But Wait, There's More

IBM Appoints New iSeries Marketing Manager

Cecelia Marrese, who has been in charge of iSeries marketing at IBM since January 2003, has been named to a new position within the company as director of distribution channel management and channel marketing for the Americas region. Marrese was head of marketing for the iSeries for 20 months and, like her predecessors, received some of the most intense criticism and the most free advice among IBM's many lines of business. She takes on her new job on November 1, and it will involve all IBM products that are pushed through the channel in the United States, Canada, Latin America, Central America, Mexico, and the Caribbean.

Marrese has been replaced by Peter Bingaman, a marketing executive from IBM's Software Group, who has been spearheading the company's efforts to create the Express line of relatively low-cost software products for the small and midsized business market. Bingaman's title at Software Group was vice president of SMB marketing. Before that, he was director of global marketing for IBM's data management software. He joined IBM in 1996 from advertising powerhouse Satchi & Satchi, where he was vice president of account services and, among other things, handled the Hewlett-Packard account. Bingaman has a bachelor's degree in psychology from Bucknell University and an MBA from Duke University.

John Reed Named As iSeries Integration Man At IBM

"Integration Man" is not the title that IBM gave to John Reed, but it is probably the best description of the job that he is being asked to do as the new director of iSeries client availability solutions.

As the difficulties with the eServer i5 launch clearly demonstrated, piling on WebSphere and other middleware, as well as Windows, Linux, and Unix platforms, alongside OS/400 has made it very difficult to remain faithful to the "integration" religion, to which the OS/400 platform aspires. (The "i" in iSeries and i5 stands for "integration," you'll remember.)

Among other problems that Reed will be wrestling with in his new job will be trying to make sure that IBM and its partners have enough deeply skilled OS/400 experts available to help solve problems as customers implement solutions on the box. He says that there are some very bright people out there in the market, but that there are not a lot of them, and they are very busy.

He will also be working with the iSeries high availability software makers to try to come up with ways to make high availability software easier to setup and use, because IBM, like the high availability vendors, believes that high availability ought to be for all OS/400 shops, not just the biggest ones. Reed will also be working on ways to improve the speed at which IBM's OS/400 partners can bring their solutions online at customer sites. "Just like OS/400's deep integration, the speed of application deployment can be a key differentiator in the market," he says. Reed's team will also be walking up the stack from microcode through OS/400 and DB2/400, up through WebSphere and other middleware, looking for single points of failure that need to be removed and finding ways to more tightly integrate the software. And, finally, Reed will be creating tests that better simulate the real-world conditions that iSeries shops use the machines under, which will help IBM to better predict what will happen when companies put its technology into production.

How Did Those eServer i5 TV Ads Do?

At the spring COMMON user group meeting in San Antonio, IBM announced that it was running TV ads in St. Louis and Kansas City in Missouri to try out the idea of selling the iSeries on television, as many users have been asking the company to do for years. IBM set up control groups in Columbus, Ohio, and a number of other cities, and actually ran a series of print ads, drive-time radio slots, and TV ads to promote the iSeries.

According to Cecelia Marrese, outgoing director of iSeries marketing, no one who was polled by IBM in either the Missouri cities or the control group cities remembered the TV spots, which doesn't bode well for future TV ads promoting the iSeries. However, she said that the combination of radio and print ads, which featured local companies talking about their iSeries, did work. She said further that, rather than trying to compete directly against the large amount of marketing for Windows, Linux, and Unix solutions at a platform level, IBM would probably try to tailor future iSeries ads at specific industries and geographies where iSeries solutions can, and do, compete against solutions on these other platforms.

Top Techie Leaves PeopleSoft

After the house cleaning that removed Craig Conway as CEO of PeopleSoft a few weeks ago, the company's board of directors decided that it was also time to remove its top technologist, Ram Gupta, who has been executive vice president of products and technology since August 2000. Gupta, who oversaw the integration of the PeopleSoft and J.D. Edwards product lines, came to PeopleSoft from Healtheon-WebMD, where he was a general manager; he has held various development jobs at SGI and IBM. Stan Swete, the main architect of the PeopleSoft 8 ERP suite, was brought back from retirement to replace Gupta. It sure looks like founder Dave Duffield is getting the old PeopleSoft band back together.

ACOM, FaxStar Partner for iSeries Products

Document management and electronic payment software vendor ACOM announced last week that it has signed a co-marketing alliance with the Fax*Star division of Sepe, which was apparently the first company to create a fax server program way back in 1984 and is still one of the leaders in the fax serving market. Under the agreement, ACOM and Fax*Star will refer customers to each other's solutions and engage in joint marketing activities. So what was their first co-marketing activity? Going to COMMON together in Toronto last week and beating the bushes for new business.

COMMON Elects New Board Members

Beverly Russell has been elected as president of the COMMON midrange user group, replacing outgoing president Bob Boyson. Russell is director of information technology for E.D. Smith & Sons, a Canadian manufacturer of jellies, jams, toppings, sauces, and syrups, which has a staff of seven managing its iSeries shop. She has been an active member of COMMON since years before the AS/400 was launched and is on the board of directors of the Toronto Users Group, one of the largest AS/400 user groups in the world.

Wayne Madden, publisher of iSeriesNetwork, and Dan Kimmel, an IT expert with 30 years of experience, who currently works at MSI Systems Integrators, were also elected to the board, with Madden selected as executive vice president by the board. Randy Dufault was selected as treasurer, Janet Krueger as secretary, and John Earl, Gary Lagarde, Pete Massiello, and Charlie Massoglia are the remaining directors on the COMMON board.

Attendance At Spring COMMON Conference Modest, As Expected

The industrial belt surrounding Toronto is one of the centers of OS/400 computing in the world, which is one of the reasons why it is logical to host the COMMON user group meeting there. But it was October in Canada in a post-Sept. 11 world, where travel and training budgets are tight, so there was no way COMMON could get the 5,000 attendees that it had the last time the event was hosted in Toronto, which was immediately after the AS/400 launch, way back in 1988.

The official count given by outgoing COMMON president Bob Boyson was 2,000 registered attendees, with 372 first-timers. Some 380 people at the show were from Canada, with another 52 from outside North America. The word on the street is that somewhere between 950 and 1,000 of the registered users were paid attendees, with the remainder being members of the press, vendor exhibitors at the expo portion of the show, or from IBM.

Sarbanes-Oxley Webcast Scheduled

The functions and responsibilities of IT departments within companies facing Sarbanes-Oxley Act regulations is the topic of a Webcast presented by industry experts Dan Magid and Sharon Hoffman. Magid is president and CEO of Aldon, and Hoffman is a senior technical editor with Penton Media. Included in this session will be guidelines that companies are adopting and the procedures that organizations are implementing. The Webcast is scheduled for Tuesday, October 26, at 3:00 p.m. EST. Registration is available at www.iseriesnetwork.com/webcasts/.