The real skinny

I just wanted to get one thing out there very clear.

There has long been a big complaint in the community that the iSeries is priced out of the hands of small developers. And in reality that's been the case, both with hardware and software. They've both always been priced at the enterprise level, and with good reason. IBM hardware, with it's IOP/IOA structure, has allowed small CPUs to handle more business application users than pretty much any other system architecture devised.

But now we're no longer constrained by hardware costs, and as the price of hardware plummeted the next barrier was software cost. Especially in this day of "free" tools, the tiered pricing of the machine has been an issue. But now IBM has finally addressed that as well.

Because now, a single developer can buy a cheap machine and instead of paying $3650 for green screen development tools can now get a full GUI/ILE development environment for $2600. And that's list; a lot of times those tools get bundled into the express packages for half-price or less. And after that, your SWMA drops to $260 a year. Not a bad deal.

So now even a small developer can reasonably think about an i5/OS machine as a component of their network for four figures; in fact, about the same as a fully-loaded Windows server (with RAID and tape backup).

Is it perfect? No. Is it free? No. But is it the right direction?

I think so.

Joe