02
Sat, Nov
2 New Articles

Out of the Blue: Perspectives on the IBM midrange

Commentary
Typography
  • Smaller Small Medium Big Bigger
  • Default Helvetica Segoe Georgia Times

I'd love to meet the person who thought it up. Rightsizing. As a masterful bit of incentive marketing, it ranks right up there with light beer and ecotourism. In an industry that practices the alchemy of price/performance, where the transmuting power of innovation routinely turns less into more, "rightsizing" evolved to combat that pesky national trend toward downsizing.

Rightsizing does what classic marketing ploys, according to writer David Shenik, are designed to do: "It identifies customer anxieties and pounces on them." Even before you know exactly what rightsizing is, you can be pretty damn sure that whatever size you are, it's the wrong size. And just when you're almost out of your mind with worry over being wrongsized, IBM offers you what Shenik calls "an easy-purchasable way to ease the discomfort."

So, if rising IS costs are adding to your discomfort, the Application Business Systems (ABS) folks at IBM would like to introduce you to the rightsizing rage. To start, they recently sponsored the AS/400 Rightsizing Implementation Forum at their not-so-modest Park Tower digs in Manhattan. Since you couldn't make it, they invited me instead.

The Rightsizing Forum consists of the testimony of four IBM customers: Communications Data Services, Inc. (an Iowa-based company that operates subscriptions databases for the nation's top publishers); Color Tile, Inc. (with 800 retail stores that offer covering for your naked floors and counters); Henkel Corporation (which distributes industrial chemicals to almost every industrial sector in the nation); and Sunkist Growers, Inc. (the world's largest citrus marketing cooperative).

Their stories are similar and go something like this. The company's IS footprint decisions were made more than a decade ago. System costs were running high relative to the value and functionality that was provided the corporation. The IS budget was operations and maintenance heavy, especially weighted by labor costs associated with applications maintenance. Most IS environments were mainframe-based and the companies wanted to reduce overall costs while speeding up the delivery of new, distributed applications.

In large part, each company wanted to adopt a different focus: from mainframe efficiency to an emphasis on functionality; from reliance on specialized skills to a premium on business skills; from accessing information through a technical staff to giving users direct access to their data; from programming by committee to the use of query languages.

Here's where rightsizing comes in. Perhaps the best definition was offered by Bill Freitas, director of Computer Task Group, a consulting firm that participated in the forum. Freitas noted: Rightsizing has more to do with "aligning technology to solve a customer's business problems" than with any magic-bullet solution. And that, as they used to say in the "Leftsized" '60s, is Right-On.

Since the AS/400 with its high-end capacities and capabilities is, for all practical purposes, a user-friendly mainframe, it plays well with the oversized-and-underfunctional crowd.

Ironically for IBM, there is both good and bad news in that. Three-fourths of the customers who testified at the forum were abandoning their ponderous IBM mainframes in favor of the nimble AS/400s. So while IBM retained a "rightsized" customer, it did so for substantially less revenue than it would have received from a mainframe user. Color Tile, for example, reported a five- year savings of $5.5 million migrating from an IBM 3090 to an AS/400. Software maintenance savings alone totalled $36,000 per year.

(Halfway through the presentation I began to wonder if perhaps, two floors up, the Enterprise System mainframe folks-clearly on the short end of the rightsizing stick-were not holding their own forum on the benefits of "upsizing.")

Several firms reported savings in reduced headcount. Sunkist pared down its IS staff from 93 to 48. But Henkel Corp. actually expanded its staff by 400 percent. The additional personnel, however, were able to focus on providing improved customer service, rather than servicing the system. One of the more curious benefits of rightsizing was rescuing Color Tile from almost certain entombment in reels of magnetic tape. Before the AS/400, their operations personnel were chained to the tape drives, executing in excess of 12,000 tape mounts per month!

Many of the benefits that AS/400 users have come to take for granted were cited as rightsizing incentives: relational processing, less training, easier programming, improved information access, the ability to briskly accommodate change, and the availability of more than 20,000 software packages.

