Separated by Oceans, United by Purpose

To help celebrate the international scope of the IBM i business, our guest blogger today is HaiBo Yu, Senior Manager for IBM i database, Web integration & Lotus development at the IBM China lab in Beijing. His story illustrates how, when it comes to IBM i, integration is about more than the product, it’s also about the team. Read it, and then join the conversation on Facebook.

My first impression of IBM i was formed in a conversation nearly a decade ago: “Rochester takes a lot of pride in the iSeries as one of the most reliable, scalable and easy to use platforms in the world. We think a lot about what things mean to our iSeries customers…, they are much more interested in running their businesses…” I heard this from Jeff Vettel, the first Rochester, Minn., colleague I met when we established the team in Beijing to work on IBM i projects in 2004. From Jeff’s words, I realized the great value and differentiation this platform offers and told myself that I would try my best to keep the great reputation our Rochester team has built in the IBM i community. This has been kept in mind and passed on to anyone who has since joined the team.

Time goes fast. Many of us were single when we established our strategic relationship with the Rochester team, and we have since gotten married and had children! At the same time, we have delivered a lot of good things together with the Rochester team in IBM i 5.4, 6.1 and 7.1. And we have gradually accepted more responsibilities in our work too. We started with small projects, mainly on testing, but were eventually able to work independently in areas the China team covers. For example, we not only have developers and testers working on key features, but also have strong leaders participating on the business architect team led by our Chief Architect, Steve Will, for setting overall strategy and doing release planning.

The China team understands well what the key factors are for IBM i to be a successful platform running serious business applications. We believe and are deeply integrated into the culture the Rochester team has created – the processes to ensure high quality, the tradition to think in a customer’s way and the spirit of innovation to meet the needs of an evolving business environment. As we’ve grown, mentoring from the Rochester team has always been important. A lot of people in China, including myself, have mentors in Rochester. This helps us not only develop deep skills and business insights, but also be truly integrated as a global team. We do appreciate the efforts of our mentors, and we also remember to enjoy our time together when we get a chance to meet each other face to face either in Rochester or in Beijing.

With a strong development team in Beijing, we hope we can benefit our local market and customers too. We have established various channels and programs to help them. In China, we have an annual IBM i event named iWorld where IBM, customers and business partners gather together to discuss the latest updates of IBM i and share experiences. Our development team is involved to help plan the agenda and provide speakers and support staff. Besides that, throughout the year we also hold several Study Tours to invite customers and business partners to our lab for workshops and discussions about IBM i strategy, hot technologies and other topics of interest to them. We also have one-on-one interlocks with some customers for their unique questions/concerns. With our support, Chinese customers feel they are bridged with the WW community, know more of what global customers are doing and have more influence as to what this platform should do to meet their needs for business growth. Besides that, we have had chances to talk with WW customers when we attend LUG and COMMON, or do presentations at the Rochester briefing center. Meanwhile, our Rochester colleagues also have opportunities to speak with and meet Chinese customers during our Study Tours.

What will you be doing in 2020? None of us have a clear answer about ourselves yet, but IBM i’s support life cycle already extends beyond 2020 with our current planned deliverables. I’m looking forward to the next celebration of IBM i with my colleagues and customers all over the world, and also my grown-up daughter at that time…

 

 

 

 

Kemofarmacija d.d. WebSphere Commerce and IBM i

Today’s customer story comes straight from one of the customer references I’ve discussed in the past. It involves a customer you might not have heard about, but like thousands and thousands of midsized businesses around the world, they depend on IBM i, Power Systems and their solution to succeed in their market. And succeed they have. Their story also includes another IBM player – WebSphere Commerce, which helped the client realize significant growth in their online sales, and resulted in marketshare leadership.

Kemofarmacija d.d. is a leading wholesaler of medical and healthcare products and devices in Slovenia. With a range of more than 16,000 products, including medicine, medical devices and supplies, nutritional and cosmetic products and chemicals, Kemofarmacija recognized that it was not fully exploiting the potential of its Internet sales channel.

