i Can Do It!

It’s COMMON week in IBM-land—the week of education for IBM i technologies. You’ll see professionals wearing buttons that say “i Can Do It” or “i Can Do That!” These people are passionate about the IBM i platform. Here’s why…

• It’s as modern as you want it to be.
• It’s as automated as you want it to be.
• It runs Web applications.
• It hosts Lawson, Infor, SAP, or Oracle EnterpriseOne applications.
• It runs in every country in the world.
• It runs in every industry you can think of: banking, manufacturing, services, retail, insurance, transportation, agriculture, media, and software (we run our business on it).
• It’s reliable (runs 99.9997 percent of the time). High Availability is really part of the platform. In fact, many teams take it for granted because it runs all the time. I refer to it as the platform that sits in the corner and runs the business.
• It’s recoverable (easier to recover than most other platforms). I hear from IBM i customers all the time that they were successful at their annual hot site recovery test, while their network counterparts failed.
• It’s expandable. Over the last decade, CPW capabilities have grown 70 times faster. Today, you can configure more than 1000 partitions on a single server. It can host terabytes of data. It really is a mainframe on the high end; a network server on the low end.

Yes, it costs more, but look what you get: A reliable, integrated server with a database; a highly productive development environment; powerful security; an operating system with no viruses; work management for job control; an easy scripting language. Those of us who use this platform understand that it costs more because you get more, you need fewer staff to manage it, it’s less likely to fail, and easier to recover.

The problem is that many people don’t know what they’re missing. I keep running into customers that started to leave this platform 10 years ago because their CEO was convinced that a Windows environment was a better choice. Now, millions of dollars and frustrations later, these companies are back, depending on their reliable IBM i servers.