IBM i: A Competitive Advantage

07/29/2013

Alison Butterill

IBM i: A Competitive Advantage

It’s always interesting to me that there are so many customers who run IBM i. Checking in at a hotel, checking out at a cash register; I see IBM i everywhere. As a previous blog entry from Steve Will pointed out, IBM i runs businesses all over the world but much of the time the use of IBM i is well hidden from view.
Many banks, retailers and insurance companies run their entire operation on IBM i. I wish more of them would agree to let us tell their stories through references and case studies. The irony is that they would love to share their success, but they consider running IBM i to be a competitive advantage. In the highly competitive world of today, they are unwilling to disclose their advantage.
As I meet with more clients all over the world, I now realize that all companies running IBM i have an advantage over their competition. Whether they are in a highly competitive business or not, the high degree of integration inherent in IBM i, provides every client with superior economics, ease of use and lower operational costs. All of these are contributing factors to a competitive advantage. These are even more important as clients are being driven to do more with less. This is a consistent theme I hear from every client—they are being asked to do more with less; more sales with fewer people, more client services with fewer staff.
Luckily for IBM i clients, they can do more with less—specifically, provide more function and more business benefit with less staff. This has been the case for IBM i clients since the introduction of the AS/400 in 1988. IBM Sellers have talked about how the Lower Total Cost of Ownership over 3 years is measurable and recorded by many clients. In October last year, we published an ITG Study that reported on the lower TCO and lists all the reasons why this is true. But where are the examples? Where can we read about the customers who realized this benefit and will share their stories?
Here are a few examples of clients who attribute IBM i for their ability to “do more with less”.
The Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising (FIDM) is very open about how they are using IBM i. They use a wide variety of IBM hardware and software in their enterprise, including products from both IBM Power and IBM Software Group. They implement the most amazing and ingenious solutions, always evolving their technology to match the needs of the business. In a recent case study done by IBM Software Group, Roxanne Reynolds-Lair, CIO of FIDM, points out that their staff now selects other products based on the computing paradigm set by IBM i. “Ease of custom application development is critical, as is ease of information posting and portal management. These are especially important in an economy where the IT staff is often asked to ‘do more with less.’ ”
The FIDM case study documenting FIDM's latest integration of IBM SWG products including WebSphere Portal, Lotus Notes and Connections, WebSphere App Server and more will be published shortly.
Read about other organizations doing more with less and doing it on Power with IBM i. Here are some great examples:

Arizona Beverages cuts costs by 50%, grows sales by 14%

Bishop Company retools for smart commerce and drives up growth, savings, and profitability

Landstar drives higher quality and improves business economics

Read these and I know that you will agree with me. Every IBM i client has a competitive advantage, whether they acknowledge it or not.

The Green Screen of Death

Sept. 3, 2013by Seamus Quinn in Global Power Action

At an IBM-oriented conference, a group of midrange pros stand chewing the fat between seminars. A senior IT guy at a multinational is bemoaning the demands of his users from both above and below. "They just want a nice, pretty GUI," he says, the latter part in little girly voice. The group all chuckle at this knowingly.

These are, after all, grown-up business computer people. They laugh because they know the real value of the good old green screen: fast data entry, efficient order processing—all that stuff. Plus, they know that their users' desires are driven by the ephemeral experiences of their personal lives. Lives where cartoons of doggies chasing their tails or smiley dancing bank managers or kiddies playing with balloons glimmer out of EPOS systems, bank ATMs, and numerous other screens everywhere they go.

Our group of veterans finds the idea of adding to this cacophony of animation most amusing. Big Blue never foisted a native GUI onto their big systems. There are many ways to modernize a proper application and, as adults, IBM gives them the choice of how to proceed.

The problem is, though, that many don't proceed at all. And—hands up—I have been a member of a group like this, and I've laughed along at the GUI thing myself. However, it's time to face facts: The number's up for the AS/400's traditional interface. Those familiar green letters on a black background now spell just one word: death.

Culturally, I mean this in a literal sense. In any modern TV show or film, if a character encounters a legacy-looking computer interface, it's dramatic shorthand for something old, mysterious, inscrutable, and, more often than not, downright dangerous. The makers of sci-fi shows seem particularly keen on this. Lovingly crafted, future-retro scary screens adorn anything remotely alien or dystopian.

The writing was probably on the wall as far back as 1999, when film producers the Wachowskis employed a menacing motif of vertical green-on-black Japanese half-width kana computer text in The Matrix. Somewhat ironically, this green rain effect became the RPG programmer's screensaver of choice for many years afterwards.

