Whenever I get a chance to interview a top executive, especially executives in large companies, one of the tactics I like to take is to ask what is important to the executive and to the company. When you go into an interview sort of open ended like that, you get a better chance of figuring out what a company cares about and the strategy or company view of the problem or opportunity. Sometimes if you manhandle the conversation around the topic you care about, you’ll run out of time and completely miss some of the driving strategies and opportunities that are top of mind for the people running the business. At the COMMON conference in Minneapolis, our editorial team had the opportunity to meet with several key IBM executives and managers, including Tom Rosamilia, general manager of Power and z Systems, and Colin Parris, vice president and business line executive for IBM Power Systems.
In addition to a few revealing statements that Rosamilia made during the opening session about Power Systems and IBM i, I want to share some interesting nuggets about priorities for the IBM Power brand and the cloud future for IBM i.
Our most frequent readers will remember that IBM sold out of Power Systems in the fourth quarter of 2010, but it was great to hear IBM’s top Power executive talk about it on stage:
“We sold out of our 740s and 720s in the fourth quarter of last year, and that was a first, and we didn’t do it because we just didn’t make very many, we actually sold quite a few, which was nice to see,” Rosamilia said. “In fact, in the fourth quarter of last year, our Power revenue grew 2 percent. It may not seem like a lot, but it was the first time we’ve grown revenue in 10 quarters.”
Then, in the first quarter of this year, Rosamilia acknowledged that its Power business was up 19 percent. And while Power was up, Rosamilia said IBM didn’t sell out of 740s or 720s because IBM made more of them and had its supply chain lined up to handle the demand.
“I’m personally excited to see this level of excitement, the level of attendance here, the level of interest, the level of passion which you folks are known for within IBM,” he said.
In addition, he said that IBM’s system software business in the first quarter was up even more than its hardware business, and he noted that IBM i operating system revenue grew in the fourth quarter and also grew in the first quarter of 2011. He didn’t offer up any hard numbers of course, but still, this is certainly good to hear.
Fit For Purpose
One of the interesting things that Rosamilia talked about was IBM’s fit-for-purpose workshops where IBMers sit down with customers and examine their application workloads to figure out the best overall platform to use to run those workloads.
“I’ve got z and Power—where should I run this? Should I run it on Intel? Should I run it on System x? Should I run it on Power Systems running AIX? Should I run IBM i? Should I run it on z? We can help people understand the strengths of each one of those platforms. I will tell you I was very proud to see Watson running on POWER7 . . . I would never run that environment on a mainframe system. It would have been totally unqualified to do that work,” Rosamilia said, noting that each IBM system and OS, mainframes, AIX, and IBM i, have their place.
“We’re not in a one-size-fits-all marketplace out there,” he added.
Investment Themes
When it comes to IBM i investment themes for 2011-2013, there are several key areas that IBM is focusing on:
- Solutions enablement
- Focus on ISV solutions integration
- Invest in language & database standards currency
- Simplified management
- Integrate IBM i performance tooling with virtual I/O server
- Automate with Systems Director Management Console
- Resilient systems
- Simplify administration of PowerHA for mid-sized companies
- Broaden storage area network integration
- Cloud computing
- Deliver VM image management mobility, automation
- Extend storage virtualization features
One of the areas that have seen excellent results so far has been IBM’s Solution Edition program which combines special core business application packages from IBM’s ISVs with discounted hardware from IBM. A year ago this program had only nine ISV participants; now it boasts well over 100 ¬participants that are offering significant deals and rapid deployment capabilities.
Still, the bigger picture for IBM when it comes to Power Systems is, so to speak, striking while the iron is hot: “On the Power side in general, we’re trying to catch as many clients making strategic decisions right now as we can,” Rosamilia said. “The industry is going through an incredible process right now of people having to make decisions about what’s strategic to them. So customers, who in their prior lives were big fans of Solaris running on SPARC systems or big fans of HP-UX running on now Itanium systems, are really having to make a decision . . . and I’m trying to catch as many of those competitive wins as I can, and they make those competitive decisions every day. . . .
