When IBM announced a year ago that it was merging the System i and System p divisions, the news generated uncertainty and trepidation in the System i world. IBM's largest customers would be serviced by one group, while the company's smaller customers would be the responsibility of another. What would this mean for the System i?
And then April brought COMMON, and with it IBM's announcement of "The New Power Equation" and the realization that the System i, as many knew it, no longer existed. The i5/OS operating system was renamed to IBM i and the version naming convention modernized so that V6R1, for example, was simply 6.1. The System, the hardware, the familiar black box was killed and reborn as a Power System where the OS suddenly seemed less integrated and, well . . . installed.
What might this mean to the IBM Business Partners that sell, service, and add value to the aforementioned System i? Is gaining the Power System a viable alternative to losing the System i? Will it be good for IBM i?
First of all, when it comes to selling i on Power, i now gets to enjoy the market-leading perception and awareness that previously was reserved for System p. The System p got all the POWER6 processors first, and when it did, it spanked the Unix competition with one hand tied behind its back. Sure, IBM could have shipped i5/OS on POWER6 sooner; but really, how would IBM promote it so that the HP and Sun lovers of the world would notice? Either way, the results are clear.
At this point, POWER6 represents the gold standard in the Unix market," explains Charles King, president and principal analyst of Pund-IT. "From a performance standpoint, POWER5+, and now POWER6, pretty much shut down the competition. Before POWER6 was announced, HP came up with some benchmarking results that showed its Itanium had finally reached parity with POWER5+ . . . and IBM announced POWER6 about two weeks later."
The point is, by dominating a clear-cut Unix market, IBM created a new line of hardware, Power Systems, that already clings to the market-leading identity of having top-notch technology — and that will mean something when an IBM Business Partner tries to sell an i-based solution.
For IBM Business Partners, as for most every product seller, new talking points are critical to generating sales. And Power Systems deliver. There's performance, flexibility, scalability, greenery, and more. And all of it has been coming together and bringing new excitement with it.
"I think it's incredibly good news for System i customers and more importantly for IBM Partners. I think this unification strategy, and it's not just my opinion, is a shot in the arm and the kick we need," says Tony Madden, Avnet Technology Solutions senior vice president and general manager of the company's Americas IBM Solutions group. "We didn't have a particularly strong 'i' last year, and the stimulus . . . we could use right now."
One of the ways Avnet has gotten in front of customers is with a 10-city campaign called Power Premieres that shows off the new Power Equation for the Enterprise Data Center and then shows the movie Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. The campaign is a riff on the idea that the Power Systems line is the next generation of IBM hardware, while the movie represents the next generation of the Indiana Jones saga.
The Power System effect certainly will come into play for new customers, but also for customers who may be caught in the middle of technological change — say, an acquisition or merger where a CIO doesn't particularly know or understand the IBM i value proposition. The consolidation of Power hardware, however, removes one potential stumbling block: the unknown.
In the event of a merger, for example, IBM i might be just as foreign as i5/OS, but at least the hardware wouldn't be. Plus, with the way IBM has segregated the System i's virtualization feature and reworked and renamed it PowerVM, a CIO who knows little about i might understand PowerVM and the virtualization capabilities on the Power lineup — giving a CIO more reason to keep i workloads running.
If a business process works, is easy to maintain, and resides on a box that is readily understood by the market and that has reasonable pricing, the opportunity for inclusion rather than exclusion is much better than it was before Power and i.
Plus, in a merger situation, there remains a sliver of opportunity where i provides a better solution with less hassle than others that sit next to it. IBM i has a chance to gain positive attention in situations where previously it may have been ignored.
The inherent flexibility of a Power System makes it even easier to sell an application that runs on i because a Power System also could be used to run non-i workloads.
"It does eliminate a lot of fears," notes Stan Staszak, director of System i/x products for Sirius, an IBM Premier Business Partner. "We can tell the customer that this platform can support more than 15,000 business applications because it can run AIX or Linux in addition to i."
Similarly, Avnet's Madden recently spoke to eight large System i customers who were excited about the new offerings. "If you're a CIO or a decision maker, and you've had iSeries technology and it has been doing its thing effectively, but a lot of the new activity had been developed on different operating system platforms, and now you have the ability to run those applications and further leverage your iSeries technology, it's very compelling from a customer's perspective, and I think it gives them again another degree of safety," he says.
Neither Madden nor Staszak expects many existing System i customers to upgrade to a Power System with the intent to run AIX workloads, but the ability is key. "It's like the insurance policy you hope you never use," Madden says, noting that some customers think they may need it, but end up sticking with i-focused solutions. "Power Systems allow for ease of mind, and that's important," he adds.
Back to talking points and the technology. How many System i customers don't come close to fully maxing out the capabilities of their System i box? From a sales standpoint, technologies with cool marketing-focused names also can benefit i on Power sellers who talk up features that are at once self-explanatory and at the same time will be touted by IBM as industry-leading solutions. Cases in point are PowerVM and PowerHA — from the names alone an IT buyer can guess they are a robust virtualization solution and high availability offering that are likely well integrated into Power Systems.
Another reason to like IBM's Power initiative is it seems to be leading to more favorable cost-to-value ratios for the i world. You could argue that even at higher purchase prices, the total cost of ownership of a System i is still less expensive than a System p with AIX, but cost of acquisition is what has been so troublesome to many IT buyers.
By sharing the same Power System hardware, i on Power customers will get the same deals as customers running AIX and Linux for what is essentially the same box coming off the assembly line in Rochester.
"I think it's exciting because we now have hardware parity between i and p and, quite frankly, we've competed against p in the past," Staszak says.
"Say for example that a customer was looking at a J.D. Edwards upgrade and wanted to size that application on i and p, and we'd come back with two comparable servers, and they might say, 'Okay, for an apples-to-apples comparison, we're not going to do external storage on either platform; we want to do this on internal storage,'" Staszak explains. Inevitably, the p was always less expensive — 20 to 30 percent at least.
Unfortunately, not all customers will see the savings resulting from hardware parity. IBM has moved to a la carte, pay-for-what-you-use model, which means that many of the System i's built-in features and benefits have been broken out. So now i customers will need to add what they want back to their purchase, much like the rest of the server buying world.
For many loyal, existing System i customers, the new Power Systems and i is just business as usual — a new name change, but really, all the core functionality remains. And these customers also will be able to buy i Editions that closely resemble their previous System i boxes. They may even save a little on the hardware and, if they don't use many of the built-in System i features, they might even save more.
Still, Staszak says that of the customers he's spoken to, the response to Power and i has been unanimously positive.
And, he adds, "System i customers aren't shy about giving you the straight scoop."
Chris Maxcer is news editor for System iNews and SystemiNetwork.com. "There is one big piece of the i-selling landscape I didn't explore here, and that's IBM's Vertical Industry Program," he says. "It's a whole 'nother animal — selling into highly focused niche situations vs. the broader System iecosystem — and it's been doing well for IBM. Look for VIP coverage in a future report."
Links:
[1] http://systeminetwork.com/author/chris-maxcer