Angus: IBM i Disconnected, Disaffected
I wrote this piece for the December 2013 COMMON Connect magazine. I found it again in an unrelated google search, and thought it should be reposted..
Enjoy!
Everyone knows our platform is the best business platform on the planet. Period. No matter what other server proponents say, we have the best return on investment, the best scalability, the best reliability, and the best applications. Yet, we seem to be constantly fighting a battle against competitors and naysayers, who tell the world we are out of date and no longer relevant.
Running IBM i on Power Systems affords us many advantages. From a virtualization perspective, Power Systems provides complete integration with multiple IBM i instances and other operating systems. Live Partition Mobility and HA/DR offerings allows us to deliver, manage and support IBM i 24×7 without regard to the physical server location. In the recent Technology Refresh 7 for IBM i 7.1, RPG is now a completely free format modern language, which suits business better than any other language. Ruby on Rails is now native to IBM i, adding to the strong PHP adoption over the last few years.
Why then, does the world appear willing to move companies away from this incredible platform? The answer requires us to be introspective. If you ask any community member, the majority will respond and aim blame squarely at IBM – whose faults, it seems, are many. Which is ironic, given they are the provider of this wonderful platform. If we look closely at our community – and that includes each and every one of us, you
will find a level of dysfunction afforded to most families. Discuss the platform with a random sampling of community members and you will hear a plethora of responses.
At the Enterprise2013 conference, at least six names/brands were mentioned when talking about the platform. Five years in, many people still do not realize that Power Systems is a new platform – not just a rename or a rebranding. Before listening to IBM i sessions, attendees were mixed in their opinion about whether or not the platform could “do that”, in reference to modern technologies, modern architecture, modern software solutions, etc.
When our own community does not have a consistent approach to what the platform is or what it can do, that becomes proof to the outside world that our platform is stuck in some dark age. It is beyond time for us to counter that. To us, individually and as a community, IBM i is a large part of our world. If we were to act as a united community, imagine how quickly we could expose the misinformation spread by the naysayers and prove to the world the value of our platform to an IT organization.
IBM will continue to market in their own time, their own ways, and with their own money as they see fit to suit their business goals. IBM i is simply one very small part of that picture to IBM.
Ask yourself if you are doing all you can to support and promote IBM i, along with your peers in your local community, and your IBM i family around the world. Your task, should you choose it, is to tell the world that IBM i on Power rules. Are you up for it?
