Like a cross between The Onion and Search400, Mid-Deranged is a satirical humor site about the IBM midrange. So it’s imperative that you not take it seriously when the site proclaims that IBM has announced it is buying Nintendo and merging Power Systems with the Wii to create the IBMii.

It’s also important that you realize it’s a joke when the site announces IBM’s new environmentally friendly program for the i, called Recycle/400.

“For a minimal fee IBM will take your old AS/400 and convert it to a useful product,” the post says. And then it lists 29 ways an AS/400 can be reused. Some of my favorites: rabbit cage, tanning booth, and highway crash barrier.

Yes, you will want to check this site out. It will bring a few chuckles into your System i world. And it doesn’t hesitate to take pot shots at IBM and System i competitors. The most recent post declares that Sun is suing the island of Java for trademark infringement, while an earlier one “reports” that a guest keynote speaker at the Common conference was Bill Gates, who gave a speech entitled “Software Quality through Perception, not Reality.” Ouch.

This year, as many of you know, is the 20th anniversary of the introduction of AS/400. This weekend IBM held a big celebration at its campus up in Rochester, Minn. in celebration of the anniversary. But 20 years ago, not everyone was celebrating.

When System/36 and System/38 merged to become the AS/400 back in 1988, the higher-end customers were pleased, but not all the smaller ones were. This according to Frank Soltis, the chief scientist of System i who has been working on the AS/400 platform since it still had the codename of “Silverlake.” Soltis spoke during a Webcast last week hosted by Tango/04, a System i server monitoring software company.

“System/36 folks absolutely refused to buy AS/400 for many years,” Soltis said.

Twenty years later, System i and p have merged to become Power Systems, and similar consternation exists among users. The high-end ones tend to like the merger, Soltis said, while the smaller customers are worried that they’re losing their business computing platform.

So will all the System i users become Power System converts? Perhaps not, but predictions of the platform’s demise may be premature.

It is striking to see how far the platform has come in 20 years. Ian Jarman, the System i product manager, said that the first AS/400 machine, the B10, was rated at 3 cpw (commercial processing workload). A new Power6 that runs i5/OS, the 595, is rated at 300,000 cpw.

Soltis said during the Webcast that if someone had asked him 20 years ago what he’d be doing in 20 years, he certainly would not have guessed that he’d still be working on the AS/400. So what about 20 years from now? Jarman said this:

“I’m very confident that we can take our applications forward into any generation of technology to come and we’ve made investments with Power systems. I can’t predict the future but we have positioned it to really move wherever the mainstream moves.”

Other Soltis anniversaries

Soltis is celebrating other work-related anniversaries this year with IBM. This October is the 30th anniversary of System/38, one of the precursors to the AS/400. And then in November, Soltis is celebrating 40 years of working full-time with IBM. His first assignment? To create a replacement for the System/3 minicomputer, which ended up being the System/38, which ended up being the AS/400, iSeries, System i and now Power Systems.

“Even my children point out to me that in all my 40 years at IBM, I’ve only really worked on one product,” he said.

Regrets?

Soltis revealed that when IBM decided to merge System i and p, the opportunity arose to re-rename the operating system from i5/OS back to OS400. Soltis opposed the reversion, agreeing with most at IBM that “going backward was a bad thing.” Still, all the renaming has given Soltis some regrets.

“If there was something I could do, it would be to undo all the renaming,” he said.

