Trevor Perry started a thread on LinkedIn asking people "what it would take to call the platform IBM i?"
I posted the following comment, but I think in my mind I wanted to understand "what do people gain by calling IBM i on Power Systems an AS/400?"
I call it IBM i on Power Systems, and educate my users to do the same, because of two main reasons:
1. It's the name of the OS and hardware that we currently run.
2. It ensures that everyone in the company, from shop floor to CEO, is aware we are investing in modern technology. Yes it's backward compatible and runs the old green screen apps, but that Sametime 8.5.2 rich web meeting and PHP web app for production control is thanks to IBM i.
Anyone who mentions "the 400" around me in my shop usually leaves the ensuing conversation with a greater appreciation of our IT department, our systems and, if I do my job right, the confidence we can deliver modern solutions they perhaps thought were not possible on "the 400."
To answer your question, what would/did it take? I had to change my perspective. What would I gain by wrongfully calling it "the 400?" Absolutely nothing. I've gained so much more by rightfully calling it IBM i on Power Systems and taking a little time to provide a little education; something many IT folks have abandoned as not "part of the job." I strongly disagree. Education opens the doors that people aren't even aware of.
An AS/400 is from the 80's and 90's. I don't want my name attached to any business decision that involves moving forward in 2013 with an AS/400.
So, if you call it an AS/400 or an iSeries or a System i...what do you gain from that? Familiarity? A comfort zone? If so, you should've went into accounting or something else relatively stable and safe. As an IT professional, where the tools of the trade change very often, you're losing the opportunity to engage someone and educate them on the technological monster IBM i on Power Systems is!
Any other reasons? Please leave them below.
Amen brother Stevens, amen. The AS/400 brand is gone. Long live the IBM i.
ReplyDeletehttp://iseriespriest.blogspot.com/2011/05/i-use-ibm-i.html
Its a fair point you raise Steve, but the issue is that 'the IBM i' is a bad name, just like 'the IBM p'. It's impossible to search for, and noone outside the current customer set understands what it is.
ReplyDeleteI'm more on the AIX side of things, and from my perspective could understand the shift from RS/6000 to pSeries back in the late 90s. The eServer x/p/i/zSeries names made it a family and could explain the relationship between the brands. The move to System i/p/x/z was just rearranging the deckchairs, and IBM i and p just was a plain bad move.
So I understand why you raise the point you do, and also that referring to the AS400 perhaps makes it seem like a legacy system. However, I think IBM needs to do you some favours here. 'IBM i on Power Systems' is as bad a brand name as I can recall, and telling people they must use it isn't the way forward. They need a brand name that people are proud to support and stand behind.
So to be clear, Stuart...IBM p never existed. It's not a name that was ever used for AIX on Power. pSeries, yes. System p, yes. IBM p...nope. :)
ReplyDeleteIBM i is an operating system, as is AIX. iSeries/pSeries was operating system plus hardware, as was pSeries/System p. There were good reasons for that, as there are good reasons to split them up. Of coruse that didn't stop anyone, including IBMers from trying all the old tricks to make it seem like i was going away when the change was made.
People outside and inside IBM have been trying to kill off IBM i for years. When the latest round of naming was coming along, I was told by IBMers that "iSeries is going away" and by that they didn't mean the name, they meant the platform.
Of course you see they weren't even calling it System i at that point either. :) When I told them that System p was going away too, they argued with me that no it's staying. They didn't get it.
I had a customer yesterday tell me they have a "Power Series", yep also not a real thing. Never existed in the market. They are on a p550 which they call Power Series, and then took a minute to educate me on naming. HA! They were of course wrong in their description.
I agree IBM i is harder to search for, and iSeries and System i are better in that regard. But, Power Systems is a heck of a brand name and is building marketshare year after year. AIX and IBM i are operating systems. It isn't even "the IBM i" that's actually kinda wrong too.
Should they have called it something else? Sure. They should have used i/OS and just said the heck with Cisco, just like Apple wanted to before Cisco licensed it to them. I still think IBM could do that with some kind of spin.
What I see in the field, is that customers love the platform. They really don't give a crap what it's called. Thus they use what they want. iSeries is the most common one I hear, next to System i and AS/400. That's the name that resonated. Part of it is lazy, part of it is "who cares."
Another part of me says, well you know Windows never had a name change....why is that? They didn't need one. Then again, we don't refar to our Domino servers as Notes servers anymore either. While it may be true that IBM i shares much of its function with OS/400 back to 1988, it's developed far beyond that.
I get the naming battle, although, I don't always agree with the vigorous nature of some of the discussions with customers around it, but certainly partners and IBMers should have this nailed, and so often they don't either, and that's a real problem.
...and searching for AS/400 will get 'helpful' results dated 1999. It is necessary for us to push the new name whenever we can, because the old name is inevitably linked to old tech in everyone's minds. Our users, our management, our competition and the world at large all think of the AS/400 as a doddering old fool who refuses to leave the party.
ReplyDeleteAnd I would never argue that the i-Thing is a doddering old fool. I love the platform and have in the past recommended it to a good number of customers.
ReplyDeleteI applaud what you guys are pushing for here. The challenge is how you get the market to understand the message you're trying to communicate. I have a fear that the answer would be 'marketing' or 'advertising', neither of which we're likely to see.
So given that, apart from Steve's excellent campaigns over the past few months, how do the iEvangelists make the new nomenclature (and the continuing benefits of the platform) stick?
Hi Stuart,
DeleteI think there's three things that need to happen:
1. Customers, if running IBM i, must refer to it as IBM i. More customers will do it if they hear other customers doing it. It's a change in perception, that's all.
2. Business Partners must use the new branding. They're usually the closest contact to IBM the customer has. When I see a BP mention their product runs on iSeries V7R1, I see red.
3. IBM has to continue what they're doing to make the branding more effective. They need to be encouraging the Business Partners to use the correct branding. They need to continue fazing out any mention of i5/OS or OS/400 in their literature for current products. IBM front line support needs to to be saying IBM i instead of OS/400. Other areas within IBM need to understand what IBM i is and how they can drive revenue because of that understanding. They're getting there.
Marketing or advertising? Yeah, we probably won't see any Super Bowl ads. But I think it's monkey see, monkey do. All of IBM needs to be speaking the same terminology, then the BP's, and then the customers will hopefully follow suit.
Until then, if we spot language from the 80's I think we need to correct that language by offering a friendly but very direct reminder, regardless of where we see it.