“We caught almost 1,900 last year of applications and customers that had moved off—about 60 percent of those left Solaris, about 30 percent left HP, 10 percent were a collection of x86 consolidations, which still go on. We did another 210 in the first quarter [of 2011], a similar mix. We’re seeing a lot more interest from HP clients, as you might imagine, now that Oracle announced they aren’t going to support HP-UX on Itanium.
“We’re open arms on the IBM side, all are welcome, we’d love to have you come run with us. We’re investing, we’ve got a product roadmap that goes way beyond POWER7, and so they know we’re a reliable partner, and POWER is a strategic investment platform for us, and we have a good support structure. Whether it’s a partner or a customer, we’re seeing people flocking to Power Systems,” he explained.
“The number one goal for the Power brand is to catch as many of those competitive migrations as we can,” he said.
In some ways, this is tough news for IBM i-focused customers. But it certainly does make sense, really. If IBM misses an opportunity to catch these companies in the moment, it would be astronomically harder to get them to make yet another move—to IBM—any time soon in the future.
Searching for IBM i Clouds
IBM hasn’t exactly said this in so many words but from everything I’ve heard, both directly and indirectly, if you want to tap into cloud computing for IBM i, you need to look toward IBM Business Partners for the service. IBM’s Rosamilia and Parris cemented that assumption on my part without saying so directly—but they also reinforced it with two very important focuses for IBM i:
Disaster Recovery from the Cloud. For the IBM client set, IBM sees a natural first step for the use of cloud-like services in disaster recovery. Customers gain offsite backups, and ideally, a DR play through a “cloud” would be cheap and cost-effective. In some ways, this is just about reworking marketing terms for services that existing IBM Business Partners already provide to some customers. Still, it’s clear that IBM sees an interest from its customers, as well as opportunity. All the IBM i world needs is clear marketing and a base set of expectations around pricing and options.
To help, Rosamilia and Parris have tapped an IBMer named Ari Kugler to work with partners in this area. “He’s working with third parties to get them to be providers of DR in a cloud,” Rosamilia noted. “That’s a very specific focus for us. Because, unlike some of the other cloud environments where people are looking for all of this amazing dynamic change and workload flows and provisioning and de-provisioning, that’s not what this client set is really looking for. That’s what other client sets might be looking for, but this client set is very interested in DR. And the second area of interest is app dev.”
Application Development in the Cloud. One of the things Rosamilia said he heard loud and clear from attendees at COMMON is an interest in running application development for IBM i in a cloud environment. The next question, of course, is, “Will IBM ever offer app dev in a cloud to IBM i customers . . . any time soon?”
“First, I think it’s important that it comes from somebody, whether or not it’s us,” Rosamilia said. “We try to do an awful lot of things through partners and we think it’s important that we have an ecosystem and that we don’t dominate and become the only offering in town. So right now, I won’t say ever or never, I will say that our goal is to try to enable third-parties to offer DR in an a cloud-like environment and offer app dev in a cloud-like environment. I’m perfectly fine with it coming from partners.”
That’s all very well and good, but when is all this going to become clear? It’s a bit hard to get definitive when multiple partners are all rolling out clouds on their own, and pricing and licensing gets complicated fast. . . .
“This is nascent for us. It’s not well-known or well-understood, and we’re still in the process of rolling it out. It’s the beginning—the start of the journey,” Rosamilia said, noting that IBM has some work to do to help ensure that these cloud offerings are cost-effective and more than competitive with on-premise solutions.
Our editorial team asked if IBM would consider making a statement of direction and just come out and say that it’s not going to create the next big Amazon EC2 type of cloud with IBM i in the sky.
“We don’t usually make statements of direction of what we’re not going to do,” Rosamilia joked. “But maybe we need to make a statement of direction of third-party [cloud offerings]. Maybe that would be an interesting way of signaling—I don’t say ever or never—but, ‘Take a look here because what they are doing is interesting. . . .’”
Chris Maxcer (chris.maxcer@pention.com) is content director for System iNEWS. “One of the best off-the-cuff comments that Tom Rosamilia made that I simply couldn’t fit into any article is this quip: ‘I like legacy. Legacy means it works,’” Chris recalls. “You’ve got to admit, he makes a good point.”