Re: Marketing the platform was: System i - Mentioned twice in

john e wrote:

Crunching out the same green-screen apps in RPG III with some %BIF's here and there (aka RPG IV) doesn't cut it and whining about how good the platform is but IBM can't market it is just silly.

What's needed is to get the ISVs back on board. But this is starting to swerve into the land of opinion, and I'm trying to avoid that here. I get my one rant a month and that's all.

But think about this: we have one (last?) chance with the platform. The idea of sticking an i5/OS blade into a network is simply stunning to me. Encapsulate your business logic (web services, JSON/REST, even stored procedures, I don't care) and make them available to the rest of the business using industry standard calls. They'll be amazed by the speed and it won't really matter what it's running as long as it's relatively cheap and fast and reliable. And frankly, we've always been the last two, and with the new commodity hardware, we've got the first.

But the trick will be to get ISVs to write for the blade. The model might be cheap software but two weeks of services to configure, install and migrate your old system. It may even work as an open source model, I don't know. But again, that's the realm of opinion. But I think getting that channel restarted might make more difference to our platform than what we call it.

Joe