Happy Customers and New Resources for IBM i

If you expected me to be talking about #ibmwatson today, I could understand why. The first episode has aired, and the next two look to be equally entertaining. I’m happy Watson is showing itself so well.

Today I really wanted to talk about IBM i (twitter hashtag #ibmi) because, in case you haven’t seen it yet, we’ve recently refreshed the “Power of i” page, and it has some good information for you.

First, the short, easy-to-remember URL for the page itself is http://bit.ly/Powerofi and it contains a nice opening letter from Colin Parris, Vice President of Power Systems. The attached documents are the IBM i Strategy and Roadmap document, which has recent updates, and the executive summary of the refreshed ITG Report detailing the advantages of IBM i on POWER compared to our competition. It reaffirms the IBM i total cost of ownership advantage of more than 40 percent, and it also breaks down how much of that cost is related to acquisition over the three year period, and you might be surprised at the results. See figure below.

In addition to the great new information, I also wanted to mention our happy 7.1 customers. First, a couple of quotes, and then some data.

“Management is very pleased in the smoothness of the upgrade, the stability of the release and have been running with out any issues ever since the upgrade.”
                        Giuliano Franciscovic, VP of IS
                        National Telewire Corp

“At AgVantage Software, Inc our ASP/MSP offering has been growing rapidly and we needed to become more efficient…. Going to IBM i 7.1 has been very smooth and has helped us become more efficient and made our customers happy.”
                        Brad Belcher
                        Systems Analyst
                        AgVantage Software, Inc

These are just two of more than 3,000 customers who’ve already adopted IBM i 7.1. And, of those, more than 1,500 have also adopted the first of our technology refreshes, IBM i 7.1 TR1. We’re hearing comments like this from many customers, and it fits with the quality data we’ve been collecting, which is showing 7.1 is a nice stable release. 

Have any of my readers adopted 7.1 yet? What’s your experience? Let me know in the comments section.

Until next time (which may be later this week), I encourage you to take a few minutes to examine this new information so you can see what a great choice you’ve made for a platform, and learn the strategy of that platform.

Comments

[Trevor Perry]

Steve,

This is wonderful information! Your chart can be used where we fight the TCO vs TCA argument. And, such positivity with IBM i and 7.1 can be used as effective information to educate those with other agendas.

Thank you.
Trevor

[Tommy Holden]

We're running 4 LPARs on v7.1. 2 LPARs are dedicated to Lotus Domino/Notes & the other 2 are ERP & Dev/HA. no issues whatsoever. Upgrade was pretty much a "non-event" considering we had already made the leap to v6.1 earlier on. so far the performance is better, the new system management capabilities are very nice tools to have. for me some of the biggest advantages have been in the database & application development dept. SQL performance has improved drastically (in v6.1 & v7.1), the new functionality/enhancements to the RPG language was worth the upgrade alone.

[Patrick Townsend]

This is really a great presentation. I would really like to see a clear presentation of the IBM i Cloud strategy, if there is one?

Patrick

[Aaron Bartell]

I know the white paper mentioned is meant to be for higher level system type things, but I am curious to know if IBM is still doing a roadmap for programmers/developers?

A couple google searches turned up nothing for me - I am probably using the wrong terms :-(

AaronBartell.com

[Steve Will]

@Patrick - I don't have a "Cloud Strategy" presentation yet, sorry. I will be presenting "IBM i Trends & Directions" -- or variations on that theme -- several times in the coming few months. "Cloud" will be part of that.

Yet this is also an area that is evolving. There are cloud-enablement services being offered by our ISV team which I'd like to blog about. There are efforts underway to figure out how to license and charge in a cloud environment. And then there is the underlying technology around which cloud is based -- some of which has been delivered, some of which will be delivered soon, some of which is coming.

It's a big topic. We'll talk internally about when & how to communicate it.