertising and marketing is whether the iSeries business will grow, instead of contracting, as it has been doing since 1998. Guild Companies has its eyes firmly on what the magician's hands are doing, not on where he is saying to look.

So targeted platform pitches will happen at the comarketing level, generally not in the wider media. IBM has no interest in pitching the iSeries against its own platforms--or any other, for that matter--since making simple comparisons invites deeper comparisons that might undermine its eServer branding in servers or its WebSphere branding in middleware, just to name two of IBM's more precious brands.

An unusually content Al Barsa, president of Barsa Consulting, kicked off the Sound Off component of the iNation town hall. Barsa, traditionally the first of a series of acerbic speakers for what used to be a gripe session, did his best to color his praise instead. "You've got a real serious problem in V5R2," Barsa told the panel of IBM executives. "V5R2 is such an outstanding release of OS/400, I can't imagine you'll ever be able to top it."

And what would Sound Off be without a derogatory reference to IBM's marketing of the iSeries? One of the participants said that IBM's iSeries marketing has been quite successful--at killing the iSeries. This got Zollar's goat. "If anybody says we're trying to kill the iSeries, I'll kill them," he said. (Because there is no shortage of wise guys at Guild Companies, later on that day, as we were meeting Zollar, we walked up to him and said, "Hi, I'm Tim, I'm Alex, and I'm Dan, and we're hear to kill the iSeries." Zollar got a good laugh out of it.)

One speaker had a serious issue with the education vouchers that IBM is including with the new iSeries machines. Since these vouchers are only good for IBM-sponsored education, and IBM's education competes with COMMON, he said the vouchers are a direct hit on COMMON. "You've got to support COMMON," he said. Another speaker recommended that IBM do something to make iSeries boxes more affordable so schools would be more apt to adopt them.

Don Rima, an iSeries consultant who is very active in OS/400 user groups and platform politics, gave the biggest contribution to making the session like the Sound Offs of old. Rima said that IBM had charged one of his clients a punitive fee for not staying current on the release. Customers who have let their OS/400 maintenance drop are charged the currency access fee, which can sometimes be very expensive. Rima asked whether IBM had anything better to do than charge small businesses these types of fees. IBM recommended that customers should stay current, as IBM continues to deliver more and more functionality.