The future, according to Frank Soltis

Some things to look for, both from IBM, its customers, and the server market in general, according to Soltis:

• “In the future one of the things we’re looking to do is move toward special purpose processors. As a result, one of the things we have done is worked out the design of the next generation of Power technology called Power7. If you look at Power7, it’s not just Power anymore. It’s Power plus a lot of these special purpose processors.”
• “Back in 2001, we were having negotiations with Microsoft to run Windows on Power…Over the last several years, Microsoft has been busy moving to 64-bit platforms. As a result, very little has happened with running Windows on Power…We certainly don’t see anything in the near future with Windows running on Power.”
• On the System i blade: “A lot of our customers don’t have blades, and personally I don’t see a lot of them moving to a blade environment. Yes, we’re going to support blades where it makes sense, but also support the fully integrated system as we always have.”
• “Personally I believe over the next couple years there will only be two vendors of processing technology (in business computing)…I’m a firm believer that Intel and IBM will be the two main ones or only ones…”

Kind of an old post, but I missed it and so I need to link to it here. It comes from Aaron Bartell and includes the following joke:

The boy Microsoft programmer is smoking and leaving smoke rings into the air.

The girl AS/400 programmer gets irritated with the smoke and says to her lover co-worker: “Can’t you see the warning written on the cigarettes packet, smoking is injurious to health!”

The boy replies back: “Darling, I am a Microsoft programmer. We don’t worry about warnings, we only worry about errors.”

In the go-ahead-and-smile category, the iDevelop blog came up with a bunch more acronyms beyond YiP (Young i Professionals) and now RiP (Retired i Professionals) to describe various factions of the i community. Here are a couple:

MiPs-–Modern i Professionals-–those who like to stay up with technology and the latest in capabilities of the i. These might be contrasted with the next group. …

LiPs-–Luddite i Professionals-–those who resist new capabilities and technology. “It’s been good enough for me and/or my users since 1988. …”

A couple readers posted in the comments with their suggestions. The best back-and-forth started with Aaron Bartell, who suggested FRiP, Fence Riding i Professionals, defined as “personnel in a company who can’t make a technology direction decision if their life depended on it.” Another commenter responded to that by saying “isn’t a ‘FRiP’ the same as a ‘CIO’?”

Any others? The only one I could come up with was NiPs: Name-consumed i Professionals (NCiPs, maybe?) They are the ones obsessed with whether the platform should be called AS/400, iSeries, System i, or now IBM i or Power Systems. And I grant that sometimes their obsession is warranted. I would also guess that there are plenty of DKWTCTPiISs, which stands for Don’t Know What To Call The Platform i IBM Salesperson.

There have been plenty of arguments for and against putting System i on a blade server. Proponents say that being able to have their i, p and x86 servers all in one BladeCenter chassis is a big selling point. Detractors worry that I/O performance won’t be the same on a blade, or that System i shops in general don’t really need the small-form factor of the blade.

But as Chris Maxcer points out in his talk with IBM business partner Sirius, interest in the i blade has been high so far, but sales are low. Why? Well, when you get to the end of the post, it seems that maybe it’s just because System i blades are still in their infancy. IBM announced the first i blade at the beginning of April, so we’re only a couple months in.

Because it’s early on, configurations are limited. Users can get IBM i (formerly i5/OS) on the JS12 blade, which has a single dual-core Power chip, or the JS22 blade, which has two dual-core Power chips. Even there, though, there is some confusion on IBM’s own website regarding the JS22. While one Power blade overview site mentions support for IBM i on the JS22, the more detailed server specs page says nothing about IBM i support. In the end it doesn’t matter that much — if JS22 supports IBM i, then it supports it. But there could be some confusion in the meantime from users (or nosy reporters) browsing the site.

Maxcer also quotes Sirius as saying that there essentially needs to be a trifecta for a user to want to buy i blades. One, they have to be an i user. Second, they should probably already be running blades and have a BladeCenter chassis on the ready (with empty slots, of course). And finally, Sirius said the user would also have to have DS4000 or DS8000 external storage server.

One final note on the post: At the end, we find out that Sirius is actually bullish on i blades, with the director of System i and x products at the company saying that “(i)n the future, five-to-ten years, it’s going to be widely adopted.”

A few years ago, Salesforce.com came out with a product called AppExchange that allowed independent software vendors to host their applications on Salesforce.com for customers to use. It’s the software as a service (SaaS) approach that there is a lot of talk — and some think a lot of hype — around.

