Job: Enterprise Servers and Application Analyst
Minas Basin Pulp & Power Co., Ltd.

Age: 29

How long have you been working with i technology? Almost 9 years.

Free time: I spend a lot of time with my wife and 18-month-old son. I love to play guitar. I played the club circuit for almost six years before getting into computers.

Favorite music while working: I love hard music—Slayer, Pantera, old Megadeth, or Metallica

Job if you weren't a developer: Probably a food critic

Many of us don't think much about the cardboard boxes that we ship and receive items in. Maybe your kids play in them or maybe they just go directly to the curb (hopefully for recycling). But there are people out there who make a very nice living on those cardboard boxes and how they're put together. This month, I interviewed Steve Pitcher, one of those hardworking people behind the often-ignored brown boxes that keep the so many things in our lives coming and going.

Pitcher works for Minas Basin Pulp & Paper Company, which uses recycled materials to produce the paperboard that eventually gets converted into those cardboard boxes. Located in Hantsport,  Nova Scotia, Canada, Minas keeps 10.8 million cubic feet of paper out of Nova Scotia landfills every year.

Getting down and dirty with the i, well, you might say that it's in Pitcher's genes—his father is an AS/400 analyst, and he encouraged his son to look into programming on the system when he first started college. "When I was in college, I studied RPG, but my dad was always telling me about the aging workforce on the i, and all the positives of the platform:  reliability, security, integration. He sold me on the fact that it was a solid platform that would need specialists for many years to come."

Pitcher focused on programming while he was earning his diploma at Keyin College, and when he finished school, he headed into the exciting world of technical sales, working for an IBM business partner in New Brunswick. Pitcher sold and implemented OS upgrades, new i machines, and services. But one thing was always on his mind: "The coolest thing about selling the i was the stability of the machine. I remember going into customer sites and finding they haven't IPL'ed their machine since they bought it a couple of years beforehand."

After being a successful salesman for two years, Pitcher decided that he wanted to move to a smaller town to raise his family. He began cold-calling companies in Hantsport (a one kilometer square town), and stumbled upon a newspaper ad for the local paper company, which was looking for an analyst. The rest is history—Pitcher has been happily employed by Minas for five years now.

An average day for Pitcher is busy. "Yeah, anything can happen in a day," he admits. Normally, he spends his time working out the kinks in the new ERP system, retrofitting the labeling system with BARCODE/400, designing reports on internal sales and inventory, and working on Domino administration and development. Minas runs three i boxes: a 170 running 5.2 that handles management, sales, and quality control; a 270 that runs the payroll systems with 5.4; and a new 515 that has taken on most of the 270's old workload, including ERP, file and print sharing, the Domino server, Blackberry enterprise serving, enterprise ID mapping (which offers a form of Single Sign-On), and interfacing with Microsoft Active Directory.

And Pitcher can't say enough good things about the systems that are the workhorses of Minas. "I just love the i ," he espouses, "The main benefit is that it's cost-effective—we have Windows machines, probably 10, but they just don't handle the workload of the i servers. I also really value the integration, security, middleware and DB2. And I love that it's still keeping current by driving new ideas like virtualization and setting new benchmarks for computing."

As for his future with our beloved box, Pitcher is steadfast in his commitment. "I will absolutely still be on this box in five years," he says, "I could not take a Windows job. I just don't want the headaches and stress of moving to that world."

Erin Bradford is an associate editor for System iNEWS.