COMMON Spring 2005 iSeries Town Hall Meeting

[Transcription from the show]

IBM executives present:

Mark Shearer, iSeries general manager

Peter Bingaman, vice president of iSeries marketing

Frank Soltis, iSeries chief architect

Jim Herring, iSeries product development manager

John Reed, director of iSeries client availability solutions

Joyce Bordash, director of iSeries channel marketing

Tom Inman, marketing product manager for WebSphere

Bob McCormack, worldwide iSeries sales

Greg Szibowsky, sales leader for Americas

Video Question: Since the rename from AS/400 to iSeries, people still call it the AS/400. How can we educate users about iSeries name?

Bingaman: We actually have a worse problem. The alternative to the AS/400 name is officially the IBM eServer iSeries i5 570. So I'm not too sure where you want to take it.

[Laughter]

Clearly our first challenge though is to put to rest the AS/400 name. The only way we can do that is through aggressive marketing, sales training, and just being consistent in the way, first of all, IBM even treats the name. So everything we have out there now is focused on the IBM eServer iSeries right now. We are consistently communicating iSeries as the family name of products. So iSeries iSeries iSeries. And I ask all of you to help us communicate that, by the way. It's iSeries, and the i5 is a product line within that family. So leave this room with iSeries, and correct everyone you know with iSeries.

[Applause]

Video question: Hi, I'm Trevor Perry. I hear there's been an attack from the Evil Empire. . .

[Guy behind the camera] He just said Evil Empire. He can't say Evil Empire. . .
[Malcolm Haines, also behind camera] Yes he can.

. . . um, from Microsoft. What are you doing about that?

Shearer: We're going to speak out. Here's Joyce Bordash.

Bordash: Let me just start by trying to be very clear on the iSeries Initiative for Innovation that both Mark and Peter talked about earlier. There's really one big thing we're trying to do with this announcement. And that is to reestablish the world's greatest solution portfolio and business applications for iSeries. There should be no doubt hopefully in your mind, certainly not ours, that the IBM company is investing in this in a big way. And the way that we're going about it is through three key programs that Peter talked about earlier. I just will quickly recap them for you.

The first one is the Application Portfolio Innovation program that we'd mentioned. That program is really all about reaching out to thousands of ISVs. We are actively profiling these ISVs today, offering them free solutions assessments, really trying to identify and understand what help we can provide them in extending their applications, and really introducing this innovative technology capabilities that we talked about. The great news is we're not doing it alone. We're doing it with an army of tools providers. Many of you here in the audience have great solutions that you're demonstrating in the Expo center.

The Tools Innovation program that you saw us announce two weeks ago is really about us going to market with about 60 different tools providers. We expect that to grow pretty rapidly over 100. Many of you may be aware of what Microsoft announced. They initially announced a program with eight providers. It's grown slightly. But we're all about inclusion and really trying to capitalize on some of the innovative technologies that these tools providers bring to us.

The third program, the iSeries Innovation program, is really about redefining what the meaning of solution is. I tell you this announcement has really resonated in the press. In the two weeks that we've done this, we've had 52 press stories on it. So we think it's what you've been asking us to do. We're really excited about it, and just really feel that it should work very hard for you, our clients, and our partners.

[Applause]

Question: [We are paraphrasing here, but the iSeries reseller said that he started installing HMCs with some difficulty, and he sent a letter to John Reed and got good response from IBM. He said further that with the last couple of releases of HMC code, he saw a lot of improvement, and that his customers stopped complaining. He suggested that the HMC be equipped with redundant disks and power supplies.]

Reed: Thanks for the comments. I vaguely remember some discussion about the HMC at last COMMON. I kind of remember a little bit about that. But we've put a full court press on this. All of IBM's rallied around, the usability people, the user technologies, development people. There's been a concerted effort to really take this thing and make it what it needs to be. And it's improved dramatically. I know Jim Herring and I both installed these. When we initially installed them, they weren't as good as what we thought what IBM needed to deliver.

From a redundancy standpoint, really right now, our approach is if you have a network and you need redundancy with your HMC, you have the ability to install a couple of HMCs within your network so you have total redundancy and you won't have that single point of failure. As far as the product roadmap, I'm going to turn it over to Jim.

