Analyzing the IBM i market could be generously described as a crap shoot. There’s not a great deal of hard data to be found. When something does arise, we take notice. A month ago, an article in IT Jungle provided a peek into the results of a survey of IBM midrange shops conducted by HelpSystems. The results of that survey have been compiled and presented in a report that has just been released.

IT Jungle, along with the European publishing company PowerWire, assisted HelpSystems in choosing topics and questions that would lead to revealing details about the

Despite being based in Texas, SMA Solutions and its systems automation software for IBM i are not particularly well-known in the United States. However, the company has enjoyed success recently in the European IBM i market, and now SMA’s owner and CEO, Michael Taylor, has tasked his European managers with accelerating growth in IBM i market stateside this year.

Taylor admits that he would rather spend money on R&D and customer support, as opposed to investing in marketing. “The average iSeries reader is going to say, who the heck is SMA? They’ve got no clue,” Taylor tells IT Jungle.

In the high availability world, the replication of IFS data has been a bit of a bottleneck. Companies that require 24×7 continuous operations have no tolerance for downtime, so backing up all systems and data, creating a failover system, and having access to everything is of the upmost importance. One of the keys to this is throughput performance and Maxava has addressed this with multi-threaded replication architecture for the IBM i Integrated File System, or IFS, which has just become available in its enterprise HA product.

Multi-threaded IFS replication lets organizations run multiple IFS replication processes in parallel, increasing the

We have been noting in recent issues of The Four Hundred that Big Blue’s sales and marketing people in the United States and Canada have been quiet on the wheeling and dealing front in recent months, which is a bit peculiar seeing as though you would think that IBM, having exited the X86 system business, would be doing everything in its power to help push new iron to its Power Systems and System z installed base. The Power8 machines have been in the field since last year, and many of the customers and resellers we talk to say a

Hi Dan:

Thanks for continuing to find new topics to stir conversations around the IBM i marketplace. I just read your story about IBM’s ISV support programs and had a few thoughts to share.

One of the challenges for ISVs who want to work in this market is that sometimes the strategies and development methods recommended by IBM are out of touch with the ISV’s market niche. You have to be careful not to follow IBM down a path that can lead you to create an application that IBM developers will praise, but very few customers will buy.

Another challenge