IBM Launches System i Laboratory in South America

According to reports in the local newspapers, IBM Uruguay has spent $500,000 to open what it called an iSeries Laboratory, the first such lab of its kind apparently to serve those countries in the “Southern Cone” region of South America.

The report did not say much more than this–you can check it out here and test your Spanish skills–but it did mention two local vendors by name: ARTech, which is based in Montevideo and which sells its software in its home country as well as in Brazil, Mexico, and the United States, has created a set of iSeries-based software development tools called GeneXus that will be tested in the center. The other company was called Interamericana de Cómputos. ARTech has 5,000 customers using its tools, which, among other things, kick out Java or .NET applications from the same descriptive high-level application models.

I have never heard of ARTech or GeneXus, which just shows you how provincial the OS/400 platform really is. And that is kind of wonderful, really. Still, it is at the same time a bit scary that I have never heard of an iSeries tool developer with 5,000 customers, which is a pretty big number. We all have to do a better job of getting the word out, which is why I bothered mentioning this story at all. I also never heard of the term Southern Cone, which is Cono Sur in Spanish and Cone Sul in Portuguese. which means Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, southern Brazil, and sometimes Bolivia.