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  3. September 2003

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

Hans,

At 9/10/03 01:32 PM, you wrote:
If a salesperson encouraged a customer to by a pSeries instead of an iSeries, could it be perhaps that the pSeries was a better fit for that particular customer?

In one case in particular, the company I was working for was an IBM BP and, like good "partners", we brought the IBM sales rep into some of the sales calls. This was our prospect and was a very good fit for the hardware and software solution we were proposing. The result was that the IBM rep did an end run around us and stole the customer, selling them a Unix solution.

At the time we were curious as to what incentive a rep would have to do that. We came up with 2 basic legitimate reasons (and one not on the up-and-up.)

1) The reps are not always trained properly on all the platforms that they sell. So if they came from a Unix group, then that's what will be pushed.

2) The commissions and overrides tended to be much higher on the RS/6000s. (I don't know if that's still true, but I wonder if there's parity across the board.)


Although I work on a product that runs on OS/400, I believe fully that the customer should be able to freely choose a solution from amongst any of IBM's offerings, to get the solution that's best for that customer. If that means some IBM product other than an iSeries, then so be it.

Unless you are dealing with very compute intensive environments (where there's a heavy need for floating point arithmetic, etc.), there's so much overlap in the business world that a decision is most likely based on initial cost and who can sell better, not on the "best" solution, since both solutions will work. If the mindset toward the AS/400 going into the sale is that it's "legacy, outdated, slow, non-GUI, obsolete, on the way out..." due to the lack of IBM's proper promotion, then what chance does the box have for a new customer sale?

-mark


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