Zoran Lemut, CIO of Kemofarmacija d.d., explains: “Market needs had evolved, but our website had not changed with them. It wasn’t easy enough for customers to navigate our website, and we were not maximizing opportunities for cross-selling or more targeted online marketing.”

Kemofarmacija realized that it could drive more profitable sales by creating tailored website advertisements and promotions, offering customers the products they wanted at the right time. The company first needed to gain greater insight into its online customer base, so that it could enhance its website to better meet customer needs.

Kemofarmacija partnered with IBM Premier Business Partner MZR d.o.o. to design and build a custom e-commerce solution, Nova Elona, which is based on the IBM WebSphere Commerce Enterprise platform. The Nova Elona solution integrates IBM WebSphere Commerce Enterprise software with the company’s existing content management and ERP systems, offering advanced functionalities such as special offers, management of sales activities and customer segmentation.

Nova Elona is hosted on an IBM Power 720 Express server, with the IBM i operating system providing the exceptional levels of security and business resiliency that Kemofarmacija needs to guarantee consistently high service levels for its mission-critical e-commerce system.

“We are a long-term user of the Power Systems platform, and have always been impressed by the system’s stability and performance,” says Lemut. “The IBM Power 720 Express gives us all the performance we need in a compact, cost-effective and highly reliable server. There is also a clear upgrade path, so we can be sure that the solution will grow in line with our requirements. When you combine all of this with IBM’s continued investment in the platform, it gives us great confidence for the future.”

By choosing to run IBM WebSphere Commerce Enterprise on the IBM Power 720 Express, Kemofarmacija can take full advantage of its existing investment in and knowledge of the Power Systems platform. The company is also maximizing the potential for creating even greater business efficiency by leveraging a single Power Systems server to run the new solution alongside its other core business applications.

“With WebSphere running on the robust and powerful IBM Power 720 server, we have successfully maximized the revenue generating potential of our Web presence.”

—Zoran Lemut, CIO, Kemofarmacija d.d.

IBM WebSphere Commerce enables Kemofarmacija’s marketing team to deliver highly personalized marketing campaigns and advertisements via the Nova Elona solution. With the WebSphere software, users can fine-tune online shopping flows and electronic marketing messages, without intervention from IT. The solution provides information on customer behavior and the distribution of sales over different customer segments and sales channels—online, telephone orders and direct sales. It also provides powerful analytical tools for measuring the effectiveness of each marketing initiative.

“We are now able to offer online promotions and display ads that accurately reflect the products that customers are most likely to be interested in purchasing,” notes Lemut. “As a result, we have experienced a 30 percent increase in online sales order lines, so that more than 90 percent of our sales order lines now come through our web portal. We have also been able to improve cross-sales by presenting more targeted product recommendations, thereby encouraging customers to buy more during every visit.”

With IBM WebSphere Commerce boosting online sales, Kemofarmacija estimates that it has captured 42 percent of the market, giving it the largest market share in Slovenia.

Zoran Lemut concludes, “With WebSphere running on the robust and powerful IBM Power 720 server, we have successfully maximized the revenue-generating potential of our Web presence.”

I want to thank the team who put this reference together. They did a great job identifying the value brought to the customer. I had to edit it down for space, but the story is clear. Whether your company is using solutions from IBM, alongside your existing in-house and ISV workloads, like Kemofarmacia, or whether you use one of the thousands of industry-specific solutions in the IBM i marketplace, you also benefit from the reliability and integrated value of running IBM i on Power Systems. I hope this customer example helps you see new possibilities for the platform in your business.

 

 

 

 

 

EasyOptimize and IBM i

One of the many parts of the announcement on February 5 was the introduction of EasyOptimize technology. You might have missed it, but it’s briefly described in several places, including on the IBM Power Systems Advantages page. The key words used to describe EasyOptimize are:

“To achieve maximum performance, POWER processor-based systems are designed with EasyOptimize technologies that enable the system to tune automatically to specific industry workloads.”

