Looking For i In All The Wrong Places

September 19, 2011 Dan Burger

For those of you who seldom find your way to the IBM i homepage, here’s a peek at an archived webinar you can find there under the title of Optimizing on Power Systems for Superior Economics. It co-stars Ian Jarman, IBM’s program director of global marketing for Power Systems, and Brad Day, an IT industry analyst and president of Enterprise Computing Advisors.

I visit the IBM i site from time to time in search of new resources and information to pass along to IT Jungle readers. Last week, I decided to check out the Power Systems webinar.

This 50-minute presentation highlights the importance of business architecture driving the choice of IT technology rather than IT technology forcing changes in business. That sounds like it would have some IBM i relevance, being that forced changes seems to come up fairly frequently. My personal favorite is the Oracle JD Edwards watch.

As I read through the preview of this webinar I find that workload optimization–a favorite term in IBM i environments where server capabilities often exceed the demands placed on it–is one of the major themes along with determining life-cycle costs, and sorting technology according to “must haves” and “nice to haves.”

Beyond that I’ll find discussions on virtualization, the cloud, and Linux, as well as how to noodle lifecycle costs by factoring in the cost of operation and incremental changes on top of the cost of acquisition. I can categorize some of that as “must know” and some of it as “hope I can skip through that.”

What I didn’t know before registering and beginning this webinar is that after listening to all 50 minutes there would only be the briefest mention of the IBM i operating system. In fact, if a listener didn’t already know the IBM i operating system ran on Power Systems, this session would only flick the light on and off in that room.

Once again IBM has done a fine job of making Power Systems all about Unix and Linux. It’s as interesting that this presentation is listed on the IBM i home page as it is that a presentation like this gets made with essentially no recognition that IBM i is part of the Power Systems equation. You can find it under the heading of “Special Offers,” where none of the four offers have anything to do with i.