Re: Marketing the platform was: System i - Mentioned twice in

Pete Helgren wrote:

IBM has great ISV resources and gives us quite a bit of technical help in developing apps and also has some good marketing tools to help market our products. The key is help in differentiating the i from the other platforms and then making it easy to bundle a box and an application.

And I don't nkow how this is going to shake out, Pete. Personally, I have a feeling that we may be seeing the first steps towards the "Business Application Appliance". As the ISV, it's up to you to decide which platform it runs on. You can sell a low-end solution that uses Wintel technology, or you can scale up to an enterprise version that requires an appliance.

In fact, that's not a bad model, if you think about it. Community edition for free, support costs extra - can even be hosted. Performance edition comes with a standalone Wintel server. More expensive, but not too high. Enterprise edition comes with enterprise appliance: i5/OS blade server for speed, security and reliability, with perhaps with a Wintel or Lintel front end.

The CFO won't care, as long as you hit the right ROI numbers.

Joe