The Wild Nightlife At The Beach

What’s a lemur have in common with Robot? Well, a few weeks ago, a group of us were together for the IBM Power Systems Technical University in Miami, FL. The picture is a shot of Marci being entertained by a lemur at Miami’s famous South Beach area. At that moment, we were just tourists having our picture taken with this little critter. We definitely had fun with our unexpected visitor.

I love these conferences—they’re a great opportunity to meet customers and vendors that I might see only once a year. (Or, in some cases, once a decade.) That night, I was having dinner with some of our staff, some customers, and a business partner who regularly refers our products to others.

For Help/Systems, referrals are great. We deliver the products and service, and customers and partners recommend our solutions to other companies. We don’t take this for granted—we really appreciate having our message shared with the rest of the IBM i world. Referral business is the best kind of business, and the Robot products have certainly benefited.

At the Power Systems event, I talked with several customers about future needs, while demonstrating product features they can use now. And, the topic of high availability (HA) surfaced again. People are asking for more support of the PowerHA solution from IBM, but Help/Systems also received compliments because of our support for IASP technology—a good first step. Many customers pointed out that IASP awareness is unknown to many IBM i vendors.

I also spent some time learning about the new p Server announcements, and took a few classes on Virtual I/O Server (VIOS) technology for the Power Systems server. Both of these represent steps toward the convergence of the IBM i and the IBM p worlds. VIOS gives IBM i customers the ability to better use the server with Storage Area Network (SAN) technology. (In some classes, we were warned that because IBM i applications require a lot of disk arms, to proceed carefully with SAN technology—it can cause performance issues when you switch from local disk to network disk.)

So, Power Systems technology continues to grow for both IBM i and AIX, and it was refreshing to see so many customers at this conference. Thanks to everyone who stopped by our Help/Systems booth to learn more about Robot, SEQUEL, PowerTech, Bytware, and Skybot.

Oh, and I’m sorry if you missed the chance for a photo op with a lemur!