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Archive for category System i

SkyView Partners IBM i Security Software Pricing Change

May 17

Posted by dshirey in System i | No Comments

Historically in the i world, prices for software was based on the P level of your processor.  The more powerful the P level, the more you would pay and this had implications not only for the initial purchase but also for anytime you upgraded.  You would have to check all your software and see which ones you needed to adjust payments on and get a new license key for.

The initial reason for P level pricing, other than trying to just confuse the situation, was to let people get into the i world on the cheap and then charge them more as their usage grew.  But it tended to be an annoying reminder that no matter what you do you always end up paying more.  Now, however, a number of companies are moving away from P pricing and going to a fixed price and SkyView Partners, makers of premier security products for the IBM i including Policy Minder which helps ensure that your system stays in sync with your security policy once you have set it up, and Risk Assessor that helps you determine what areas you might have security problems in (almost finished but it’s OK to take a deep breath), is now joining that group.

Pricing has been changed to a per partition fixed amount.  In addition, you can buy a universal license that allows you to run on as many partitions as you want (even if you haven’t yet set up some of the partitions).  And for cloud vendors, there is a plan for SAAS use of the tools for their clients.

For more information on either the pricing or the products (which are very reasonably priced and excellent), you can contact either myself (dave@shireyllc.com) or J. D. Seal at SkyView Partners (jdseal@skyviewpartners.com).

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The Beginning of the End for ‘Buy and Use’

May 13

Posted by dshirey in System i | No Comments

It has been happening for some time now, but it really hit me when I saw the recent  announcement from Adobe that they would no longer sell copies of their Creative Suite products.  Instead, all such products will now be available by subscription only and will run ‘in the cloud’.

Currently, a basic version of the Creative Suite would cost around $1400.  And once you bought that you could use it forever.  Nothing came with that, you had to install it on your machine and you had to provide your own storage for the things you ‘created’ and eventually you would upgrade, but the up side is that once you paid the price you were free and clear.

Under the new rules, subscriptions to a single seat of Creative Suite will start at $49.99 a month.  You can do the math as well as I can; if you kept your purchased copy for two and a half years, you would start to come out on top.  And on the surface, that may seem like an acceptable trade off.

I am biased, of course.  I don’t like knowing that I have to money up each month forever to use anything.  I do it for cable TV and lots of other things but I don’t like it.  And there are a couple of problems with the ‘I can get it for pittance a month’ philosophy.

For example, probably very few people will use the $49.99 plan.  Why?  Because it comes with only 20 Gig of storage and using Creative Suite you can burn that up that  pretty quickly.  So, most people will probably have to go with a more expensive plan, thus increasing the likelihood that you will end up spending more, perhaps much more over the lifetime of the software with this cloud model than you would with purchased.

Now I know that most of us in the i world do not use Creative Suite.  So why am I bringing it up?  Simply because that switch is an example of a change that is occurring across the industry, the move from purchasing software to having a subscription, all done under the guise of cloud computing.

Although we are used to yearly fixed costs with the i, in the past there have been many software costs that we could bundle under a capital project request and then be done with them.  It looks like in the future, more and more of an IT budget will be going to fixed costs that cannot be reduced without kissing those products and services goodbye.

You can, of course argue about whether having a fixed budget is good or bad.  On the one hand, after a few years you can end up with a sizeable budget that cannot be manipulated or changed without dropping the services (software products) associated with those costs.  I don’t like not having flexibility, plus, if cable TV has taught us anything it is that a subscription price never stays where it starts.  It always goes up.  It has to in order for the vendor to make even more profit next year.

On the other hand, having a fixed budget can be kind of a safe harbor for the harried CIO.  Want to cut my budget?  OK, what software products (supporting which user departments) do we want to do without?  The downside of it is that it does leave manpower as the one area that can be cut without losing services and most departments have few enough people now.

So, what can you do?  Certainly, cloud computing and subscription based services are not going to go away.  And Adobe isn’t the only one who will replace unit sales with cloud only subscriptions.  It is really the only way that these companies can continue to generate  increased revenue.  And when you get right down to it, that is what business today is all about.  It’s not about making a respectable profit year after year, it’s about having your profit climb ridiculously year after year.  And most people will knuckle under and follow the crowd.  It’s just part of the cost of doing business, you know.

At the very least, however, we should begin to watch very carefully the growth of these monthly subscription fees because they are going to add up to some serious money.  $49 here, $79 there, etc.   Companies need to look at what impact picking up this service will have.  And more importantly, if you run on hard times and need to dump some services, what will the impact of that be (since it would mean losing that software and possibly all of your data that is on their servers) on your ability to function.

Finally, it means that we, even we in the i world, need to keep a close eye on open source software that can do the same job.   Yes, it may not have all of the features of the subscription services but as some of these subscription products mature and new enhancements become more esoteric and peripheral to the central task they are performing, open source may make good, good sense.