Herring: If you don't have a second HMC, make sure you have a spare, as it were. I guess you don't know that we have an Advisory Council created for the Americas, the COMMON Americas Advisory Council. And we meet with them, every six months, with dozens of teleconferences during the six month period. And it's all about requirements. So what I'd suggest you do, is find Mike Plavic, he's really the chair of the requirements council, and tell him what you want to do, and that way we can bring that requirement in through COMMON through the right process so we can get that prioritized with our product line and get moving on it.

Al Barsa: Every COMMON it's a privilege to get up here and talk about the latest release of OS/400. For the last two conferences, I've indicated that V5R3 of OS/400-- or whatever you're calling it now, since my system says it's running OS/400--is great. I'd like to step up further and say that V5R3 is likely thte most stable release of OS/400 we've ever had. Any user that doesn't have V5R3 installed needs to have their pulse checked. I want to thank Jim Herring, John Reed, Kevin Tomlins, and Bob Foster, for personally coming to my office last week to gain a deeper understanding of what remaining issues we still have with the HMC. At the last conference, I was extremely unhappy with the HMC, which made IBM extremely unhappy with me. Not necessarily a precedent setting thing.

With hard HMC code, which you load over once from a recovery CD to get the advantage of high-performance journal file system, almost everybody should be happy with the HMC, both from a functional and a performance perspective. Today we are recommending the HMC to our customers and if anybody has more questions see me tonight at Ask the Experts.

Alas, hell has frozen over. You're finally marketing and advertising our wonderful system. I see newspaper ads. I see television ads. I see creative spots aimed at audiences like the one here. I'm positively overwhelmed. However, we've only been standing for the last twelve and a half years asking you to do this. The situation was first discussed at Sound Off in the fall of 1992 in Atlanta during the Rodney King riots. I once stood here with an 38-inch 2X4 so I could knock some common sense into panelists' heads. Whatever made you do an about face and listening? Now, whatever you do, please don't stop. We have the very best system in the world, and IBM has been keeping it a super secret since 1988. That's 17 years. Thanks for leaking out the secret. More. More. More.

[Applause]

Shearer: "Best kept secret" is a term I have heard in every corridor I have walked in terms of our clients and our partners. I personally from today forward really am accountable for sustaining IBM's focus and investments going forward. I won't bother to estimate why decisions were made in the past. But I will tell you, Al--and you know Sam Palmisano, and you know Bill Zeitler--Bill, Sam, and I could not be more committed than we are to keep this going. So, on the marketing aside, absolutely. Peter, do you have a comment?

Bingaman: Thank you, Al, very much. This is a big year for us, and you know that. We can't do it alone. We are spending a lot more money. We are targeting the right people that advertise, the press and analyst relation work we're doing. We need your help, right, especially getting these C-level folks. Next COMMON, I would love to be able to step up here and say at least 100 of you gave us the names of your CIOs and your CEOs so we can go call on them, with you, without you, it doesn't matter. But I'm going to challenge you guys for a minute, right? Come give us the names of the people you want us to speak with in your organizations so we can help tell the iSeries story. Bring the cards up on stage, write down the name of the person, the phone number, the contact information, anything. Together we'll get the word out a lot faster that way.

Question: Most of you have known me for years, but I haven't been at the conference for the past year because we got very involved in working on an application to run on Palm Pilots for all our route guys out in the country. This application uses IBM DB2 Everyplace synching to the AS/400, across Sprint CDMA network, using WebSphere EveryPlace Communication Manager. Going back to the '400.

The problem that I have is that getting the pervasive computing community within IBM to know that the iSeries even exists, much less getting the Pilots working on it, has been a real challenge. I cannot go to version 5.3, because when we put this in place, we had already switched to version 5.2, and we had to go back a level with Data Propagator in order to get the Pilot to work synching back up to the AS/400. But we got it working. It's fantastic when you get it working, and get it all the way back up to be able to see 52 different tables that are on this handheld, all the data in it back on the '400 as soon as the synch is completed. It's a phenomenal piece of work that IBM has.

My challenge to you guys is to get this product on the AS/400 platform. Get WebSphere Everyplace Access, get DB2 Everyplace Access running on the AS/400 platform. Make sure the rest of IBM knows about your product. That's the toughest thing that I've had to is to teach them over and over again and to demand from them that we get this working, all the way back inside of IBM.

Shearer: Thanks for your comments.

