IBM i 7.1 Leads OS Shipments, Pushes Entry Sales

July 25, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan

The second quarter was not just a good one for IBM‘s Power Systems server sales. It was a good one for the latest-greatest incarnation of the OS/400 operating system and database platform, known as IBM i 7.1.

Back in May, when the editorial team at IT Jungle–Dan Burger, Alex Woodie, and myself–attended the COMMON midrange conference in Minneapolis, we met with the top brass in the Power Systems organization. They told us that in the first quarter of the year, there were a few companies making the jump from i5/OS V5R4 directly to IBM i 7.1, but that most customers made a stop at IBM i 6.1 if they went on to the i 7.1 release at all. Tom Rosamilia, general manager of the converged Power Systems and System z server business, told us that when he first took his GM job back in the summer of 2010, people were grumbling that IBM should just support V5R4 on the Power7 machines, not just i 6.1 and 7.1. But in the first quarter of this year, the grumbling about that died down.

And in the second quarter of the year, people assessing the situation decided to just go with i 7.1. I talked with Rosamilia last week about a bunch of things relating to the mainframe and Power Systems customer bases, and he said that in Q2, IBM i 7.1 represented 85 percent of all new operating system license shipments across Power Systems iron configured to run OS/400 and i workloads. “We seem to have jumped over a hurdle there,” Rosamilia said.

Rosamilia was also pleased with the turnaround on entry Power Systems servers in the quarter, which more than doubled their sales in the period. “It’s not all IBM i in there, there’s some AIX in there, too, but this is a good sign.”