Given this background, it's fairly surprising that anyone under the age of, say, 35 can be persuaded to operate an old fashioned-looking application at all. And, if you were an ISV, imagine asking them to go out and actually sell one.

As time goes by, I find more and more anecdotal evidence to back this up. As one example, the other day, my wife and I were waiting for a train in the concourse of our local station. We were near two ATMs for the same bank. The station wasn't particularly busy, so there was no real queue for the machines.

"Watch this," I said, "they always go to the machine on the left." And people kept on doing just that. My wife said, "How do you know?" The answer was simple: The forlorn ATM on the right had an old-school text screen; the one on the left showed a smiling, helpful-looking woman dressed in the livery of the bank. Even older people almost always chose the bright, GUI-fied ATM.

Or take another example. This time, my wife and I were at a department store. The items we'd seen on a previous visit were no longer on display. A helpful assistant said they were out of stock, but she could check whether they had any at the store's other local outlets or whether she could order them. On her EPOS system, she started hopping between a catalogue-type web app (graphical, with photos) and a green screen.

"AS/400," I said to my wife. "It's what he writes about," she explained, apologetically, to the quizzical assistant. The assistant, a mature lady, told us that the younger staff hated the old green screen application. She, on the other hand, still rather liked it, even though she now had to skip from one system to the other. She'd been using it for over 20 years and even showed us how fast she could whizz around it.

"Still," she said, adamantly, "we do need a new system."

I'm not sure what you can do about that. Yes, modernization can be expensive: A decent-sized project can cost around the same amount as the annual wage of one of your IT team. Yes, you need to be careful about the methods you use to make apps fit for the 21st century. But there is a vibrant ecosystem of firms dedicated to the task and a plethora of advice on the subject on this website alone.

That's not to say that apps should be modernised for the sake of it. But a new approach does offer the opportunity to improve and, crucially, future-proof systems. Current skill sets need to be weighed against various approaches. New skills may have to be adopted, and you might even have to involve design-oriented folk.

Of course, in a real-life world of order-fulfilments and supply chain headaches, there will always be other priorities to find. But admit it—it's over for the green screen. To cling to its nostalgic embrace any longer is to consign yourself and your work to history.

There will still be midrange professionals chuckling, patronizingly, over this kind of heresy amongst themselves for some time to come (a few, no doubt, over HD video-conference links on big boardroom touch screens). But one wonders how long it will take them to realize that the joke might, very soon, be on them.

IBM Posts Impressive SAP Benchmark with IBM i

IBM i continues to power SAP installations around the world, but admittedly the workhorse operating system on POWER-based servers doesn't scream and shout often enough to keep up the mindshare that the dynamic duo -- IBM i on Power Systems -- deserves. In fact, when IBM i is used to deliver SAP's enterprise goodness, it can handle all the vagaries of SAP with snappy performance . . . and do it at enviable price points.
Here's two relatively new case in points:

1. New SAP BW Benchmark

SAP just posted a new benchmark for 500 million records running SAP BW Enhanced Mixed Load (BW EML). The OS was IBM i 7.1, using DB2 for i 7.1 with SAP NetWeaver 7.30. And the hardware: IBM Power System 750 Express Server with 4 processors, 32 cores, 128 threads, a 4.06 GHz POWER7+ processor, 32 KB(D) + 32 KB(I) L1 cache and 256 KB L2 cache per core, 10 MB L3 cache per core, and 512 GB main memory.

 

With this configuration, IBM achieved 66,900 ad-hoc navigation steps per hour. 

 

This compares quite favorably -- if not exceeds -- a year-older SAP HANA set up that utilizes two x86-based HP servers, one for the database and one for application, running SUSE Linux. What's interesting here is how the dual-server setup compares to the single-server Power 750 -- and how the pricing and management efforts might shake out using the two different methods to deliver SAP solutions. (Incidentally, the dual x86 server setup ran against a billion records.)

2. The Cost/Benefit Case for SAP Business All-in-One Deployments on IBM i and Power Systems

Meanwhile, back to the cost and benefits of IBM i with SAP . . . an International Technology Group white paper takes a closer look at the architecture of an IBM i-based system and applies it to SAP and the cost to manage a deployment over three years. Basically, no surprise here for IBM i aficionados: While x86-based systems often start out cheaper, over three years the cost of the x86-based system gets dangerously close to twice as much as the IBM i on Power setup.

 

What's crazy to see is that the IBM i-based hardware & maintenance cost is less, the software licensing is less, the software support is less, the facilities cost is less, and of course, the personnel costs are far less -- ITG breaks it all out . . . and then goes quite a bit farther. 

