Where In The World Is IBM i?

In case you did not notice it, there is a new year here in 2016 and Big Blue has spent what must have been a fortune putting a new mobile-tuned website together for itself. I am going to show my age a bit here, but mobile formats are fine for a phone, and on a web screen they might be slick and slippery, but they are also shouty and devoid of actual data. Call me a misplaced man of letters, but I like text.

Just for the hell of it, I went poking around the new IBM website to see how hard it is to find something that did not say cognitive or mobile or cloud or mobile, and did straight-up, traditional data processing. Something like, you know, an IBM i platform. No cheating with a search engine, either.

Yeah, you can see where this is going, right? So if you go to the IT Infrastructure section, which is where I would probably hang out like it is a local bar with expensive beer, you see this pretty picture of which I have no idea why it is meant to convey II infrastructure:

The woman appears to be thinking about infrastructure, if I read this image correctly. Go figure. I have that look on my face when I think about systems sometimes, so I am not going to judge. And heaven knows the IT Jungle site is not perfect, but I am not an $80 billion IT giant trying to sell systems. Anyway. . . .

No mention of Power Systems or IBM i anywhere, but there is a tag for IBM’s new System z13s baby mainframes, which were announced last week and which seem to be aimed at modern infrastructure with containers and encryption and such. I did not see a Power Systems variant of such a machine, and am perplexed as to why, but let’s not get distracted here. If you go to the very bottom of this page, it looks like the Products link might lead us somewhere interesting. So I did that. And if you scroll down there to another interface into IT Infrastructure, you will find an expandable menu, and I expanded the sections here so you can see them:

Linux, Unix, and mainframe platforms are there. No IBM i. And if you click Power Systems enterprise servers, it takes you to AIX stuff. If you poke around, you can find IBM i in the Power Systems software for mid-sized business section. There, you find the familiar, old-style, text-heavy content that we all know. I wish there were more updated and more detailed whitepapers and presentations that made the technical and economic case for the IBM i platform. Some of this stuff is pretty stale, like years old. As publishers, we generate lots of new material each week, but maybe I expect too much. You decide.