Re: The real skinny

On Feb 15, 2008 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.

is there a prediction here? the number of applications written for the
system will increase? system i sales will be up 1Q08? The rather muted
response in the public discussion arena to i5/OS on the JS22 blade indicates
otherwise. The $15K surcharge per core for running i5/OS on a blade prevents
us from having a chance to expand our presence into territory occupied by
other operating systems.

-Steve