 

If you want to understand the benefits of IBM i on Power -- even if you're not considering SAP -- the ITG white paper isn't a bad place to start. And if you are looking at SAP and IBM i . . . again, put the white paper on your must-read list. 

Microsoft now has 1 million servers versue 23 AS/400's back in the 1990's

Microsoft now has 1 million servers. That's quite the growth from their supposed 23 AS/400's back in the 1990's. ;)

Tweet of Mr. Steve Pitcher July 2013

IBM i Customers Believe IBM i Is 'Future Proof'

Jul. 10, 2013by Chris Maxcer in PowerMaxcer

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Here's a gem: Infor recently completed research into its customer base—70,000 strong—that revealed that its 16,000-plus IBM i-running customers still consider IBM i on Power Systems to be the platform the future. Of course, Infor's customers typically run some or several of Infor's ERP suites, so these are customers who are deeply committed to serious enterprise-wide solutions. 

Twenty-five years after the launch of the AS/400 and evolution of name changes, Infor reports that IBM i has retained its core values of reliability and low total cost of ownership.  Infor’s EMEA System i Survey 2013—with results from more than 100 managers and high level decision-makers—revealed a vote of confidence in IBM i. However, Infor says, the report also flags continuing concerns around skills and cloud.

 

"As the biggest IBM partner with more than 16,000 customers worldwide using the platform, Infor has access to a lot of end user insight,” notes Paul Field, general manager of Infor's System i/IBM i group in EMEA. "It is clear from this research that a lot of businesses are still reliant on IBM i and that the platform is holding its own amongst younger technologies. The reliability, cost-effectiveness and security of the platform combine to make it virtually future-proof at 25 years old. This is in itself quite an achievement but even more impressive is that the platform continues to remain relevant with new updates and investment in capabilities such as mobile or analytics."

 

He adds, "It is clear, however, that some of this investment will need to focus on maintaining a base of skilled staff that will form the basis of this continued ROI in years to come."

Key Findings

• 71 percent of IBM i platform end-users agreed with the statement, "We believe our System i platform is future-proof." Twenty-two percent were neutral to the statement and only 7 percent disagreed.
   
• When asked whether their business system is "very reliable," 92.5 percent agreed while the remaining 7.5 percent were "neutral." Side note: None of the respondents running their mission-critical business systems on IBM i disagreed.
   
• The survey results also support the widely-held belief that IBM i applications can be deployed faster and maintained with fewer staff. When asked whether total cost of ownership of their system compares well with alternatives, nearly two thirds—63 percent—agreed.
   
• When asked whether users are able to access the data they need to run the business, 71 percent agreed, with the vast majority of the remainder giving a neutral answer. Only 8 percent disagreed -- proving that even a mature business system, kept up to date, will continue to serve business needs very well, Infor says.
   
• The report shows that the industry is reaching a tipping point on IBM i skills with 52 percent of respondents saying attracting and retaining critical IT skills is becoming a problem. The role of cloud computing in addressing these issues is also far from clear. When asked whether cloud could help address skills shortages, 53 percent were neutral.  Surprisingly a further 33 percent said cloud could not help.
   
• Looking ahead, many users indicated that they plan further investment in the platform: 90 percent of respondents consider reporting and analytics, additional functionality, mobile, and 24x7 availability as either a need or a priority for investment.

 

To see additional findings and download the full survey results, check outinforsystemi.com/survey/.

 

IBM AS/400 Turns 25: Will It Last Another 25 Years?

By Sean Michael Kerner (Send Email) 
June 24, 2013

Some server operating systems were built to last the test of time. The IBM AS/400 is one such system.

"Today we call it the IBM i, because the 'I' stands for Integration," Ian Jarman, Business Unit Executive, Power Systems Lab Services & Training at IBM, told ServerWatch. "The integration operating environment runs today on our latest Power systems and also on our latest PureSystems."The AS/400 (Application System/400) was first introduced by IBM 25 years ago in June of 1988, and it's a system that is still alive and well today in 2013. Though the core server operating operating system that constituted the AS/400 is still alive, the name AS/400 as a product brand is not. In 2008, IBM rebranded what had once been the AS/400 as System i.

The original AS/400 operating system was a combination of IBM's System 38 and System 36 that were merged together. Jarman explained that the AS/400 was actually the name of the hardware platform, while the operating system was originally known as the OS/400

The AS/400 operating system from its birth 25 years ago has always been an integrated operating system that includes an IBM DB2 relational database.