In the end, it comes down to budget flexibility.  How much of your budget do you want dedicated to fixed cost subscriptions, and how much do you want to have the ability to control?  In a world that is increasingly trying to tie you into regular monthly payments, how can you maintain your independence and flexibility?

 

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Power7 Announcements and Low Pricing for Entry level Machines

Feb 13

Posted by dshirey in ERP, PRMS, System i | Comments off

I generally don’t talk about hardware.  To be honest, I find it kind of boring.  And I have trouble remembering all the model numbers and how they relate to each other.  But this piqued my interest.  Again, not because I thought it was interesting (please reread first two sentences of paragraph) but because of what I see out there especially in the PRMS world.

So many people seem to be switching from PRMS to either Oracle or SAP.  And they all seem to be doing it the same way, by leaving the i and going to servers.  The thing that jumps out at me in all these cases is that while the i was always up, once you switch to servers you get a constant stream of ‘environment down for maintenance’ emails going out to the entire corporation.  And seeing the time for your MPS/MRP run double because of server limitations.

It really amazes me that more i people don’t realize that the i, even if it is an i running AIX, is more than a viable option to run  their new ERP.  Is it because we just don’t think of it, that we are so tunneled into thinking of the i and iOS being paired?  Is it because, as I have heard, IBM pushes people toward servers rather than the i?  Or is it a sinister plan on the part of an alien race that is slowly invading Earth and supplanting the human race?  I’m not sure.

What does this have to do with the recent Power7 announcements?  I guess it just reminded me how the i is always advancing in terms of speed and size.  And the pricing on the entry level 710 and 720 machines is so low that I am reminded that it is affordable as well, especially with the title of lowest overall cost of ownership.   We are privileged to work on one of the greatest machines ever developed.  We should think twice before we let it go.

 

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Another Cloud Blog Post

Apr 11

Posted by dshirey in Cloud, System i | Comments off

Everywhere I look I see that people are supposedly turning to the cloud, to bundled hardware and software services with a fixed fee price as a way to cut costs.  Please, color me skeptical.

I know there are a lot of advantages, for some shops, to cloud computing, but what I wonder about is the gut rationale for the rush to cloud computing that we see today.  Everything that we do as human beings, of course, comes from some sort of gut reaction. Cost, for example, is certainly a gut reaction, but I can’t buy the adage that cloud computing is going to save us boatloads of cash. That just doesn’t seem reasonable.  After all,Shirey’s First Law tells us that costs never really decrease, they just change category and become harder to categorize.  So what is really driving the drive to cloud computing?

One of the key factors that drives people today is fear and the desire to avoid anything that might go wrong for which we could be blamed. That and avoiding any upfront cost.  I really believe that most IT and business decisions can be explained using those to gut reactions.  Simple fact is that I don’t want to be blamed for anything, however oblique.  Doesn’t really matter what the monthly charge is as long as there is no upfront cost. And cloud computing satisfies both of those primal needs; if something does go wrong it’s really not your fault, it’s the provider, and they pay people to spin it OK so no problem.  And there is no upfront cost, just a monthly charge and you can always make the numbers come out right.

Now, I’m not saying that cloud computing is bad. It is definitely worth looking at and is the solution of choice for many shops that are, shall we say, ‘talent poor’. But is it the way everyone should go, is it a rational way to structure every department because solid business benefits will accrue – or is it a reaction to primal forces that have nothing to do with IT?

What do you think?  Are people, including CIO’s, rational or gut?

 

IT Strategy – Pro-Active Strategic Design

Apr 5

Posted by dshirey in System i | Comments off

Today, many IT shops have two characteristics in common.

First, they tend to be reactionary; waiting until a problem occurs and they are contacted by an outside group (sales, manufacturing, finance, etc.) before getting  involved in a situation.

And second, many IT shops have come to define themselves as overseers of the programs and infrastructure, rather than as guardians of the business system.  The mental wall has been erected around the program libraries and hardware and our interest doesn’t range as far a field as it use to.

Part of the reason for this is that most shops are under-staffed, at least as compared to the olden days, and there’s just not as much muscle to go around looking for trouble.  Another part of the reason is that we, for the most part, do not have pure analysts anymore, people whose job it was to live like a user and look for opportunities for system growth or improvement.  Instead, what we pretty much have are programmers who have an extensive knowledge of the user situation but whose main orientation is still firmly grounded in IT.  That sounds like a small, insignificant difference, but it is anything but small and far more than insignificant.

The end result is that many IT departments get looked at as a service unit, providing services to other, more forward thinking groups, rather than as the business system leader for information.  And once you are seen as a service, rather than a strategic leader, then you are in jeopardy because anyone can provide a service.  Strategic leaders are much harder to swap in and out.

