Re: The real skinny

[Trevor Perry <trevor@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Joe,

Just a quick clarification, since it is not so clear. Are you referring to
used servers only?

You cannot buy an iSeries new from IBM any more. In fact, last month was the
two year anniversary of the end of the iSeries product line.

Does the complaint stretch to the current server line? Will it stretch to
the new Power6 blades as well?

Just checking.
Trevor



On 2/15/08 9:11 AM, "Joe Pluta" <joepluta@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> 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