In Jarman's view, the biggest change to the platform occurred in 2008, when the IBM i operating system was brought together with IBM's AIX Unix operating system and Linux onto the same Power server systems.

PHP

When the AS/400 was first introduced the concept of open source software didn't really exist. In 2013, open source is a reality and IBM i integrates with the open source PHP language to further extend the platform.

"One of the areas of strongest growth for new applications on the platform is PHP, as people use it to link out to web and mobile applications," Jarman said.

RPG IV

When the AS/400 first debuted one of the most popular languages for programming on it was the RPG IV. As it turns out, 25 years later RPG IV is also still alive and well, too.

Jarman noted that just as the AS/400 has been transformed over the last 25 years, so too has RPG IV.

"RPG is an incredibly efficient transaction processing language," Jarman said.

He added that RPG now works well with other modern languages such as PHP and Java.

"You can put a PHP front-end with an RPG IV backend," Jarman said. "That combination is very popular because people that come from PHP are able to very easily familiarize themselves with the new RPG IV."

AS/400, AIX, Linux

When it comes to the open nature of the Power architecture, the IBM i, AIX and Linux operating systems can all exist on the same server, at the same time.

The multi-OS nature of Power is enabled by way of the PowerVM virtualization technology.

"The vast majority of our IBM i users today are using PowerVM to virtualize their systems," Jarman said. "It's very common for people to run a combination of operating systems because that's the way they can drive the highest efficiency."

The Next 25 Years

While IBM is now celebrating 25 years of the AS/400, it isn't resting on its laurels. There is a planned IBM i 7.2 release set for next year as development and innovation on the platform continue.

One of the areas where Jarman expects IBM i to grow is on the PureSystems portfolio. The IBM PureSystems approach itself is an integrated, storage, compute, networking and applications stack.

"PureSystems gives us the ability to run IBM i and Windows workloads or Linux on x86 workloads very efficiently together," Jarman said.

From the day that AS/400 debuted 25 years ago to the modern day, Jarman stressed that a key component of the architecture is that it has a technology-independent machine interface.

"Effectively what that does is it protects you from technology change," Jarman said. "It's difficult to predict the future, except to say that in next 25 years the technology underneath IBM i will fundamentally change."

The promise of the IBM i is that it is able to change as underlying hardware changes. It's a promise that could see the platform survive for the next 25 years.

"I'm very confident given that we made a big promise of technology independence 25 years ago with the AS/400 and we delivered on that promise, I'm very confident that people will be running IBM i applications 25 years from now."

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of the IT Business Edge Network, the network for technology professionals Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.

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Gartner Publishes 2013 Magic Quadrant for SIEM

Monday, 10 June 2013

Gartner Publishes 2013 Magic Quadrant for SIEM

Posted by John Burnham in Security Intelligence

Just as surely as spring has established a foothold on Cape Cod, the SIEM Magic Quadrant for 2013 has published. The news is out, and IBM Security has improved our position as a Leader in the 2013 Magic Quadrant for SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) again — marking the 5th year in a row that IBM Security/Q1 Labs has achieved this leadership position. For the first time, IBM/Q1 Labs is in the top position in the SIEM MQ.
IBM/Q1 Labs also received outstanding scores and improved standings in the 2013 SIEM Critical Capabilities report, which provides numerical ratings of vendors by capability and use case.
Back to bragging: IBM/Q1 Labs is rated #1 (above every other vendor) on “Ability to Execute” (the Y-axis).  This represents overall viability, product/service, customer experience, market responsiveness, product track record, sales execution, operations and marketing execution.

• IBM/Q1 Labs is rated above major competitors (McAfee/Nitro, Splunk, LogRhythm, and RSA) on both “Ability to Execute” and “Completeness of Vision” (the X-axis).  Completeness of Vision represents product strategy, innovation, market understanding, geographic strategy, and other factors.

• IBM/Q1 Labs is rated highest in the Critical Capabilities report for essential elements of Security Intelligence with Big Data: Analytics and Behavior profiling

• IBM/Q1 Labs is the highest rated in the SIEM Use Case, Product Rating, and Overall Use Case categories.

Besides vendor chest-thumping, what does this mean to our customers? Simply this: the creation and development of the IBM Security Systems division concurrent with the acquisition of Q1 Labs ensured:

• Customer-facing focus
• Continued and increased investments in Security Intelligence
• More opportunities to engage with more customers worldwide
• More 3^rd party partnerships to ensure Big Data collection from more and more sources
• Resources unique to IBM. And face it, no one knows data like IBM.