Then, too, the AS/400's ability to play on the leading edge of technological innovation was an attractive inducement to rightsize. Office automation, multimedia, image, voice-data or telephony, facsimile, and even artificial intelligence. In short, the impression emerging from the forum was that only the most obtuse corporations would find excuses not to rush into rightsizing.

Of course, the efficacy of the AS/400 is not at issue here. It is an honest system capable of meeting its advertised claims. It's that silly word: "rightsizing." As beneficial as it can be to customers who have not upgraded their technology in some time, rightsizing has an amusingly manipulative ring. Like my mother said as she smiled from behind a big spoon of foul-tasting medicine: "It's gonna do you some good, but you gotta swallow it first."

If I squint, rightsizing looks suspiciously like downsizing made profitable. Essentially, rightsizing combines the allure and benefits of downsizing (less cost, less people, less complexity), with a generous dash of functionality thrown in. And it is aimed primarily-though not exclusively-at salvaging mainframe customers. From mainframe to saneframe, with less cash drain. (Do I belong in marketing, or what?)

After the presentations have concluded, we are urged to interview participants and a number of available IBMers. I opt for William Zeitler, ABS director of Brand Marketing (worldwide). Zeitler seems a very intelligent and thoughtful man who, I am sure, could have provided me with a great interview. But it's a curious process interviewing top management at IBM. For one thing, you can't ever get them alone. They interview in packs. Two other people sat in on my interview, serving no discernible purpose but taking copious notes and looking intensely interested. It sort of stifles the natural flow of things.

I leave to catch a cab back to the airport. I sit with the windows open, the hot, stagnant air stinging my eyes, and think back to something William Zeitler told me. I had asked him what he thought of Louis Gerstner's appointment as the new head of IBM. He told me Gerstner was a breath of fresh air. In New York, that's no small accomplishment.

Victor Rozek has 17 years of experience in the data processing industry, including seven years with IBM in Operations Management and Systems Engineering.

BLOG COMMENTS POWERED BY DISQUS

LATEST COMMENTS

Support MC Press Online

$

Book Reviews

Resource Center

  • SB Profound WC 5536 Have you been wondering about Node.js? Our free Node.js Webinar Series takes you from total beginner to creating a fully-functional IBM i Node.js business application. You can find Part 1 here. In Part 2 of our free Node.js Webinar Series, Brian May teaches you the different tooling options available for writing code, debugging, and using Git for version control. Brian will briefly discuss the different tools available, and demonstrate his preferred setup for Node development on IBM i or any platform. Attend this webinar to learn:

  • SB Profound WP 5539More than ever, there is a demand for IT to deliver innovation. Your IBM i has been an essential part of your business operations for years. However, your organization may struggle to maintain the current system and implement new projects. The thousands of customers we've worked with and surveyed state that expectations regarding the digital footprint and vision of the company are not aligned with the current IT environment.

  • SB HelpSystems ROBOT Generic IBM announced the E1080 servers using the latest Power10 processor in September 2021. The most powerful processor from IBM to date, Power10 is designed to handle the demands of doing business in today’s high-tech atmosphere, including running cloud applications, supporting big data, and managing AI workloads. But what does Power10 mean for your data center? In this recorded webinar, IBMers Dan Sundt and Dylan Boday join IBM Power Champion Tom Huntington for a discussion on why Power10 technology is the right strategic investment if you run IBM i, AIX, or Linux. In this action-packed hour, Tom will share trends from the IBM i and AIX user communities while Dan and Dylan dive into the tech specs for key hardware, including:

  • Magic MarkTRY the one package that solves all your document design and printing challenges on all your platforms. Produce bar code labels, electronic forms, ad hoc reports, and RFID tags – without programming! MarkMagic is the only document design and print solution that combines report writing, WYSIWYG label and forms design, and conditional printing in one integrated product. Make sure your data survives when catastrophe hits. Request your trial now!  Request Now.

  • SB HelpSystems ROBOT GenericForms of ransomware has been around for over 30 years, and with more and more organizations suffering attacks each year, it continues to endure. What has made ransomware such a durable threat and what is the best way to combat it? In order to prevent ransomware, organizations must first understand how it works.

