This blog entry was written by Alan Seiden, an authority on PHP development with IBM i, who helps his clients achieve best practices and top performance when combining PHP, Zend Framework, IBM i, RPG and DB2. An award-winning speaker, Alan is project manager of Zend's open-source PHP Toolkit for IBM i and owner of Alan Seiden Consulting, Ho-Ho-Kus, N.J. You can reach him at http://www.alanseiden.com, [email protected], or @alanseiden.
At this year's COMMON conference, an IT director told me that his IBM i remained stalled at release 6.1. “I wanted to move to 7.1 two years ago,” he said, “but my business partner didn't know enough about it.”
The same partner had made costly errors, he said, but the IT director couldn't find anyone better in his city. I said, “There are experts all over, and they travel. Why not consider [name of expert]?”
Sound harsh? Not so; it's an IBM Business Partner's mandate to help customers manage IT's speed of change. Rochester provides the tools. IBM i offers unique, industry-leading functionality for reliability, work management, security and performance, available to companies large and small. Ignorance and laziness are the only barriers to wider use of this treasure.
Does your business partner:
- Stay up to date by attending COMMON and other conferences?
- Tell you about the benefits of new releases and encourage you to upgrade, as appropriate?
- Cultivate relationships with industry experts to ensure that you receive effective advice in all areas of your IT operation?
- Let you know when a 7.1 Technology Refresh (TR) would make your life easier?
- Share relevant articles from IBMers and industry experts that could save you money and time?
If not, consider finding a business partner that does. Change today is rapid and constant. Unless we adopt progressive practices, we'll find ourselves forced to use systems that may be heavily promoted, but that are capable of less than IBM i.
And the IT director attending the COMMON conference? Upon hearing my suggestion, he brightened. “I'm calling [name of expert] tomorrow.”
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