COMMON Europe Opens Up Global i Top Concerns Survey

Published: April 27, 2009

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

The AS/400 community has always been an international one, and in fact, for most of the 30 years that IBM has been selling midrange systems, the company did a lot more box shipments in Europe than it did in the United States. This made sense, given that Europe was not yet economically united and each country had its own businesses. Mergers around the world have given rise to a lot of consolidation of companies and their platforms, which has diluted the multinational feel of the i platform a bit. But just a bit.

To get a feel for what i shops are thinking these days, COMMON Europe is conducting a global Top Concerns survey of AS/400, iSeries, System i, and Power Systems i shops and would very much like you to participate. You can do so at this link in Deutsch, English, Espanol, and Francais, depending on your home country or the languages you studied in high school and college. COMMON Europe is handing out an iPod Nano to one survey respondent each in North America, Europe, Australasia, and Japan to encourage participation, and will be also gathering up information from attendees at the opening session of the COMMON Europe Congress, which will be held in Krakow, Poland, from June 6 through 9. At the ending session of the event, the survey results will be presented. The survey runs from April 14 through May 31, and is the fourth such global Top Concerns survey that COMMON Europe has conducted.

IBM and COMMON Europe have also extended their nominations for the 2009 Power Systems Innovation Awards until May 1, and if you want to put someone's name in the hat for the smart things they have done with the i platform, you can do so here.

COMMON Europe is running another survey, this one aimed at students and educators in the i field. The Top Academic Concerns survey, which is restricted to students and educators who are members of IBM's Academic Initiative program. You can participate in this survey here. The idea is to take the pulse of those on the academic side separately from those in the end user and business partner communities.

In case you missed it, COMMON Europe did a similar global Top Concerns last summer, and presented the results of the survey back in November. We had some snippets of information from the survey, which we told you about (see The i Upgrade Cycle Seems Par for the Course for more on that), but COMMON Europe put together a much more useful report after that story ran. Here's one interesting chart from it, which ranks the Top Concerns of i shops:

You can download the executive summary of last year's report at this link. The interesting bit in this executive summary was that 39 percent of customers polled this time last year said that they would migrate to i 6.1, 23 percent said they were moving to Power6 processors and only 6 percent seemed to be keen on Power-based blade servers. COMMON and COMMON Europe members are, as the report suggests, early adopters and this data is not necessarily indicative of trends in the i base at large. The other interesting bit was that companies in the Americas were more enthusiastic about upgrading than their counterparts in Europe in terms of moving to i 6.1 and blade servers, but Europeans were slightly more keen on moving to Power6-based machines.

It will be interesting to see what i shops say now that we are on the other side of the economic meltdown.

RELATED STORIES

The COMMON Conference Agenda Is Coming Together

COMMON Takes a Trip to DisneyWorld for 2010

Slate of Candidates Put Forth for the COMMON Board

The i Upgrade Cycle Seems Par for the Course

COMMON Creates Scholarship Honoring Al Barsa

                     Post this story to del.icio.us
               Post this story to Digg
    Post this story to Slashdot