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

IBM needs to make it possible for those who provide services to have an
incentive to sell the machine. I'm still waiting to collect on my bet with
Mark Shearer that there are probably a thousand different "contract
programmers" out there who would like an 800 number to call and place an
order for a box. No muss, no fuss, no "Business Partner".

They are concerned that when the slick BP's show up, they will be pushed
aside.

I have been proposing this kind of thing for years, and was ignored until
Mr. Shearer assigned one of his lieutenants to work on this. The guy's name
was Kurt something or other. We spoke on the phone one time after the
Minneapolis COMMON conference, and then he disappeared. After leaving him
about 10 voice mail messages with no response, I gave up.

Speaking of disappearances, what happened to Mr. Shearer?

Paul Nelson
Office 512-392-2577
Cell 708-670-6978
nelsonp@xxxxxxxxxxxxx


-----Original Message-----
From: midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Pete Helgren
Sent: Friday, February 22, 2008 10:49 AM
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion
Subject: 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.

=======

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