There are various technologies in the EasyOptimize category. One of them is the Dynamic Platform Optimizer, which is used across a Power platform to optimize memory access for a system with multiple partitions running. I’m not going to describe it in detail, because it was very nicely covered in the Power Firmware blog a couple weeks back, but it’s a clear example of the kind of technology we’re building.

Another example that’s called out in some places is called AIX Dynamic System Optimizer. It’s an extension of the AIX Active System Optimizer and performs such functions as cache and memory affinity optimization, and tuning the operation of the operating system to optimize database workloads.

The same kind of function is integrated into the fabric of the IBM i operating system. Consequently, as we were preparing for the announcement, we also coined the term IBM i Dynamic System Optimizer to describe the integrated features tune system resources to optimize business workloads. In other words, just as for AIX, EasyOptimize refers to a set of capabilities, some of which are delivered by the Power processors in conjunction with the firmware that underlies all Power operating systems.

EasyOptimize is also a set of integrated capabilities in IBM i. The Dynamic System Optimizer (DSO) function is autonomic resource management built into the IBM i operating system. Its first underpinnings were made available to clients more than 20 years ago, and it has been enhanced every release since. IBM i has been actively working to make memory and processor affinity optimal for many years, and advancements are made in each release. Affinity, for those who are not familiar with the term, describes the “distance” data has to travel from memory in the system to the processors that need to act on the data in that memory. In a system with as many cores as Power has, and as much memory as Power has, it would be very easy to have data drift “away” from the processors acting on it. Very complex algorithms are involved in ensuring that data that’s currently being used, or that will soon be used, by a processing unit (a core) is as close as possible to reduce latency. Again, affinity autonomic processing has been a part of IBM i for many years, and it represents an excellent example of EasyOptimize capabilities.

Another example you might have heard about is the Performance Adjuster (QPFRADJ), which has been an integrated part of the operating system for more than two decades. It learns how the customer's workloads are using memory and processors and it balances system usage to optimize performance and throughput. Another example, which was made available a couple of years ago, is called IBM i Workload Group support, which allows clients to limit the processing power given to their workloads while still leaving the detailed management of which work runs on which cores to the operating system. Similarly, using a built-in function called Dynamic SMT, the IBM i operating system can recognize when a core does not need to be shared, and allow processes to run in single-threaded mode, automatically improving workload performance. These EasyOptimize autonomic performance capabilities serve the fundamental principle of integrated value in IBM i.

And then of course, we have the integrated DB2 that automates various database operations to optimize system usage based on the precise workload that’s being run. The 7.1 release, for example, delivered Adaptive Query Processing, which can automatically recognize when a frequently run query is taking longer than it has in the past, and optimizes the query to improve performance.

Most of the Dynamic System Optimizer functions within IBM i are integrated for no extra charge. DB2 for i does have some features that fit into the EasyOptimize category, which are available for an additional charge. For example, DB2 Symmetric Multiprocessing (5770SS1 Option 26) is a feature that can spread database work, such as complex queries, across multiple threads and cores automatically. When it was first introduced, only our largest customers were using multiple cores and multiple threads of execution, but with today’s POWER7 and POWER7+ processors, many more clients might get benefit from this capability.

So when you hear people talking about EasyOptimize capabilities in Power, you can be assured that IBM i is playing in that arena, and has been for a long time. Together with the rest of the Power Systems family, we are working together to use the expertise of our scientists and engineers to optimize the way our systems are used, based on the workloads your business requires.

 

 

 

 

Liverpool Football Club and IBM i

We’re preparing for an announcement next week, so I haven’t blogged as much as I would like, but I wanted to share one of the customer references I talked about last time. If you’ll recall, I mentioned that while many clients do not allow us to mention their names, there are also many who are happy to share their story. Today I’ll spotlight someone from the other side of the Atlantic: the Liverpool Football Club.

Like many of our clients, no matter what the industry, the Liverpool Football Club wants to do a great job for their customers. Their need from the IT solution they buy: Liverpool FC aims to provide the best possible football experience for its supporters and recognized that online ticket sales were a key part of its interaction with its fans. The club decided to review its ticketing platform and create a roadmap for future development.

