Tom Jarosh, AS/400 champion and vice president of Operations, IBM Systems and Technology Group, has succumbed to cancer.

Jarosh, 55, died Friday, Oct. 17, at his home in Ridgefield, Conn., where he was surrounded by his three daughters, Kristy, Shannon, and Brynn.

Jarosh, one of the most dynamic AS/400 general managers in the history of the long-running platform, held the titles of general manager, IBM AS/400; general manager, Midmarket Servers; and later, vice president, Business Development and Blade Servers. He was also vice president, Operations, and vice president, Transformation, Systems and Technology Group. 

Taking over the reins of the AS/400 Division in 1997, Jarosh launched a vigorous and well-funded advertising campaign to market the AS/400 and followed up by introducing new models including the iSeries server. He guided the platform's transformation into an e-commerce server and was largely behind the most recent metamorphosis into the combined Power Systems platform hosting IBM i, AIX, and Linux.

In 2000, Jarosh was quoted as saying, that "IBM eServer iSeries is designed to provide integrated solutions that help mid-size customers take advantage of the explosive growth in business-to-business commerce." He was proud of the platform's advanced technology, increased application flexibility, and new tools to help users manage the demands of e-commerce. Under Jarosh's stewardship, the platform evolved into a scalable and extremely fast server line that was able to compete with-if not beat-platforms from other vendors more specifically targeted to individual markets.

In announcing in 2000 that that i2 Technologies, Inc. applications would run on the new AS/400e business servers, Jarosh made it clear that he wanted AS/400 customers to have the best of both worlds-"a totally modern, highly versatile business computer that combines AS/400 traditional strengths of reliability, scalability, security, and service, with the latest in hot new e-business technologies." Jarosh foresaw the future of e-business on the Web, and he wanted the AS/400 to be at the center of a market he believed would explode from $336 million annually in 2000 to a projected $6 trillion within the next five years.

By 2002, Jarosh was working on developing the IBM BladeCenter blade servers. He worked to deliver high performance computing in an ultra-dense server configuration. Perhaps the father of today's drive to reduce cost and complexity in the data center, Jarosh saw the blade architecture as a sweeping new wave with the potential to go much farther than provide support for edge applications and specialized markets. "We intend to incorporate IBM's high-performance computing power, self managing technology, and mainframe-class reliability features into our blade systems," he said.

Born Thomas J. Jarosh on June 5, 1953 in Naperville, Ill., he was raised in Pittsburg, the eldest among 10 children born to Nancy and Donald Jarosh. The engineer-to-be graduated from St. Elizabeth Catholic School in Pittsburgh and later earned his B.S. degree in engineering from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. He went to work for IBM there in 1975 and spent the next 32 years helping shape the future of the company.

Both a golfer and gardener, Jarosh's real passion was classical music and he regularly attended performances of the New York Philharmonic, Metropolitan Opera, and New York City Ballet. Friends remember him as "a gentleman with a great sense of humor." 

In addition to his daughters, their husbands, and his five grandchildren, Jarosh is survived by his mother and eight siblings. His sister Patty and father Don preceded him in death. Services were in St. Mary's Roman Catholic Church in Ridgefield. Memorial contributions may be made in his name to the Regional Hospice of Western Connecticut in Danbury, or to the Melanoma Research Foundation, Hillsborough, NJ.

Chris Smith was the Senior News Editor at MC Press Online from 2007 to 2012 and was responsible for the news content on the company's Web site. Chris has been writing about the IBM midrange industry since 1992 when he signed on with Duke Communications as West Coast Editor of News 3X/400. With a bachelor's from the University of California at Berkeley, where he majored in English and minored in Journalism, and a master's in Journalism from the University of Colorado, Boulder, Chris later studied computer programming and AS/400 operations at Long Beach City College. An award-winning writer with two Maggie Awards, four business books, and a collection of poetry to his credit, Chris began his newspaper career as a reporter in northern California, later worked as night city editor for the Rocky Mountain News in Denver, and went on to edit a national cable television trade magazine. He was Communications Manager for McDonnell Douglas Corp. in Long Beach, Calif., before it merged with Boeing, and oversaw implementation of the company's first IBM desktop publishing system there. An editor for MC Press Online since 2007, Chris has authored some 300 articles on a broad range of topics surrounding the IBM midrange platform that have appeared in the company's eight industry-leading newsletters. He can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..