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I believe platform independence is very important to IBM and probably also very important to ISVs but of little to moderate importance to the end user community. For IBM & for ISVs it leads to products that can be deployed across the various platforms they sell (IBM) or choose to support (ISVs). It lets them market this ability to not be locked to a specific platform. One downside for hardware & OS vendors is that platforms are commoditized. For IBM this must be frustrating. They need to market cross-platform technologies to compete but at the same time those technologies gut the mindshare that makes companies go for their proprietary (System i & z), high-margin platforms over lower cost, higher bang-for-buck (System p & x) hardware. Another downside is that cross-platform code is rarely optimized for any specific platform. This frequently leads platform choice to cost, speeds-n-feeds, internal preferences, and strength of the OS and available tools/utilities. Companies are getting used to horizontal scaling out (more small systems) v. vertical scaling up (few bigger systems). Again this favors Windows & Linux over midrange. Beyond the hardware and app vendors, the user community will generally pick a platform and stay with it for a number of years, making the independence issue less a factor. It is a factor when selecting a software system and will influence the platform decision, but in the end companies rarely rip and replace one platform with another just because the apps support it. There has to be a business reason. A sample business reason is when an infrastructure upgrade is necessary to support a growing or changing workload. There are more upgrade options and more technologies to consider. I've mentioned before that we're a JDPeopOracle EnterpriseOne shop and that our i5 is not sized to handle the growth we're going through. As IBM has killed upgrades within the original 570 frame (1.65GHz CPUs) the upgrade option is to gut the CEC and replace it with the 2.2GHz CPUs. I'd like that, of course, but that means re-buying our RAM and misc. other expenses like $50+K/CPU core for OS licensing. Upgrading both production & BCDR is a high 6-figure expense without even adding any DASD. The alternative we are piloting is moving part of the architecture -- the end-user piece served by WebSphere App Server -- off the i5 and onto Windows. So the cross-platform nature of WAS and EnterpriseOne's use of that technology is losing revenue for IBM as the Windows boxes we buy come from Dell.
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