Inman: Thank you, first of all, for using our technology. Recently I picked up responsibility for Everyplace Access products. I did not have responsibility for that until January of this year. Peter knows, as Peter came from software group just before coming over to work in this job, that I've been an advocate for the iSeries product line for a while. We've been operating in a very wrong fashion, if you will, in the software group. We've been doing what I call a port and pray model. Port some of our products over to the iSeries platform. Pray that something good happens. That's not the model that we're on any longer. Once I started grabbing hold of the rest of the WebSphere software platform because I didn't have responsibility for it until recently, one of the changes I made is I went outside, and grabbed an individual with a long number of years background in iSeries, a gentleman by the name of Al Grega. Al's been on the COMMON advisory board for the last two to three years, worked for IBM before, then joined LANSA, came onto my team. Al's role is to live and breathe WebSphere portfolio, and we're going to bring the rest of the software business with us, to the iSeries platform.

As relates to WebSphere Everyplace Access, I've got the team looking at how we can take the existing product plan and port it now over to the iSeries platform. It was not prioritized when I got it, and we moved it into prioritization. I don't have a date for you right now, but with your passion, and that sort of deployment, this is a reason why we're going to accelerate moving all of our products much more timely on our platform.

I guess the last comment would be, we've started to do a much better job of planning jointly working with the iSeries team. This stuff doesn't come about naturally unless you plan for it. So recently WebSphere Application Server Version 6 we announced in the fourth quarter, and we shipped on the distributed platform December 30, plus or minus, and we made available on the iSeries platform less than 60 days later. Our commitment is to close that gap. In the past it was much, much longer than that. So you will get much more timely focus from us.

As it relates to the DB2 team, I moved my former product manager for WebSphere over to that product team, and he bleeds iSeries colors as well, so I will talk to him tomorrow and I'll see what I can do to move that one forward as well.

Shearer: Great question. It really also brings up a key point. Many of you have told us that we need to be as diligent inside IBM telling the iSeries story, as we are outside.

[Applause]

I know that some of our IGS colleagues or BCS colleagues might benefit from a primer on iSeries. We're not going to go through the details today, but this internal communication is part of Peter's overall marketing and communication plan going forward.

Question: Last summer, I was up in Canada fishing. I got pulled over, and I said to the cop, "What is it illegal to pull a trailer in Canada?" "No," said the cop, "but you lost your skier a mile back." iSeries has lost its skier. iSeries is its own worst enemy. There are no solutions. We are not used to six-month to one-year development scenarios. You won't sell WebSphere. You are overselling customers. We have to buy bigger, more expensive hardware. Your sales people can't even talk the language anymore. It's gotta be simple. It's gotta be a solution.

Inman: I couldn't agree more. Mark mentioned earlier in his comments about complexity in the IT industry and the need for simplification. You know it's a major issue when the Economist publishes the entire journal in October 2004 on the need for simplicity in the IT industry.

The single largest thing I'm working on in the WebSphere business, as vice president of product management, is simplification. In October we'd kicked off an initiative focused on simplicity. The design point is making it simple to consume the technology, simple to understand it, simple to buy it, simple to sell it, simple to install it, to develop, to deploy it. That is that much more important on the iSeries platform. The work we are doing with Al, the product team underneath Jim, and the engineering groups, working with business partner teams, is absolutely critical. The design point is to make WebSphere far more visible within the iSeries environment by simply doing what I stands for, which is integration. So I agree with what you're saying, we were on a port and pray model, as opposed to integrating all the capabilities we've had within the iSeries environment. So I couldn't agree with you more. As it relates to the skills and focusing on the developer community, I think that's a fundamental party for myself and my team, and working with the developer roadmap, with Joyce and the other tools partners, to make WebSphere and the other surrounding tools from ourselves and our partners, more and more productive for the developer community delivering the sort of business solutions you need.

Herring: A lot of people felt the iSeries Developer Roadmap only led them one place, and that was Java. That place is sometimes complex. Myself, I went out and bought the book, "Learn Java in 21 Days," and 21 months later I was still working on "Hello World." So we recognize that that isn't the right destination for everybody. The new roadmap has three destinations, one of which is RPG, one of which is Java with EJB, and one of which is a combination of the two. And you get to pick when you really get done where you end up from a core business offering perspective.

