Today’s PowerUp blog entry is written by Alan Arnold, Chief Technology Officer at Vision Solutions, and accompanies the latest chapter to be revealed on Facebook in celebrating the 25th anniversary of IBM i, chapter 11: ISVs.
This is a story about how IBM i took a young kid and
fashioned a career and a company that is thriving 25 years later. As I look
back at my career in technology, and specifically with IBM i, it has been a fun
and exciting journey. Over the last 12 years I have had the pleasure of working
as the Chief Technology Officer at Vision Solutions. But previously, I have
worked in a number of different roles during my career, and they have all
revolved around the ecosystem that is IBM i.
Upon graduating from college, I began working at a start-up company named Specialty Insurance Services. They were an IBM Business Partner ISV. Our niche was general agency insurance companies and there was a nice opportunity for small business computers within this industry. We wrote our software on the System/36 and System/38. Smaller clients implemented the System/36 and larger ones the System/38. These systems could be implemented almost anyplace. I must have installed hundreds of them. And when I did an install, it included unboxing the system, loading the software, running the cables all over the building and then training the users. It was really a wonderful self-contained environment that we sold and supported. What I personally loved about this environment was the complete control we had with our customer’s environments. We also made good money selling software and IBM systems. The IBM midrange systems ecosystem was really taking off. It was about this time IBM invited our company to a briefing in Rochester, Minn., to learn about their next platform, the AS/400.
This was a great solution for our customers. I had the pleasure of installing one of the first AS/400s in the country at a large customer of ours in Detroit, Mich. This new system could handle more users than the System/36 and System/38, thus it was our biggest sale in the history of the company. This particular customer would have more than 400 users on the system. For us, that was huge. We worked closely with IBM Rochester on this first install. With it, we had just transformed our small ISV and our software solutions from 15- to 100-user companies to 1000s plus. This install was completed before the official announcement of the AS/400. I was at the IBM Costa Mesa, Calif., office on the day of the announcement. I still have my IBM gift mug from the event shown here.
After I left Specialty, I worked at other IBM Business
Partners including XL/Datacomp and Ernst & Young LLP. I have always worked
closely with many of the friends I have developed at IBM Rochester, Austin, NY
and other locations. These relationships have helped my companies to bring the
latest solutions to our joint customers, who are some of the largest
organizations in the world. The scalability of IBM i never ceases to amaze me
and that’s really powerful for ISVs.
Let me fast forward to my current work at Vision Solutions. As mentioned, over the last 12 years I have had the pleasure of working as the Chief Technology Officer at Vision Solutions. I manage one of the largest IBM i development, support and services organizations in the industry. Vision is one of IBM’s largest Global ISVs and we have an installation base that includes the most prestigious customers in the world. Our deep expertise on system and application availability is our core strength. We work closely with IBM in many regards. Today’s development tools, support systems and platform capabilities are some of the most advanced in the world. Our team uses the full capabilities of the IBM i platform to deliver highly scalable solutions that bring value to each customer’s environment. We work closely with the top IBM experts in their labs, advisory committees (Dr. Frank Soltis is a key member of our advisory committee), and educating our market. As a result, we have continued to grow our IBM i business and continue to introduce new products to this very day! MIMIX DR will be formally launched in May and we expect this exciting new solution to help us address yet another segment of the IBM i market. I would invite you to tune into the Vision Webcast on May 9th that I'm doing with Steve Will, IBM’s Chief Architect for IBM i.
Let me end with congratulating IBM on the Twenty-Five i milestone. Vision Solutions is committed to this great platform. It’s simply one of the greatest technology architectures to have ever been introduced to our industry, and I have worked on most of the others. The flexibility, scalability and ease of use make it unique in many ways. The sophistication of its communications, database and security are also huge differentiators. Today, Vision builds cloud, big data, physical and virtual solutions using all of the capabilities of IBM i to bring state-of-the-art solutions to market in an extremely efficient manner. We look forward to another 25 years of working on this great architecture.
Vision Solutions team celebrating IBMi25 at COMMON
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