This year's COMMON in Anaheim started off with an overcast day that quickly turned into sunshine, and the opening session also proved to include a few rays of sunshine amid System i's rather lackluster sales performance in Q1 2007.

First, COMMON President Randy Dufault started us off with a brief rehash of the year's events and covered the new COMMON Customized education model made up of three pillars: Leadership and Advocacy, Community and Networking, and Education.

As in the past, awards were presented to COMMON speakers and volunteers, with gold medals in speaking going to Al Barsa, Jr., Randall Munson, and Trevor Perry.

Next, Perry — who also now leads COMMON's Community and Networking program — provided a summary of iSociety happenings. Though iSociety had a slow launch, Perry said it's been growing fast lately, particularly after events such as COMMON. iSociety now sports a new welcome portal page that directs users to iSociety features, including key System i news and a new membership forum hosted by COMMON that includes "celebrity chats" so that iSociety members can chat online with IBMers and System i experts in the field.

IBM System i General Manager Mark Shearer kicked off his address by reflecting on the past multi-year journey to today, where he touted the new entry-level System i 515 and 525, along with key go-to-market changes such as user-based pricing and the Vertical Industry Program (VIP), which we previously covered in "IBM Announces Radically New Entry-Level Boxes (and More)."

Shearer also noted the System i group's increased efforts to bring higher education students into the System i world, noting that 75 percent of the colleges and universities that participated in IBM's System i Innovation Challenge didn't have an existing System i curriculum. More than 100 teams registered (and some schools entered multiple teams). Shearer said his group plans to introduce a similar competition in Europe this fall and in Asia-Pacific regions in 2008.

Other key recent enhancements to the System i line came in the form of BladeCenter integration, the IBM-3Com IP telephony solution, and the successful, less-expensive CBU System i boxes.

The newest announcement came in the form of another open-source initiative: following on the heels of PHP on the System i, IBM has teamed with MySQL AB to resell and support the extremely popular MySQL open-source database on the System i. The two companies plan to deliver DB2 for i5/OS as a certified MySQL storage engine on the System i platform. MySQL boasts 11 million installs, and the database is particularly popular with developers who use PHP, which gives System i customers new application and developer talent options.

The opening session wrapped up with a few comments from the crowd — including the annual concerns about marketing and declining System i sales revenue. Shearer noted that, despite multiple fiscal quarters of declining revenue, IBM looks at the System i from a holistic IBM customer perspective. Although the hardware portion of the System i may be losing money, a large percentage of IBM's best customers use the System i. In addition, those customers spend a lot of money with IBM that doesn't get tagged directly to the System i sales reports.

One attendee thanked Shearer for sticking with the System i division for a third year (alluding to the fact that most System i GMs start some good projects but then get tapped for a promotion as part of IBM's executive-shuffle strategy). The attendee asked whether Shearer was going to stay with the System i division, and Shearer danced around the question but eventually assured us that he has no plans to leave the System i and that he's steaming full speed ahead with work yet to do.

Of course, he didn't say he would refuse to take on responsibility for another IBM position if offered/ordered, but odds are good that he'd like to stay at least long enough to see efforts such as the Initiative for Innovation, VIP program, and the new 515 and 525s generate new revenue and success for the System i.