Bordash: Please go see Greg B in the expo. He's showing this new developers roadmap. He's showing some of the fundamental changes we're making, and how much more open and embracing we're trying to be in terms of the technology. The other thing I would say Mark is we recognize that the development community is an important constituency and we need to do a better job of servicing their needs, and you'll see a lot more focus from us in that area.

Comment: The message is great here. But when we get to the feet on the street, we need to get down to the business partner. Make it go down. It's great to hear it here, but it's not yet down to the customers.

Question: What are you doing to get the iSeries into colleges and into universities? We need to see more young people here today. Also, HHS has mandated the HIPAA rules must be implemented by April 2005, and I do not see a solution coming from IBM to handle HIPAA regulations that is secure.

Bingaman: I think you're spot on in both areas that we haven't had the focus we need to really ramp up our education efforts significantly or quickly enough. Linda Grigoleit has been doing a great job attacking it as we have, but it's clearly not where it needs to be and that's one of the reasons why we put in writing this IBM Charter for iSeries Innovation. You take a look at that in there is a statement of our commitment to building skills through education. We put that in writing so that we would direct ourselves to go tackle this a lot more aggressively than we have to date. So that was one area that we know we need to focus on and put some mass behind. We are piloting something over in Germany that's proving very successful in the education field. So that's a big point.

The other area that we haven't really done a great job in iSeries, either, is the industry focus. Over the last three months, we've done a real deep dive in the key industries that we need to target, one of which is healthcare, which is now forcing us to really look closely at what those impending events are, like HIPAA. By the way, we didn't do a great job with Sarbanes-Oxley. We still have a lot of work to do there as well.

These points you're on are absolutely right, things we need to go attack aggressively, both of them are in the charter for specific reasons. They're big focus areas. We have to be good at them and we're going to put the critical mass there necessary to succeed.

Shearer: It's really interesting. As I travel the regions of the world, in every country I've been told this requirement that we've got to get to university students and teach them the iSeries value proposition in the IT curriculum. And we're actually developing a core curriculum now that we plan to make available around the world, and we're looking at various forms of providing either local systems or remote access so that students can access iSeries technology. I call it work in process, but we're very cognizant of the requirement. We've got more work to do there.

Herring: I have to tell you, usually when I sit up at these meetings, at least I have an idea when that particular thing will show in the operating system. Because as you know we're very, very up to speed on security. But I have to admit, on this particular one, I'm not. And we actually work with people in healthcare profession. We have some on our board of advisors. Here's what I'll offer you. I'd like to meet with after the Town Hall gets over with and pull some of our security experts so we can understand this in greater detail make sure you get what you need, either as part of V5R3, or as part of a solution.

Continuation of the HIPAA Question: I already brought this up at COMMON Nashville and in Orlando. That was over two years ago, so it's not like it has never been brought into this forum. I need something to take back to me, because I have gap analysis and I have risk analysis that I have to document what am I going to do about this, what am I going to be in for. What am I going to be able to implement?

Jim Mason, Question: I know the name AS/400 is a dirty name around here these days. But the thing you have to remember is the title of it was Application Server 400. I agree with the statement some of the people made that the thing that made this market--not the platform, not the hardware, but the actual market itself--strong was the fact that it could build and deliver great applications quickly. That was originally the leverage point that you had over other platforms. And going back to that leverage point, I think you need to focus on that.

So we have had some investment from IBM in what I call iSeries WebSphere tooling and so on. But that investment is actually rather weak, I think, relative to where we need to be and where the platform actually was 15 or 20 years ago. It was a leading application development platform then. The WebSphere tools as a family--it's a big fat family and covers everything that IBM wants to make and sell. But in the iSeries space, they've done some very, very good things, but it looks like you're not getting all the funding you need to deliver everything they should in a timely manner. So we have WebSphere Version 6 out, but we don't have the tools for that.

On top of that, the other thing that the iSeries platform that I sort of disagree with the whole strategy of WebSphere tooling. Most of the tools in the WebSphere family target a different developer profile completely from the iSeries. And in fact, if you really value the iSeries business, and what it does economically as a value statement to these companies, it focuses on the ability to build applications easily.

And that is not following what I call the detailed J2EE roadmap that the regular WebSphere tools do. You will get how the iSeries versions of these tools differentiated. It's radically easier for existing developers or even non-developers in some cases, to build things, than it is with the regular version of the WebSphere tools.

