Re: iSeries (non-) Marketing - part 24,566

[jim.hawkins@xxxxxxxx]

I sit in a unique position in that not only do I work daily on an iSeries,
I also teach a course at the local community college about OS/400.

Despite the fact that within a 50 mile radius of the school there are well
over 500 companies that run an iSeries most of my students walk in the door
having never heard of it.  They ask "why do we need to learn this, no one
uses it".  Many of them come with the attitude of Microsoft, Linux, Java or
nothing.  Granted, a lot of them are looking for jobs writing games.  But I
find similar attitude in industry.  A year and half ago we were looking to
move Lotus to a new server.  The iSeries wasn't considered. Why? 2 reasons:
"It isn't stable enough" and "It doesn't have a broad base of support".
Why do these perceptions exist? Because they don't hear about it outside of
the few of us within the company that actually work on the platform.

I have seen local companies make the decision to go to other platforms
because the executives making the decisions don't think the iSeries is
viable because they don't see or hear about it outside their company.

Does Coca Cola need to bombard us with ads every 10 minutes to urge us to
buy their product? No, but they want to maintain market share.  I have seen
ads on TV for the pSeries and the xSeries.  Most of us are not saying that
IBM has to put the kind of money into promoting the iSeries that Coke does.
But when an executive looks at two proposals, one for an iSeries based
solution and the other is for an Intel based solution  9 out of 10 will go
with the Intel based solution because it's the one that they have heard of.

I know of companies that determine vendors based on their ranking.  Must be
a top 5 international provider.  Doesn't matter what the numbers are.  It's
the name recognition.

Has anyone seen stats relating to the sales of new boxes over the last 10
years?  Especially to new customers?

Even ads that said  "pSeries, xSeries, iSeries or zSeries? Let our experts
recommend the right solution for your needs" would be a boost.

How about it IBM?  Will we see some marketing support for the iSeries or do
we have to fight the battles within our companies alone?
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+


 Jim Hawkins
 IBM Certified Specialist AS/400 RPG IV Programmer
 Programmer/Analyst
 Eimo Americas