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Every time I see a presentation about iSeries legendary reliability and lower cost of ownership, it resonates with my own experience, and I come away convinced of the value proposition. But it seems that competitive forces have, and will continue to drive the price of the platform lower, even as chip technology drives the performance higher. When someone complained about the price of iSeries disks, Frank Soltis suggested ordering some from the pSeries group, instead. IBM branding, manufacturing, and middleware technology tend to homogenize all their server lines, which makes it hard to draw distinctions between platforms. In order to attract new workloads to the iSeries, IBM promotes J2EE, Websphere, open standards, and middleware, but more often than not, the same runtime environments and applications perform better on lower priced pSeries and xSeries servers. Net.Data and PHP developers are reporting similar results about performance. Consequently, there's a tendency to deploy new CPU intensive applications on the lower cost hardware, even though it would run on an iSeries. When it became clear that IBM was pricing interactive capacity at a huge premium, a number of ISVs felt screwed, saying it was their applications that created the value, but IBM was the one profiting from it, which furthered an ISV exodus to other platforms. The term "interactive tax" stuck. When iSeries sales remain flat as in recent years, the platform loses market and mind share as the market for servers grows. To say that the iSeries is a niche product, is being generous perhaps, which is counter intuitive, because when you consider the advanced technology alone, and integrated nature, it makes you wonder why it's not the dominant server on the planet. It's still clear that IBM believes in the future of the platform, and continues to invest in it, and is making it possible to run new applications outside the native environment. If they could just figure out how to market it.
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