We should be focusing more on the iSeries developer profile and making it much easier to build these applications. So if you actually look at the iSeries tools in detail, and stack them up against application developer or the Rational tools, there's a world of difference between these two tools sets, and really nobody in IBM understands that. So IBM is off and selling the wrong toolsets to the iSeries customer to begin with. The iSeries customer has wrong roadmap on how to learn that stuff. And IBM, I think, is under-investing in that iSeries toolset. I think you need to go back, get some more money, put it where it belongs, and then drive the people in this community--all these developers that are at COMMON--drive them to the point where they are in fact leaders in application development. This isn't about learning in Java. It's about taking the approach the iSeries toolset has and extending it and driving farther and faster than you have before. So I'd like to see a different approach to iSeries investment. Thanks.

[Applause]

Inman: Once again, I agree. We have a very strong fixation in software, we love runtimes. Unfortunately you can't actually get people to adopt your runtimes unless you do a real good job with the tools. We will announce and ship the Version 6 of the tools in the second quarter. It seems a bit strange to ship the server first, but it's been done.

As it relates to the investment, there's a reason that Mark Shearer and my boss speak now once a quarter and preferably about once every six weeks. One of the things we're focused on, we did a piece of work in the fourth quarter to look at Jim's team and my team, some business partners I've been working with, at the roadmap that we have across the various skill sets that are needed to be able to adopt our portfolio. And no doubt about it, there are some gaps. So we understand the gaps and the investment and prioritize the gaps and the investment, and now we're using the forum that we have periodically with Mark and Software Group to actually redirect some of the investments.

As it relates to designing tools for the user, once again I have to agree with you. We've not done a brilliant job in my opinion, and so we're really focusing on user-center design, personas, personas of the various users of the tools, and doing a far better job designing the tools for the needs of the user community. So there's a lot more focus, again I have to turn my attention back to Al. Al has spent a large number of years in this area. Between Al and my product management and development team, we have a lot of energy focused on this. We do need a bit more money, and that's why we focused to build the gap plan and are focused on getting that funded.

Shearer: Thanks for the question, Jim. I suspect I'll be hearing from Tom after this meeting.

Randall Munson, Question: Conference after conference I've been getting up here and speaking on behalf of my clients, who most of them are business partners. And I always deliver the same message, that it was the marketing, stupid. And this panel of people--some of the people have changed, but basically it's the same people, in the same roles--always responded, "We get it. Just wait."

This time it seems different, and I'm puzzled by this. You say you're going to increase you're marketing by 200 to 300 percent, and you've already done that if you put one ad in the Wall Street Journal.

[Loud applause and laughter]

Since IBM was on the black, and they took all these different platforms and said, they're not really different, they're all eServers, they're all black now, and they're all doing the same things. And unwilling to distinguish one from the other, that's what we've been living with, and we knew that IBM would never allow people to see the value of iSeries because the rest of the platforms would be embarrassed in contrast.

Now you're showing us a commercial where you're laughing at the absurdity of the other platforms. If you actually aired that thing, that's totally different. So this is wonderful, it's delightful, and my question comes out of this: When I wake up from this wonderful dream, what day will it be.

Shearer: I have heard this pretty consistently as I've spoken to people, and I will tell you that you're going to have to deal with me and put up with me for several years, so I may as well tell you the truth.

Munson: You're doing different stuff right now.

[Laughter]

Shearer: This is personal. Back in 2000 we faced a situation where IBM lost essentially 10 percent market share in hardware the prior five years. We went from about 33 percent in servers to about a 23 percent share, even though we had great technology, it wasn't perceived to be relevant to the industry at large. We also had completely independent development activity and investments, and we were completely failing to leverage the great intellectual capital across our various systems and businesses. Some senior executives put me in a position where I was to drive synergy and leverage this thing called eServer. In fact, in the past few years, we have moved from 23 to 33 percent share, sort of back to where we had been in the 1990s. The gainers in IBM were our Unix business, our Intel business, and our storage business to some extent.

But unfortunately, a byproduct of our eServer strategy was that we really failed to continue to communicate the very high, unique value proposition of the iSeries. I think from the marketplace point of view, the message got lost beside the others. Now, for the next few years, Sam's asked me to recreate the very deep differentiated category of computing that I think iSeries represents. I have no excuses for the past, but rest assured I'm a very determined individual. So long as I'm in this position, we're going to continue on this path.