I mention this because Magic Software, a System i vendor that develops products around helping IT run in sync with business goals. Last week, the company announced that one of its signature products, iBOLT, would be offered on Salesforce.com.

Of course this leads me to wonder about whether there are a lot of System i companies out there that are Salesforce.com customers, and in particular if they use Salesforce.com for SaaS purposes.

I looked around and noticed that J.D. Edwards, one of the biggest System i ISVs, is also part of the site, and that Salesforce.com is definitely pitching the idea of being able to do SaaS of any kind of so-called “legacy” systems through them.

We asked a few of our experts what experience they may have had running SaaS products on i, and a few responded that they didn’t have experience. So generally speaking, we can safely assume that this is still pretty new. However, Jim Mason of ebt-now shared that he has worked with customers on Salesforce.com using standard ETL tools Informatica and Data Stage which essentially do the same thing that iBolt does.

When asked about any concerns about user friendliness and security when using a product like iBolt, Mason responded,

“If you are trying to do the replication real-time, experience has shown high variances in actual performance often over the Web and proprietary networks. Properly done, security shouldn’t be an issue. Like many good ETL tools, iBolt appears to minimize programming by using visual editors to create the data maps between the data source and the data target.”

He also elaborated that the advantage and attractiveness of a product such as iBolt includes the decreased technical skill requirements to operate the program compared to locally-installed programs. However, he also noted that “debugging connection or performance problems to an SaaS application can be challenging, even for the vendors.”

With the growth in popularity of cloud computing, Mason thinks that SaaS products have a growing role to play. In fact, he’s banking on it. His company is rolling out SaaS web solutions for small businesses in the coming year that will focus on online Web collaboration without programming, simple Web stores with simple data transfers for item catalog and sales data, online web meetings and collaboration tools, and online Web databases and applications that can be synchronized with local databases using export/import in batch mode.

Magic has some customer testimonials, but I’m curious if there’s anyone else out there who is using Salesforce.com, and in what capacity. And if not, why not.

Associate Editor Leah Rosin contributed much of this report.

So far the feedback on renaming the operating system from i5/OS to i or IBM i has overall been mixed, although there are some detractors who have some strong opinions. This one comes directly from an IT employee from an Arizona-based general contracting company:

Changing the name of the operating system to just “i” is just another idiotic idea from IBM, probably initiated by the same stupid “marketing geniuses” that dreamt up the latest super dumb campaign starring brainless “Gil” and his young clueless “geek” buddy, whose name (thankfully) escapes me.

IBM could have at least dropped the “5″ and made it i/OS or or i-OS or OS/i or OSi or something beyond just the single letter “i.”

Are they going to now change z/OS to z??

Fictitious scenario, similar to Abbott and Costello’s “Who’s on First” :

1. What operating system do you run ? i.
2. I what ? Just i.
3. Just you ? No, not me - i.
4. (repeat 2 and 3 above, ad infinitum)

Who would be stupid enough to choose a non-capitalized first-person pronoun to represent absolutely anything (beyond its normal English meaning/usage) ?

Lastly, the really nice thing (not), is that until IBM either reverses this name change or until the next (inevitable) name change, everyone in the AS/400 (yes, I said it) community gets to perpetually respond to their Microsoft Outlook client spell-check feature (F7) to “Ignore” every instance of i.

Even enclosing the i inside quotation marks still “throws” a “Not in Dictionary:” error. The only viable alternative is to tell spell-checker to “Add” “i” to its dictionary, after which the spell-checker forever loses its ability to find a bona-fide yet accidental neglect to capitalize a legitimate reference to one’s self, via the pronoun I. Between the above two choices, I will begrudgingly be forced to continually inform spell-checker to “Ignore” every occurrence of an i (to refer to the OS).

