Remarks By Frank Soltis, COMMON Spring 2005

[Transcription from the show]

[Note: Before Soltis' remarks, IBM showed a video, which you can download at ftp://ftp.software.ibm.com/as400/web/iseriesmyseries/video/ and see for yourself. This one is called Automatic.mpeg.]

I have to share a quick story with you. Friday, I was home in Rochester. And it was Friday night, and the telephone rang. And it was Malcolm, and Malcolm says, we just finished the video we're going to use at the opening in COMMON. And he says, here's the Web site, here, go and download it. Then he said to me, 'Oh by the way, show it to your wife. She will like it. You probably will not.' Once again, Malcolm was 100 percent correct.

I know we want to get onto the questions, and so I'm only take a few minutes. And so I thought what I would do this afternoon is spend a little bit of time talking to you a little bit about some of the observations that I've been making over roughly the last six months. I've had the opportunity of course to be around this product for many, many years, and there have been some significant changes that have been seen certainly over just the last six months. And I thought maybe it was an appropriate thing to just reiterate my own personal impressions of what I've seen happening.

You may recall a year ago, if you attended the conference in the spring of last year, one of the things we spent a great deal of time talking about was technology, innovative technology. It was really a time we were getting ready to introduce Power5 technology. And Power5 is just an incredible processor technology and we spent an awful lot of time talking about the processor technology and things like virtualization and virtualization engine and so forth.

So a couple of things happened. One in the industry, as far as press, consultants, and so forth, they were all very excited about it. We got an awful lot of press coverage on this, especially with the new i5 being the first to use Power5. In the iSeries user community, we got almost no reaction. In fact I had more iSeries customers saying to me, Well now wait a minute, Power5, that's something that comes after Power4 and before Power6, right? No, it's a lot more significant than that. But it really didn't sell very well with the iSeries technology.

Now why did we focus on the technology a year ago? We've done that in the past and been very successful. Some of us may remember back in 1995. A long time ago, back in 1995, when we introduced the first RISC processors. And if you attended a COMMON session back in 1995, everyone but everyone was talking about the difference between CISC and RISC and migration and the innovation of how we would move forward. And there was just a lot of discussion, a lot of hype, a lot of excitement. And I will tell you when we introduced that RISC processor, an awful lot of older AS/400s and a lot of you were still sitting on those old things, the System/36s, anybody remember those? They all moved to the new RISC models! So we thought with the introduction of Power5. Power5 by the way, in the industry is equal in significance to that original RISC announcement.

So we focused everything on Power5. Noticed we've changed that. It's what I'd like to talk about as back to basics. What sells this product? Certainly not technology. You know we have great technology, great innovations in our technology. But what sells this product, as we've been hearing, is through solutions and partnerships. Partnerships with ISVs, partnerships with business partners. And so what we've seen in the last six months is really a refocus on those parts of the business, the parts of the business that are really important to us, and you've heard Mark and Peter both talking about that. So that was really the first observation, over the last six months is sort of getting back to basics, the sort of thing that made product successful over many many years, in fact.

The second observation is one that's probably not as obvious to you, but to a lot of us within IBM it is very, very obvious. And that's the level of support that we actually have across all of IBM. And everyone of us at some point or another has sat back and said, is this iSeries thing really important to IBM.

I get an awful lot of questions from people about you know, what's the future of the iSeries, what's the future of i5/OS, usually called OS/400 of course. "What's the future of RPG?" I get those types of questions. And you kind of sit back and say, "Is there a future to this?" One thing that I can tell you that has been very obvious to most of us inside, and I think it's obvious to you, is the level of commitment and the level of support we've seen across all of IBM with this product, and it has been phenomenal. In fact, you probably would have to go back to the original announcement in 1988 of the AS/400, to see that level of support. So that has been something that has been extremely gratifying to many of us within IBM.

The third and the final thing that I really wanted to talk about was really the marketing. You know, how many years have we been coming here, these Town Hall meetings, and what do we hear? "It's the marketing, IBM." I'll go back to that early video.

[Referring to a different video that we did not have access to at press time.]

On that video was the comment: "Now the best computer a business can buy suddenly has a marketing plan that matches it." And I absolutely agree with hearing that from both Peter and Mark.

So the personal observation that I've seen over the last six months is there's been a tremendous amount of enthusiasm for this product inside of IBM and outside of IBM. And now we're going to be delivering on those promises. I was also thinking to myself as I was watching those videos, I'm sort of feeling sorry for that salesmen. Anybody else feeling sorry for that salesman? No? This is a tough crowd.

[Laughter]

Let's see how that salesman is doing with that third and final video.

[Note: After Soltis' remarks, IBM showed a video, which you can download at ftp://ftp.software.ibm.com/as400/web/iseriesmyseries/video/ and see for yourself. This one is called People.mpeg.]