Peter do you have any thoughtful comments in terms of . . .

Bingaman: What you did with eServer?

Shearer: No.

[Laughter]

Don't forget, you still work for me.

Bingaman: I think I shared those thoughts earlier anyway. There are a couple things I'd say we are sort of wrapping our arms around as well.

On the eServer thing, we started re-engaging in this whole dialogue, and the sticking point for a lot of people outside iSeries has been very simply this: You can put zSeries in a mainframe category, the xSeries in a Wintel category, the pSeries in a Unix category. Where's i? It's a unique category. It is, in and of itself, a category. And so we have to be telling the story, because it's too difficult to go from a discussion from an eServer level down to another level if they're really not aware of what this other category is, where the iSeries exists. So we had to invest.

The investments actually, up 200 to 300 percent, are actually very substantial. When you take the advertising investment, when you take the air cover we're getting out of the investments we're making in press and analysts, we are reaching tens of millions of customers multiple times throughout the year. The equivalent dollar spend will be close to a hundred million dollars if you add it all together, maybe even more. When you wrap that with the efforts we're doing with the iSeries Initiative for Innovation, channel incentives--there is nothing that holds a candle to this in terms of the investments we've versus other years in the last five years. So it is significant. And I'm a marketing guy through and through. I didn't come from sales or engineering or anything else. So I'm steadfastly opposed to investing in something that's not going to have an impact on the market. We're re-directing funds from one place to use in other areas that are truly going to develop awareness for the brand. I really feel comfortable with the amount of money we're spending, and we're going to have a strong impact this year.

Munson: Let me finish by saying thank you.

[Applause]

Question: There can't be any more confusing landscape than ERP right now, with SAP and PeopleSoft, Oracle and JD Edwards. Being a JDE iSeries customer, I'm really interested in how that's going to play out.

Shearer: JDE and IBM have a 27 year history of working together, including our mutual clients. The installed base of clients is extremely important to both Oracle now and IBM. And we are reaching out to all of our clients, recommitting to iSeries support for the J.D. Edwards platform. Oracle you'll see down in the Expo center. They have some specific materials they've prepared to address some of the concerns that you would naturally have.

We've done some market research around the world. We find that most of the J.D. Edwards class are continuing to invest in current platforms. There are segments and pockets of our clients that have expressed a desire to explore other add-on software or other ERP solutions on the iSeries platform. And we've got a very safe approach by taking care of our installed base with the J.D. Edwards client base is hugely important to us. I spent the day out at Oracle a few weeks ago with one of the co-presidents and several members of the senior executive team, and we're taking our responsibility very seriously in terms of insuring continued support for our client base.

Bordash: We have put a senior executive leader in place now over this Oracle relationship, and they have done the exact same thing. The team is now engaged working hard. You've seen some of the public statements in terms of Oracle's statement of direction that they are supporting the product through 2013. As we speak we are developing a future roadmap together. This confusion that you talk about, I somewhat feel your pain. I think in some ways it's also a benefit to us in the sense that we do have wonderful solutions out there. We have several of them. And it's not just SAP and PeopleSoft. We have great solutions from folks like Manhattan Associates and Lawson and SSA, Intentia. This is really what the iSeries solution portfolio is all about, is we're providing you with choice.

Now where we need to step in and perhaps take some of this confusion away from you is really where the ecosystem comes into play. Who really is in the best position to support the offering and really cover your specific needs. So that's really where we're focused on is clearing the space at the high level, the strategic level, working very closely with these ERP vendors, and at the same time really building up the ecosystem with feet on the street.

Bingaman: What we've promoting internally is the need to understand you're point of view, quite honestly. Because it's very easy for us to declare, here's IBM and here's Oracle, and we've come together and say here's a declaration. What it's going to come down to is you guys, people who have the World application, whether or not you want to stay with that application or not. And then, if not, where will you figure out what the right alternative is for your business--a very simplistic, customer-centric view of World.

What are you looking for us to openly declare? I don't want to give a cryptic answer to a very cryptic question. Is there something you're looking specifically to hear from us that would help?

Same questioner: Well, that's a very complex question.

Bingaman: Ha! Right back at you!