From more than 20 vendors, the club selected IRIS Ticketing, its incumbent supplier, to deliver a program of enhancements for the TALENT Sport ticketing system. IRIS Ticketing focused on transforming the fans’ experience with a new queuing system, and improved performance by moving the software onto a new IBM Power 720 server.

The team clearly saw benefits from this solution:

1. Increased capacity by 250 percent; the system can now support over 750 concurrent users.
2. Handled 100,000 ticket sales within four days without a single moment of downtime.
3. Queuing system gives supporters a better understanding of the ticketing process, improving customer service and fostering loyalty.

“The upgrade has at least doubled our capacity on the TALENT Sport system, and may even have tripled it.”

— Phil Dutton, Head of Ticketing and Hospitality at Liverpool FC

As is clear by this example, we reach many of our IBM i customers because of the excellent solutions that continue to be invested in and enhanced by ISVs such as IRIS Ticketing. It’s this focus on a customer solution that runs the business reliably, with high performance as well as fit-for-purpose functionality, that remains a winner.

So, whether you’re a fan of Liverpool FC or not, did you know that they use IBM i and Power Systems for their business? Now you do. That’s an example of IBM i in your world.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

IBM i in Your World

When you go to a bank, do you know what kind of IT equipment is being used to run it? How about when you go to your local courthouse? Or a big retailer? When you check into that hotel? When you call your cable company? When you ship a package?

I wish I were at liberty to tell you the names of every client we have using IBM i, but the fact is, most companies do not give IBM permission to use their names. Those who do, become “references” and we use those references frequently. Current IBM i customers, or companies considering adopting IBM i, like to hear about other businesses who are successfully using it.

Still, while I cannot list every customer, I can mention some. I can also tell you in general about some of the ways you probably encounter users of IBM i in your daily life. In fact, I tweet about these every once in a while, so let’s see a couple of examples.

The above is an example of a long-time client, a member of the IBM i Large User Group (LUG), which is very successful. The business is growing, and if I told you their name, there is a very good chance you would recognize it. In fact, this description could apply to several of our LUG members.

Here’s another “anonymous” example.

Now, you might not have heard of this specific (fast-growing) company, but I can pretty much guarantee you have heard of its parent company. Even without the name, it’s pretty impressive to know that this customer successfully handled more than 100 million online transactions on the Monday after the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday, and those transactions were running on IBM i, on a very large Power System.

IBM i is extremely prevalent in several key industries in the world. One of them is banking, and the follow tweet contains an actual reference account.

Alex Woodie wrote the article in the link above, about Bank Ekonomi Raharja (BER) in Indonesia. Now, if you are not working with that bank, you might not think this has much to do with you, but the point is that you might well have dealings with a bank that is running on IBM i. Three of the most prevalent banking solution ISVs in the U.S. (FIS, Jack Henry & Associates and Fiserv) have highly successful IBM i solutions – the bank I use is a customer of one of these three – and DataPro is a strong IBM i banking solution provider in Central and South America. Additionally, several of the largest banks around the world use IBM i for key portions of their diverse financial offerings.

What about the parcel delivery industry? This quote from FedEx Ground is in many of my presentations, because they are a long-time reference for the platform.

“Its stability, TCO and speed of development convinced us we should not only maintain our mid-range environment, but expand it to keep it at the center of our operations for the long term. IBM i has enabled us to grow the scale of our environment, while at the same time become more nimble and resilient.”

            --Ken Spangler, VP of IT

However, FedEx is not the only company in the shipping business that counts on the reliability of IBM i running on Power Systems. If you used a package delivery company in the U.S. during this past holiday season, there’s a pretty good chance the business was running on IBM i. You might not have known it, but based on our client list, it certainly could be.

Many of the most successful large businesses in the world, as well as many thousand smaller businesses and governmental entities, keep their customers satisfied while relying on Power Systems and the IBM i operating system. They are all around you, and just like your company, they use this platform because it delivers stability, security, value and innovation that helps them succeed.