Even though no other words — other than “i” — in this e-mail are misspelled, it still took me about 15 seconds to respond “Ignore” to all of the occurrences of i in this e-mail. Hopefully, IBM’s bone-head decision to call the operating system “i”, will cause it to spend many thousands of dollars when its own employees are forced to do the same.

Most disheartening is that (to my knowledge) the user-community wasn’t even queried for suggestions as to whether to change the name or, given a name change, what to call it. They could have even made a contest out of it, and given away a “blade” (or would that be an i-blade?).

Don’t take this personally, because I know it’s not your doing; however please feel free to forward it to anyone in IBM who 1) would care; and 2) would actually be instrumental in rectifying this mistake (like that could/will happen).

Thanks for taking the time to read this.

Ken Jack, a software engineer at trucking software company TMW Systems, has created the T-shirt you see to the right. He has it on his personal CafePress website called iWhatever.

Jack reflects the anguish of many System i users — er, users running i on Power Systems — who have a hard time figuring out what to call the server platform on which they run all their business applications. In a recent story on feedback of the System i/p merger, one user told me that he spent a long time trying to convince everyone in his organization that the server and platform should be called System i and i5/OS, not AS/400, iSeries, or OS/400.

Now that IBM has renamed it again to Power Systems and just “i,” expect some folks to just say forget it and start calling it AS/400 again.

That’s how Jack feels, as is apparent by this T-shirt he’s selling. He’s been selling a similar shirt for a while now, just adding on whenever IBM decides to rename the platform again.

“It’s honestly to the point where if IBM changes the name one more time, I’m going to have to put ‘continued on other side…’ on the front of the T-shirts,” Jack wrote in an email to me. “Just last month somebody bought a shirt that stopped at ‘System i.’ I bet he’s pissed.”

What are they calling it at TMW Systems? Jack said that “everybody at our shop still calls it ‘The 400.’ ‘Power System running i’ is just too much of a mouthful.”

By the way, in addition to buying the T-shirt, you can also buy other merchandise with the logo on it: mousepad, coffee mug, baseball cap, etc.

Last year IBM and Nortel announced that it would collaborate on a Voice over IP product targeted for smaller customers — 1,000 users maximum. This would compete with 3Com’s IP telephony product on the i somewhat, although the only overlapping would be at the high-end of Nortel’s product and the low-end of 3Com’s.

Needless to say, about nine months after the initial announcement, Nortel will ship software for the IP telephony product starting Friday.

The software, called the Nortel Software Communication System (SCS) 500, runs on a Linux partition on the System i. The SCS500 provides its own Linux distribution, but it also requires that users have i5/OS V5R4 or IBM i 6.1 (i5/OS V6R1) as well. Customers can use the computer’s microphone and speakers, a headset plugged into the computer, one of four hard preconfigured hard phones provided by Nortel, or their own hard phones that have been configured to work in the IP telephony system. The system is connected to voicemail, email, instant messaging, and other computer programs, which is why IBM and Nortel are fond of calling it “unified communications.”

According to IT Jungle, licenses for the SCS500 will start at $220 each with maintenance costing $34 per user per year.

This may be the last time IBM reports System i hardware revenues on their own. Seeing as the platform is now officially merged with System p into a new Power Systems, future hardware revenue figures will probably reflect that.

It’s probably a good thing.

System i revenues dropped 21 percent compared to the year-ago period. That compares to increased or flat revenue numbers from the other platforms — System z was up 10 percent, System p up 2 percent, and System x flat. Aside from a small blip at the end of last year, hardware revenues for the System i platform have been dropping steadily for a while now. Let’s take a look at the last three years per quarter:

Compare that to System p revenues in the same period:

Are there anymore questions about why IBM decided to merge the two platforms? Aside from the benefits of having a single hardware platform on the Power processor, the merger will eliminate those ugly-looking, often double-digit revenue decreases that System i was experiencing quarter after quarter after quarter.