If you visit the iSeriesTV.com Web site, you'll find a link near the top of the page labeled "promotional savings." I clicked on this link, and it took me to something I never thought I'd see on an IBM Web site: a sale on System i boxes!
Recently, I complained that IBM should make it easier to buy an iSeries box online by clicking an "add to cart" button on the Web site. Well, IBM has done it. Not only that, but apparently IBM realized that if you don't have 20 levels of overhead between you and the customer, you can actually sell the boxes for a competitive price.
This is what IBM's "sale" page looks like:
Figure 1: IBM is offering discounts on purchases of System i machines.
In the first column, there is a "Save 25 - 42%" line. This is a link to another page that displays the following:
Figure 2: For $12,000, you can own a System i.
I'm certainly happy that IBM is offering these boxes in five configurations. I just wish they had one that also included rack mounting, WDSC, 4 GB of RAM, and another couple of drives for a similar price.
I guess I'm never satisfied.
Check it out soon, because these offers expire at the end of July 2006. Hopefully, they'll be replaced with other configurations and continued into the future.
Bob Cozzi is a programmer/consultant, writer/author, and software developer of the RPG xTools, a popular add-on subprocedure library for RPG IV. His book The Modern RPG Language has been the most widely used RPG programming book for nearly two decades. He, along with others, speaks at and runs the highly-popular RPG World conference for RPG programmers.



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.
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