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

Joe,

A couple of things on this tack. IBM needs to sort out it's business partner program. And they need to do it quickly. It hasn't been able to keep up with all the changes in the platform over the past few years. The biggest issue is barriers to entry. It is so hard to become a BP and so difficult to maintain that IBM loses sales while prospective BP's are jumping through the vast array of hoops (VAE's) to become a HW reseller. They commoditized the hardware but the channel is still proprietary. They need to fix that, IMHO (and I have been saying that for a few years)

As an ISV, I like to sell a complete, end to end solution, so simplifying the HW reseller end would make my life a lot easier. Even though I always lead with i, most of my apps are hardware agnostic so I could, potentially, sell any platform: No problem with x (or any white box). Harder with p, and most difficult with i. I can sell the reliability of i but the difficulty in sourcing and pricing a box is a bit of a challenge.

IBM has great ISV resources and gives us quite a bit of technical help in developing apps and also has some good marketing tools to help market our products. The key is help in differentiating the i from the other platforms and then making it easy to bundle a box and an application.

My 2 cents.

Pete Helgren



Joe Pluta wrote:

Don wrote:

Joe wrote:
What's needed is to get the ISVs back on board.
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Joe, this is most likely the most important transitional step mentioned yet.
The applications drive the directions... the application drivers need to be
moving more in that direction, staying with the o/s(platform), and continue
development/support.

Yup, and there are a variety of options. I don't like them all technically, but they're there, ranging from pure RPG-CGI, which you can do with RDi and nothing else, or a PHP-based environment where you pay Zend for their tooling, or an SOA-based offering using EGL and RDi-SOA, or even a completely J2EE-based architecture using RDi and RAD.

The options are endless. And I've got demos that show that the basic architecture flies (at least the J2EE side, and Nathan can attest to the pure RPG side, although his stuff is proprietary). I'm getting 12 pages a SECOND on an EGL-based inquiry; it's nearly impossible to match that in a JDBC environment. But that part of the discussion veers once again into opinion (which architecture to use).

We need to prove to ISVs that the platform will sell software, and I think we're at the point where we can. But we need to focus on the right issues.

Joe