The real question, of course, is how do you break out of that?  How do you make your shop a strategic leader.

 

Seize the Initiative 

The key is to seize the initiative by focusing on the business, not the IT structure.

There are a number of ways you can do this but my favorite (at least at the moment) is to look for the points of failure or the stress points in your business.  Look at your business (or one segment of it; manufacturing, engineering, finance, order shipment, etc.) and define exactly what the stress points are.  Another way to look at this is to find everything that is hard to do in the system or where a failure in that process (manual or computer) would cause problems that could not be trivially resolved.

This is a process that you would undertake in concert with the users and it shows you to be both proactive and supportive.  You are looking for ‘their pain’.  It is not the same as building a wish list although there may be some overlap.  It is looking for the weak spots in your business.

This is also a process that needs to be carried out by someone with an analyst’s mind set which is quite different from a programmer’s.  Yes, the person who does it might also code, they may even be your chief coder, but then again, they might not.

An analyst generally tends to think a little broader.  They are not looking for a solution to a single particular problem, but rather a systems approach to an area that will be flexible over time and which will work well with other areas.  There’s a lot of thinking that goes on and that may equate to no visible action.  But it produces a design that will accommodate a great deal of growth in it as the business moves and changes in the future.

A programmer, on the other hand, can talk to users, and often has a good understanding of what they want, but their first interest is in getting back to their desk so they can start coding something.  This is not conducive to producing a flexible design that can grow with the business.

 

End Result?

Pro-Active Strategic Design plops the IT group right in the middle of any strategic planning that goes on.  It results in a design that is broad and flexible, that can be broken down into bite sized coding projects that can then be given to the people who just want to program.  It also puts the IT group more firmly in the drivers seat for new development and limits the number of times that someone somewhere will see something in a magazine and start insisting that they need the same thing.

PASD  is something that everyone should be doing.  Yes, your resources may be limited but hunkering down and reacting as best as you can to what comes at you is the last thing you do before you are overwhelmed.  You would be surprised at how effective even a little offense is as a defense.

For more information on how PASD can help you, contact SCS at support@shireyllc.com

 

New Year’s Resolution – Upgrade i5/OS

Jan 6

Posted by dshirey in System i | Comments off

 

It’s New Years resolution time again.  I know that generally we think of doing that the last week of December but over the years I have decided that waiting until after the start of the year, and resolving to do whatever I seem to be doing anyway, gives me a much better chance of succeeding.

Most New Years resolutions revolve around self-improvement and I see no reason why the resolutions for your i shop should be any different.  And the best improvement I can think of is to make this the year that you upgrade your i5/OS and get on 7.1.  (For more information on just how to do that, stay tuned in January for a MC Press article (written by me) on what to watch out for in a 7.1 upgrade.)

I know, I know, your i which is currently running 5.4 (or 5.3) is running just fine and it will take a certain amount of effort to get up to 7.1.  So why should you do it, what’s the point?

The point is that there are really only two types of i shops out there; those that are on the latest release and using it’s features, and those who are waiting for someone to come along and say it’s time to leave that old dinosaur and move to a Windows server environment.

And that brings me to the second resolution for 2012 – starting to use the advanced capabilities and features that 7.1 offers.  (After all, it’s much harder to come up with a sensible argument for leaving the i if it is doing more than just running RPG programs.)  That does require a commitment to learning and growing as a professional, but that shouldn’t be a problem.  After all, that’s the definition of that term.  It’s not just somebody who has been doing the same thing well for a long time.

So let’s make 2012 a year of growth.  Upgrade to 7.1.  And then learn how to use and implement what’s under the hood to help your company grow and to better protect the investment you have in the worlds best computer system.   Let me know how it goes.

 

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IBM Tidbits

Oct 4

Posted by dshirey in System i | Comments off

In a recent article in System iNews, editor Chris Maxcer took a look at some of the things going on in the IBM world.  If you missed it or don’t subscribe to System iNews, here are a couple of nuggets.

First, sales for the i are on the upswing, and have been for the last few months with much of the surge being due to special deals where the i comes pre-loaded with a certain set of ISV software.

Second, about 60% of the folks are still on 5.4 which was released in 2006.  With 7.1 coming out just last year, IBM is now suggesting that those who are on 5.4 just leapfrog over 6.1 and go directly to 7.1.   What’s the difference between 5.4 and 6.1/7.1?  Besides tons of functionality only 6.1 and beyond are able to run the new Power7 that gives increased speed and lower energy costs.

Third, starting with release 7.1, IBM is also starting to offer what they call Technology Refreshes; essentially simple to install upgrades to the operating system that offer increased functionality within the standard two year lifetime of the release without forcing customers to go through a complete upgrade to a new release.

