IBM i hosting "in the cloud"

Jon,

As a small company in the education business, we share your requirements. Like you, we rely on good friends who let us do testing on their machines when necessary. As far as "running my business" on IBM i, the cost forced us out of that option years ago. Our production server uses Java/Spring/Hibernate and Tomcat on Linux with MySQL. We get everything we need for $40/month, including 24/7 support. While we could easily port our server software to WAS on i and use DB2, the cost is prohibitive.

As far as education not being on IBM's radar, I have found the opposite to be true. Education is a profit center within IBM, and they see even 2-person training companies as a threat. Unfortunately, this often puts them at odds with the needs of the IBM i community as well as the people in Rochester and Toronto, who cannot get the support they'd like for their own products. We have been making proposals to IBM for joint educational projects for over 15 years now, and every one of them has been shot down by a lifer in the Education group, telling management that there is no need to go outside IBM for any training requirement. Unfortunately, that has never been true and is even less true today.

Cheers,

Bill
William A. Hansen
whansen@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Manta Technologies Inc.
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