20i2, A Year Of IBM i Un-i-ty

February 20, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Trevor Perry is one of the staunchest advocates of the IBM i platform out there, and if Big Blue had any, er, budget, they would hand him whatever piles of cash they have allocated to platform evangelization and just let him do what he does.

It’s a new year–welcome to 20i2–and one in which Perry is once again trying to shepherd the IBM i community for its own good, and is on a mission to understand how people talk about the platform formerly known as the AS/400. And to that end, Perry has launched www.ibmi2.com, a site that has a mission of building unity in the IBM i community.

“We have been playing the name game for a long time, but this is a modern system and the platform has sort of moved on,” Perry explained to The Four Hundred last week. (And yes, I did apologize for not changing the name of my copyrighted and trademarked newsletter.)

Perry, like all of us here at IT Jungle, wants to help the IBM i community, and he’s one of the reasons we speak with IBM’s brands rather than use old names for new products (even if we don’t like the new names or think IBM will just change them on a whim when it suits the purposes of the marketeers in Somers, New York).

What is important, and what Perry wants to know, is what language the managers, programmers, and users in your IT shop use to describe the IBM i platform. And to that end, the first mission of his “20i2” effort is to run a survey about who you are and how your people speak about the platform. So please help him out and take the survey.

Ultimately, the site will encourage us all to show a little unity and talk consistently amongst ourselves about the IBM i platform and then present a united front to those outside the fold. “Many people see the platform from a different perspective, and it is time to speak with one voice to the world,” as Perry puts it on the ibmi2.com site. Eventually, the site will include pointers to all kinds of IBM i resources (presumably including our own Four Hundred stack of newsletters) and also a FAQ to help IBM i users, programmers, and managers cope with some of the misinformation and myths about the IBM i platform and actually take action to promote the platform.