iSeries Users Sound Off, Sometimes with Praise, at COMMON

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

If the iSeries Town Hall meeting, formerly known as Sound Off, is any barometer, then the climate in the iSeries community is changing--and changing for the better. While some may think the iSeries base might be mellowing with age--which is a preposterous idea, unless you are talking about the kind of mellowing that oak does as it ages (yes, that is respectful sarcasm)--it is not. What is happening is that IBM is finally, after years of protests, addressing the issues that most concern iSeries shops.

It's time for us to start working on the next set of challenges for IBM before Big Blue gets complacent! (Don't be shy. Send me an email with your gripes and we will send them upstream.)

Things are indeed changing, because Al Barsa, president of Barsa Consulting Group, who has traditionally been allowed to ask the first question of the IBM executives attending Sound Off or the iSeries Town Hall meetings at COMMON, did not get to go first this time. But, as usual, Barsa's widely respected comments focused on IBM's performance in delivering the latest iteration of iSeries hardware and software.

"Every COMMON, it's a privilege to get up here and talk about the latest release of OS/400," he said. "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 the most stable release of OS/400 we've ever had. Any user that doesn't have V5R3 installed needs to have their pulse checked."

Barsa also, like many of us, had praise for IBM's new marketing and support campaigns for the iSeries ecosystem, and his choice of words was both apt and undoubtedly repeated many times as we all learned of IBM's plans for the iSeries as 2004 drew to a close and 2005 has been unfolding. "Alas, hell has frozen over," said Barsa. "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 here for the last twelve and a half years asking you to do this. I once stood here with a 38-inch 2x4 so I could knock some common sense into panelists' heads. Whatever made you do an about face and begin 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."

Mark Shearer, the general manager if the iSeries business, responded to Barsa's comments. "'Best kept secret' is a term I have heard in every corridor I have walked with our clients and our partners. I personally 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."

[Note: You can see our transcription of the iSeries Town Hall meeting by clicking here. Not everyone can get to COMMON, which is why we took the time to transcribe the keynotes and iSeries Town Hall meeting for you.]

For the first time, IBM also asked some questions by video, and this was a chance for Malcolm Haines, the iSeries chief propagandist, to show off his quirky sense of humor again as IBM was asked what is nonetheless a pretty serious question. They roped Trevor Perry, a well-known COMMON speaker and iSeries consultant, into asking this question while Malcolm Haines and another IBMer held the camera in a funny exchange. "I hear there's been an attack from the Evil Empire," stated Perry on the film, and off camera you could hear one IBMer saying "He just said Evil Empire--he can't say Evil Empire. . ." while Haines replied, "Yes he can." Perry then corrected himself (well, sort of) by saying Microsoft, and then asked, "What are you doing about that?" Perry was, of course, referring to the Midrange Alliance Program (MAP), which was launched earlier this year by Microsoft to coax midrange tool and application software providers to use Microsoft's .NET and other tools to modernize OS/400 applications.

Joyce Bordash, the director of iSeries channel marketing within IBM's Systems and Technology Group and the person who is managing IBM's relationships with its key 3,000 hardware and software partners, said IBM's countermeasures to Microsoft's MAP was the just-announced iSeries Initiative for Innovation (iI for I is a potential acronym, I supposed, or we could just call it an "i for an I"), which, by the way, does include Microsoft tools but equally importantly promotes native iSeries solutions for modernizing RPG and COBOL applications on OS/400 servers. "There's really one big thing we're trying to do with this announcement, and that is to re-establish the world's greatest solution portfolio and business applications for iSeries," she said. "There should be no doubt hopefully in your mind, certainly not ours, that the IBM company is investing in this in a big way." She walked the audience through the three core elements of the iI for I program, which I went through in detail three weeks ago in "Big Blue Pumps Big Bucks into the iSeries". "We think it's what you've been asking us to do," said Bordash. "We're really excited about it, and just really feel that it should work very hard for you, our clients, and our partners."

The new burr under the iSeries saddle seems to be WebSphere, and plenty of OS/400 shops have been grousing that IBM's middleware comes late to the iSeries platform, and when it does get there, it is not as deeply integrated (meaning, it is not easily and transparently usable, like the integrated DB2/400 relational database management system is) as it needs to be. One OS/400 user stood up and explained that he had created a solution for his company based on DB2 EveryPlace and WebSphere EveryPlace Communication Manager that linked Palm Pilots from around the United States back into his company's iSeries. The problem is, this software is not yet ready for i5/OS V5R3 and another piece of software that it relies on, DataPropagtor, is not available on the new release of OS/400, either.

Tom Inman, vice president of product management for WebSphere within IBM's Software Group, took the heat for WebSphere issues, as he has done at the past few COMMON meetings. "We've been operating in a very wrong fashion, if you will, in the Software Group," he said. "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." Inman said he has hired former IBMer, Al Grega, who moved to LANSA, to come back to IBM and be personally responsible to "live and breathe WebSphere portfolio" for the iSeries and get other Software Group products on the platform, too.

Shearer added that it was high time for other IBM business units to get a primer on the iSeries so they could have the platform in mind as they develop and roll out new products.

Perhaps most significantly, IBM has figured out that WebSphere and Java, which go hand-in-hand in the IBM strategy, are not necessarily the two technologies that OS/400 shops are interested in using to develop applications. "In the early days, when we introduced WebSphere technologies, we were relatively fixated on that environment," explained Inman. "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."

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COMMON Spring 2005 iSeries Town Hall Meeting (transcript)