  • SB HelpSystems ROBOT GenericIT security is a top priority for businesses around the world, but most IBM i pros don’t know where to begin—and most cybersecurity experts don’t know IBM i. In this session, Robin Tatam explores the business impact of lax IBM i security, the top vulnerabilities putting IBM i at risk, and the steps you can take to protect your organization. If you’re looking to avoid unexpected downtime or corrupted data, you don’t want to miss this session.

  • SB HelpSystems ROBOT GenericCan you trust all of your users all of the time? A typical end user receives 16 malicious emails each month, but only 17 percent of these phishing campaigns are reported to IT. Once an attack is underway, most organizations won’t discover the breach until six months later. A staggering amount of damage can occur in that time. Despite these risks, 93 percent of organizations are leaving their IBM i systems vulnerable to cybercrime. In this on-demand webinar, IBM i security experts Robin Tatam and Sandi Moore will reveal:

  • FORTRA Disaster protection is vital to every business. Yet, it often consists of patched together procedures that are prone to error. From automatic backups to data encryption to media management, Robot automates the routine (yet often complex) tasks of iSeries backup and recovery, saving you time and money and making the process safer and more reliable. Automate your backups with the Robot Backup and Recovery Solution. Key features include:

  • FORTRAManaging messages on your IBM i can be more than a full-time job if you have to do it manually. Messages need a response and resources must be monitored—often over multiple systems and across platforms. How can you be sure you won’t miss important system events? Automate your message center with the Robot Message Management Solution. Key features include:

  • FORTRAThe thought of printing, distributing, and storing iSeries reports manually may reduce you to tears. Paper and labor costs associated with report generation can spiral out of control. Mountains of paper threaten to swamp your files. Robot automates report bursting, distribution, bundling, and archiving, and offers secure, selective online report viewing. Manage your reports with the Robot Report Management Solution. Key features include:

  • FORTRAFor over 30 years, Robot has been a leader in systems management for IBM i. With batch job creation and scheduling at its core, the Robot Job Scheduling Solution reduces the opportunity for human error and helps you maintain service levels, automating even the biggest, most complex runbooks. Manage your job schedule with the Robot Job Scheduling Solution. Key features include:

  • LANSA Business users want new applications now. Market and regulatory pressures require faster application updates and delivery into production. Your IBM i developers may be approaching retirement, and you see no sure way to fill their positions with experienced developers. In addition, you may be caught between maintaining your existing applications and the uncertainty of moving to something new.

  • LANSAWhen it comes to creating your business applications, there are hundreds of coding platforms and programming languages to choose from. These options range from very complex traditional programming languages to Low-Code platforms where sometimes no traditional coding experience is needed. Download our whitepaper, The Power of Writing Code in a Low-Code Solution, and:

  • LANSASupply Chain is becoming increasingly complex and unpredictable. From raw materials for manufacturing to food supply chains, the journey from source to production to delivery to consumers is marred with inefficiencies, manual processes, shortages, recalls, counterfeits, and scandals. In this webinar, we discuss how:

  • The MC Resource Centers bring you the widest selection of white papers, trial software, and on-demand webcasts for you to choose from. >> Review the list of White Papers, Trial Software or On-Demand Webcast at the MC Press Resource Center. >> Add the items to yru Cart and complet he checkout process and submit

  • Profound Logic Have you been wondering about Node.js? Our free Node.js Webinar Series takes you from total beginner to creating a fully-functional IBM i Node.js business application.

  • SB Profound WC 5536Join us for this hour-long webcast that will explore:

  • Fortra IT managers hoping to find new IBM i talent are discovering that the pool of experienced RPG programmers and operators or administrators with intimate knowledge of the operating system and the applications that run on it is small. This begs the question: How will you manage the platform that supports such a big part of your business? This guide offers strategies and software suggestions to help you plan IT staffing and resources and smooth the transition after your AS/400 talent retires. Read on to learn: