Re: **SPAM** Re: AIX - i5/OS feature comparison was the notorious Steve's soapbox -- MIDRANGE-L

Tommy's post might explain why some who work for a company like say EDS that
make their/his $ thru services bad mouth the i5 over p5, et al.  $ are in
the non-i markets.
On 9/11/06, Holden Tommy <Tommy.Holden@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Ok hopefully this will be my last chime in on this subject.  The reason
I see that IBM can't sell services to offset the profit margin for
iSeries is simply that it DOESN'T need tons of peripheral applications
to make it work...it runs out of the box.  Why do they NOT market the
system better??  Simple, they can make more money selling peripheral
garbage on the other platforms.  Selling the cheaper hardware, etc isn't
the issue, it's how much can they make off the ancillary packages they
are sure to sell with other platforms??  With iSeries, I can get the
machine up & running & it can pretty much do anything & everything
necessary to keep the shop running.  I KNOW this just isn't the case
with other platforms, PC, AIX, *NIX. The iSeries IS legendary, but from
a corporate standpoint IBM's profits would plummet if the iSeries became
the primary platform on Earth...why?? Because they are just frigging
tanks!  I have never seen an iSeries totally broken down to the point
that it's just not viable anymore.  As with any hardware yes there will
be parts that need replaced occasionally but never have I seen the need
to fully replace an iSeries due to failure (only for upgrades to
performance, etc.)  Heck I still have customers running on old CISC
boxes..(not by my choice but it just simply works...)  As far as the CPU
intensive arguments I've seen all I can say is that it's mostly
garbage...no offense to anyone on the list but I just don't see where a
couple of milliseconds is that detremental...(plus since I don't have
them..perhaps some one can actually post some real world examples & the
total time to run these applications on iSeries vs. other platforms...)
Just maybe you'll convince me...IBM does still believe in the iSeries,
but as I stated...from a business standpoint they could literally kill
their own business & profits by saturating the market with iSeries.
Just my 2 coppers.


Thanks,
Tommy Holden


-----Original Message-----
From: midrange-l-bounces+tommy.holden=hcahealthcare.com@xxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:midrange-l-bounces+tommy.holden=hcahealthcare.com@xxxxxxxxxxxx]
On Behalf Of Nathan Andelin
Sent: Saturday, September 09, 2006 6:25 PM
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion
Subject: **SPAM** Re: AIX - i5/OS feature comparison was the notorious
Steve's soapbox

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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