And fourth, IBM is trying to get the word out there that staying current on the latest release makes good, good sense.  After all, the big reason that most people give for not going to the latest release is that they want to wait until it’s properly debugged.  But in a world where i5/OS is so stable and has very few significant bugs, that strategy just doesn’t hold water.

Are you on 5.4?  Well, 7.1 is out there so give it some thought.

 

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The End of Conferences?

Nov 18

Posted by dshirey in System i | 1 Comment

By now you have probably heard the news that Susan Gantner, John Paris, and Paul Touhy, main stay speakers at Common since the beginning of time, will not be participating in the conference next spring (May 2 – 6 in Orlando) after Common cut it’s reimbursement policy for speakers.

The purpose of this post is not to weigh in on the wisdom of Common’s decision. They’re in a tough spot financially and were trying to cut the costs associated with the conference. On the other hand, as a former Common speaker and an independent consultant (like Paris, Gantner, and Touhy), going to Common is an expensive proposition and cuts you off from a week of revenue, and it’s hard to justify the expense particularly in the current economic client. I also made the decision not to submit any sessions for this year although I don’t remember seeing any press coverage on that.

What I am wondering is – is this the end of the ‘conference era’. For the last 40 years, big conferences have ruled the day, but has it reached the end of it’s road? Certainly over the past ten years a number of mid size conferences, (Inovis, for example), have folded. Is it only a matter of time before the big ones go too? Perhaps the only thing that will survive are some of the high glamour trade shows out in Vegas.

And the question is why?

One reason that everyone cites is the internet. There is so much information on the internet that people don’t need to go to sessions anymore to learn new techniques. And there is a great deal of truth to that, although the interactive nature of a session can be very helpful in the learning process (as can online forums).

Another reason for the decline, I believe, is that senior level people are not attending these conferences the way they use to. They are too busy to block out a week for one particular event. And when senior people don’t attend they are less likely to send members of their staff. At the same time, not having senior people there also changes the utility of presenting for consultants.

But I think one of the main reasons for the decline is that there has been a real decline in people learning or wanting to learn. Yes, we go out to the web a lot, but we go out to peruse, not learn. When is the last time you actually went through and learned an entire tutorial on the web? Generally we go out to ‘see what’s going on’. Senior people aren’t the only ones who are busy. Everyone is. And when that happens you don’t worry about learning in the broad sense. You get tidbits; a fact here and there; just enough information to get you over the hump you are currently stuck on.

The death of conferences (if it occurs, and it might not), is just another symptom of our ‘I’m too busy to think and grow I’ll just get through this’ culture. Interesting twist isn’t it, especially at a time when most i people should be spending as much time as they can doing some in depth learning.


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Client Access and Windows 7

Oct 22

Posted by dshirey in System i | Comments off

Well, did you have your place in line reserved? 

 

It’s probably not going to be like an iPhone release, but the arrival of Windows 7 will certainly cause some excitement.   

 

I have to admit I’m one of those folks who has stayed on XP, afraid of what might happen if I voyage onto the sea of Vista so I am looking at the new windows release with some curiosity.  After all, it’s time I upgrade.  I mean I’m not having any problems with XP but it is pretty old now.  But like most i people, what I am really wondering is how Windows 7 and Client Access will get along.  And the answer is – they will, sort of, but not necessarily on day one. 

 

When Windows 7 is released, it may or may not work with the version of IBM i Access that you have.   And the primary problem will be the one that caused so much grief with Vista – authority.  The authority structure of Windows 7 is the same as that of Vista and so many of the same problems will exist when dealing with external packages.  So what’s IBM going to do? 

 

Well, on day one, nothing.  You can load Windows 7 and your client access might very well work and it might very well not.  IBM will not provide support for any version of IBM i Access until the release of version 6.1 (that is different from the 6.1 version of the operating system that has already been released) later in 2009.  That, of course will be a no charge upgrade item if you have a current maintenance contract. 

 

Support for pre 6.1 versions of Client Access (the old names are always better) will not happen until sometime in 2010.  Apparently, this whole Windows thing was a big surprise to IBM.  

 

So, is that all there is to it?  No, of course not.  There’s more twists and turns with this thing than in a West Virginia highway and for the full details I would encourage you to read the following MC Press article.  And in the meantime, be patient and continue to nurse that old XP system along.   Unless, that is, you’re feelin’ lucky.   

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Bob Cozzi’s Brilliant Idea

Aug 20

Posted by dshirey in System i | Comments off

Have you seen the Bob Cozzi post on the System iNetwork blog?  The one titled ‘The System Formerly Known as the AS/400′.   I think he’s really got something there and I hope IBM is listening.  It’s not too long, it’s moderately funny (let’s face it, Bob Cozzi is no Dave Shirey), and like I said, I think it’s a really good idea.  Check it out and let me know what you think.  Is he right?