How Do You Stay In Touch With The IBM i Community?

February 6, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

The IBM i community is global and diverse. There is a lot of things going on in our part of the IT industry, and it can be tough to keep up with everything that is going on with the IBM i platform.

But it is nonetheless important for us all to understand how people are keeping up to date on new technologies and other cultural and corporate things that are happening in our community. Which is why Tom Huntington, executive vice president of technical solutions at Fortra (formerly known as HelpSystems), did a quick poll during the 2023 IBM i Marketplace Survey webinar that I participated in along with Huntington and Brandon Pederson, worldwide IBM i product marketing manager; Dan Sundt, IBM i product manager; and Steve Will, IBM i chief technology officer and distinguished engineer.

I took a quick screenshot of the quick poll:

I was busy paying attention to what everyone was saying at the time, and looking out for the times I needed to say something, so I never saw the final number of people who attended, but it was over 100. This is a reasonable number for a webinar, and probably not statistically significant considering there are probably around 500,000 people in the IBM i community. At least.

You go to war with the data you have, to paraphrase a former U.S. Secretary of Defense.

As I have said many times before, there are around 120,000 unique IBM i customers in the world, and maybe 30,000 of them are what I have for years called active. Meaning, they attend webinars, read newsletters, have gone to COMMON or POWERUp at some point in their careers (and maybe even regularly), keep their systems relatively up to date, and pay for hardware and software maintenance. The other 90,000 tend to lag in terms of having new software and modern releases in their IBM i shops, but to their credit, they keep the business going and the fact that they can is a testament to the value that OS/400 and IBM i platforms can bring. I think this quick poll, and the nine editions of the IBM i Marketplace Survey that have been done to date, reflect this active part of the base.

We are happy to see that industry newsletters and social networks were cited by 63 percent of respondents as how they keep up with the IBM i platform and happenings in the community, which bested attendance at COMMON or local user groups (only 46 percent) or the IBM i home page (47 percent). Vendor webinars lead the way, with 79 percent of respondents saying they attended these – but of course, this was a poll of people who attended at least one webinar, so this might again be a self-selecting subset and therefore skewed data. Another 75 percent of those quick polled said they attended IBM’s own webinars.

Multiple answers were allowed in the quick poll, and if you average it all out, those polled averaged 3.1 different sources of information.

Huntington compiled this list of IBM i resources, of which we are proud to be one of:

We are proud to be part of the mix and to serve the IBM i community, as we have been doing since 1989. We love what we do, and hope you do, too.