Same questioner again: Specifically, one of the things that J.D. Edwards did was going from their World platform to OneWorld allowed them to offer a software packaged that was platform independent, which gave them the ability to market off the iSeries platform. That has proven to be a very unnatural act. And we've struggled with the iSeries running OneWorld, and we're really thinking that maybe going back to World is better.

Question: We currently use Net.Data, and I hope that Rochester continues to support Net.Data because 98 percent of our business is e-commerce. However, we keep looking at WebSphere and Java, and we keep backing away. I don't know how long you're going to continue to support Net.Data in Rochester, so we're going to diversify and get some other tools. We decided we're going to try PHP, which I don't think is supported on iSeries at this point. I just wanted to make a point, please find something other than Java as a place to go.

Herring: That's a great requirement. In fact, we spent about 45 minutes on it yesterday afternoon in the COMMON Advisory Council session. Very supportive concern was brought up and we understand it. We are looking for a simpler method for Web programming. One of the opportunities or choices is in fact PHP, which everybody knows is an open source language that's very, very popular. It's got some wonderful benefits, not the least of which is it's very popular with students coming out of universities, so we can maybe kill two birds with one stone. But that is definitely on our radar screen. If you have any other ideas about a simple Web enablement or programming environment, please pass it to me or again to the COMMON advisory council. We do understand that requirement very, very well and we are working on fulfilling it.

Question: [Paraphrasing: the AS/400 was the hallmark the strength, and investments were protected. With the System/38 and the AS/400, you could develop applications, and it was straightforward, the machine was easy to use. Now, your business partners move to .NET. He has seen this happen several times.]

Bingaman: Back to that eServer discussion. I think you're on all the points we've been trying to address with the discussion tonight. On the channel side of things, Mark referenced the fact that we introduced a new channel incentives that makes iSeries the most profitable server you can sell in IBM. We heard at PartnerWorld just a week ago, that if we had made even a tenth of it we can expect to see some significant investments backing the iSeries brand, partners are back mobilized and forecasting double digit growth.

And then there's the awareness piece that you mentioned. What are we doing to get the word out to reposition the brand. Exactly the investments we're making in advertising, press and analyst relations, and the Web. That's what we're doing to bring the word of the iSeries out into the market again. The reason we're doing this, and the investments we're making to do this, are all in recognition of the fact that it is IBM's responsibility to build markets for our partners.

I often use the analogy of Proctor and Gamble. Proctor and Gamble is successful because retailers put products on the shelves. Retailers put Proctor and Gamble's products on the shelves because Proctor advertises, and advertising makes markets for those products. That's our responsibility. Increase investments in advertising, 40 percent increase in channel incentives, significant investments in modernization. Those are the three things we're on.

McCormack: I will tell you that most of the partner firms, particularly the solution providers and the hardware resellers, have long-term investments born out of this brand. As several of you have alluded to and referenced so, as they picked up other platforms they tended to go where the market was going.

I will tell you in my career--and I've been around for a long time--I've never seen the energy and excitement that now we have to translate that into actions in front of the customers. So we're very focused on the value of the partners, all aspects. The ISVs require a much different, as you know, value proposition than a hardware reseller, who brings profit to the firm. Who's very different than an integrator, which wants access to an account in a local geography.

So all the efforts we have underway are designed to get to the value of the partners, the value proposition that are relevant to them. And then we really have to come together--which we haven't done a really good job of--in front of the customer, because ultimately you make the decision. And I think most importantly, we have to make it easier for all of our partners to maneuver within IBM, this idea of a single point of contact within IBM. So clearly, results we'll see, but we have plans for every single partner in the value net.

Shearer: The system integrator community, the consulting community, is a hugely important constituency in the SMB space, those businesses, the industry is so fragmented. I just want to acknowledge that I think we have a lot of work to do quickly to reinvigorate the broad regional SI and consulting base. I think that's a very valid point you're making.

Janet Krueger: I'd like to ask you about another constituency that I think is important to be vocal to. I've attended the last five IBM shareholder meetings. I've never seen an iSeries box there. I've never heard the iSeries mentioned as a part of IBM's directions, except for my annual conversation with the CEO from the shareholder floor. I would really, really like to see an i5 box when I get to Charleston this year, and I would really like to hear the word iSeries before I ask Sam about it.

Shearer: Thank you for your comment. Duly noted.

