Zeitler and Duncan Speak Out on iSeries Strategy

by Dan Burger

Participation was at an all-time high for the chat series that iSeries Nation has been sponsoring for several months, with nearly 500 people tuning in to listen to what Zeitler and Duncan had to say. Right out of the gate, Zeitler wanted to take the edge off any fears that IBM is de-emphasizing the iSeries. To make his point, he noted the company's commitment to bringing mainframe-class capabilities in performance, availability, reliability, and scalability, and accomplishing that with what he called "mainstream levels of simplicity, integration, and ease of use." This combination, Zeitler said, is what has distinguished the platform and made its place in the market--a place with the highest level of customer satisfaction and the highest level of customer and business partner loyalty of any IBM platform.

"We are investing more in OS/400 than we are in the hardware, and we'll continue to," he told his cyber audience more than once.

Duncan chipped in by noting what he called "enormous investments in the OS/400 platform." Those investments, Duncan said, have strengthened the iSeries by giving it the capability to work with WebSphere, Java, Domino, and Linux, which leverages a powerful combination of environments on the platform.

Duncan also addressed the issue of marketing outside the iSeries customer base. "We have to be more aggressive in our marketing and messaging--working with trade press, with business publications--and, frankly, it's doing some advertising," he said.

In the months ahead, Duncan promised "some pretty strong advertising," a campaign specifically for the iSeries and another for the entire eServer lineup, including the iSeries line. He also drew attention to the fact that his iSeries team is working on the client and sector sides, with customer relationship teams. Throughout the presentation, Duncan repeatedly mentioned iSeries offerings aimed at server consolidation, which he called "a real opportunity for iSeries and xSeries to be working together to help our customers manage their costs."

Zeitler has been tuned into the AS/400 and iSeries market for more than 14 years, and his view of today's market includes the idea that customers increasingly will be accessing systems and system resources through a variety of devices that are considerably broader than what has been the rule. He says that, because there is now a wider variety of workloads, it's important that the iSeries be capable of handling Web workloads and application workloads with the same ease as it has demonstrated in the areas of data and transaction workloads.

"What we have done with iSeries," Zeitler explained, "is to make it an appropriate consolidation platform-- not just for data and transaction work, where it was traditionally strong, but for WebSphere, Linux, and Domino." The capability to use virtualization partitioning is one of the mainframe-class technologies that Zeitler said distinguishes the iSeries in the market, where consolidating workloads will play an important role in building e-business infrastructures.

The iSeries, Zeitler pointed out, has taken advantage of IBM's investment in the mainframe, supercomputer, and Power environments. The IBM announcement about the delivery of Regatta-class technology--high- end, mainframe-grade technology to the high end of the iSeries--backs up Zeitler's comments. (See "The iSeries Regatta Model 890 Sets Sail a Little Early.")

The convergence of hardware platforms--the sharing of Power processors and processor complexes--allows for better price/performance than if the iSeries operated as a single entity, Zeitler explained. But he also noted the importance of differentiating capabilities in the software, which, in the case of OS/400, delivers a feature like the OS/400 hypervisor. There is value, he said, in "sharing the technology as much as you can and differentiating by the personality and operating system environment."

The business climate today places enormous emphasis on cost considerations, and the AS/400 and iSeries platform is not inexpensive. Although there are features like increased options for capacity on demand and a new pricing structure for base model machines across the iSeries lineup (see "IBM Cuts Prices on Memory, Disk, and Selected iSeries Servers"), IBM still sees no reason to chase after the bargain-priced servers based on processors from Intel. Zeitler and Duncan expect the target customers will understand that the total-cost-of-ownership approach is the reason the iSeries wins in terms of operational cost comparisons when initial cost comparisons make the iSeries seem to be overpriced. This understanding is especially true with those most familiar with the box--OS/400 shops--and those with an interest in asset utilization--both existing and prospective OS/400 customers.

Both IBMers made the point (without specifically mentioning Microsoft) that now, more than ever, the market is requiring a system that is secure and has a sound backup and recovery system. The iSeries will turn more heads, Zeitler says, because it still rules when it comes to business efficiency and continuity.

It seems a bit early in the game to be making predictions of a final score, but, Zeitler said, "the deployment penetration of Linux, Apache, and XML has broken the lock of Microsoft and Sun proprietary systems." He predicted that as companies move to open systems, it would drive innovation that brings the opportunity to consolidate work on the iSeries that previously would have been run on another platform.

As companies make decisions to deploy applications differently, the consolidation message will speak louder. It's widely accepted that approximately three-fourths of iSeries clients also have Windows servers in their shops, and a fair number also have Unix and, increasingly, Linux machines. Zeitler and Duncan are expecting some of those workloads will be easily consolidated onto the iSeries. The main point in this argument is connecting Intel-based servers onto an iSeries, which offers the benefit of simplified and less expensive common management, compared with the server farm administrative nightmare.

IBM says it is committed to integrating different types of workloads on the iSeries and extending the capability for deploying applications.

Giving the customer choices, rather than dictating solutions, is the heart of iSeries and eServer positioning. We've seen the moves to emphasize technologies such as WebSphere, Linux, XML, and Java in order to provide deployment choices, with the follow-up pitch about how easy the iSeries is to tune, manage, and keep secure.

"We do not believe one platform is the whole world," Zeitler said. "It's not [Windows] NT or Solaris or mainframe. It's going to be a heterogeneous mix of many things." The iSeries, in his assessment, is taking advantage of technology that its customer base can use to accomplish heterogeneous goals.

The open systems' commitment on all the platforms, Zeitler said, is designed so customers will have a choice in terms of applications and deployment. The expectations are that technologies such as logical partitioning and the iSeries Connect will come into play.

Returning to the point about investments in OS/400, both Zeitler and Duncan used IBM's autonomic computing initiative Project eLiza as an example. Among the initiative's objectives is the implementation of self-configuring, self-healing, self-optimizing, and self-protecting systems. Much of this builds on capabilities previously delivered in the iSeries and zSeries. Zeitler indicated that other features from the autonomic computing list will be introduced in the near future. This planning represents a commitment, he said, to the future of OS/400. Partners and customers are making considerable investments in OS/400, and the proliferation of data and transaction applications are testimony to a major commitment.

To further this point, Zeitler mentioned grid computing, the concept that he referred to as "the next evolution of the Internet." Grid computing uses Internet-style technologies in order to make use of unused capacity on servers and workstations to do the kind of work that would normally be relegated to a very expensive supercomputer; grid computing server and network architectures may, as we have pointed out in recent stories, be married to evolving Web services software to create the highly distributed transaction processing environment of the future. "We are trying to stay out in front of the next innovation, and work with the leaders of the open movement, to make sure we have best support of these technologies on all IBM platforms," Zeitler said.

Within the research and development of the grid computing effort at IBM is the Web Ahead team, which is "inventing new ways to use our products." The Web Ahead team is using iSeries in its development process to connect OS/400 servers onto a grid. The iSeries is also in the middle of a voice-over IP project that runs under WebSphere. Zeitler said these projects demonstrate the iSeries is "in the mainstream in the future planning" and "a launching point for strategic pursuits."