Question: I've been using IBM's ADSM and the follow on product, Tivoli StorageManager, for about 10 years. About four weeks ago I was on a conference call with some IBMers to get some assistance in upgrading to the current release of Tivoli StorageManager, only to find out that it's no longer supported on the AS/4, err, iSeries platform, under version 5.3. This is, again, one of those problems within IBM and communicating to all of IBM, Lotus, Tivoli, and the rest of IBM, that we want these products on this platform. I've been paying for support on this for years. I don't know where my support dollars are going, because obviously it's not going to keeping this product alive on the AS/400 platform. So once again this another critical area that we continue to see the rest of IBM shining away from this platform and you've got to turn this around and get that decision reversed for us as customers.

Inman: First of all, Peter, as you ramp up the internal communication plan, my commitment to you as your partner within the Software Group, is that we touch each and everyone of the key product line managers. The good news, we're consolidated as such that there's only about five of us, five brands. And so I will get, with Peter's help and Mark's help, clear communication around the market opportunity here and how we in WebSphere are focused on it, so I can help bring my colleagues along from the Tivoli team.

On that specific product, I will go talk to the product manager in the next day or so and figure out what's going on, and tell him what I've heard from you here. Mark touched on it earlier, the need to communicate internally is quite high, and as your partner inside the software group, I will help with that.

Shearer: Thank you.

Question: We've heard from ISVs, we've heard from sys admin people. We've got i5/OS, I like it a lot. I like the iSeries, I like the speed. There's a lot of great things there. I love free format RPG. And I like WDSc a lot. But, one, it's a resource hog, it really bogs down on PCs. We need to find out if there are ways out there that we can install things to speed this thing up, things we can clean out on our PCs. We'd like to know what those are.

Speaking on behalf of my developers, not a lot of training available, that we've been able to find, except for real high-level intros to WebSphere. I'd like to be able to see more things, like the guys from KOA that did the blog I learned more from their blog than I learned from anything I was able to find on IBM's Web site. It's really the developers that are going to drive that new technology. If you want us to move forward with things that are on WebSphere, on the iSeries, we've got to be able to understand it, and our bosses, my CEO is intimidated by the cost, so sending us all to class, he says let's back up, let's not go that direction again. So we've got to find a way to make it accessible and inexpensive--meaning free. Tutorials, Webcasts, videos, print, whatever it is to get beyond just the intro level to WebSphere so we can really start developing cool applications using those tools.

Inman: Here at COMMON those over 40 WebSphere sessions. There's over 11 books in the COMMON bookstore. Al Grega and Kelly Schmotzer are hosting a listening forum. Really use the time here to listen and get feedback.

I agree with you on easy to use tools. My experience a year ago when I downloaded TurboTax, and two hours later I was done, and didn't touch a manual, that's the design point. At this session, I talked about earlier when we were focused on simplicity, we had a chief designer come in from the iPod and iTunes to talk about user-centered design, so that you can learn to use the capabilities through the capabilities themselves. So there's a lot of things we're doing in terms of tutorials and samples and things like that. But frankly we're just at the beginning of doing that, because we were not focused on the problem before, so there's a lot more coming in that area.

Question: We have a big problem getting our developers to use WebSphere, because they go, Why should I? I've got PDM, it does everything I know how to do, it does it faster than WebSphere, and it does it easier than WebSphere. And there's a big challenge of getting anybody to try WebSphere. I'm one of the only developers at my company that actually uses WebSphere. Is there going to be anything, in the new roadmap…it was just trying to get the education for WebSphere. Again, we couldn't find any classes and there was nothing we could do.

Herring: Clearly, we need to make WebSphere education more available. There are definitely situations where WebSphere is appropriate and the most effective choice you can have for a programming environment. But we do recognize the fact that we need to beef up RPG and the tools around RPG a little bit. This was one of the revelations from the work we did in the fourth quarter around our developer roadmap.

Inman: In the early days, when we introduced WebSphere technologies, we were relatively fixated on that environment. And the good news is there's about 3 million Java programmers in the world. Having said that, RPG has been one of the most, if not the most, productive environment to build applications in for years. Rather than trying to turn RPG developers into Java developers, our brains are switched on the other way around, which is to try to bring RPG to the Java developer. Mask the complexity of the WebSphere environment through the skills the developer already has, so that's where's we're shifting our attention, is to simplify building applications in the WebSphere environment through what you already know in RPG and the other skills you have.