COMMON Was Fun, and That’s Good Business

About 2,300 people showed up for the COMMON conference in San Antonio last week to get the straight dope on IBM‘s new eServer i5 midrange servers, to receive education on the latest programming techniques, and to hear pitches on products from industry vendors. Sources say the show’s paid attendance was about 1,400, which was a respectable turnout given the current economic and political climate. At the show, there was a growing sense of optimism shared by IBM, resellers, and software vendors that better times just might be around the corner.

Leading the way at COMMON, of course, were the new Power5 “Squadron” servers, the rebranding of the eServer iSeries as the eServer i5, and the evolution of OS/400 into i5/OS. IBM rolled out its top iSeries executives, product managers, engineers, and programmers to give attendees and the press the first public glimpse of computers built on IBM’s fifth iteration on the Power architecture. With more than 80 sessions devoted to i5/OS V5R3–which beta testers are reportedly unduly impressed by, for its unparalleled stability and lack of bugs–lovely San Antonio was the place to be if you wanted the latest info on IBM Rochester’s newest products.

The love-fest officially started on Sunday, when IBM hosted the iSeries Nation Town Hall. While the Town Hall’s timeslot conflicted with a technical workshop on Linux–the official focus of spring COMMON–it appeared that most attendees chose the Town Hall over the Penguin, as more than 700 people crowded into a remote ballroom on the second floor of the Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center. Al Zollar, iSeries general manger, knew what they had come for, and it wasn’t the free bags of potato chips that new iSeries customer Zapp’s, a chip maker of a different sort, had donated for the town hall meeting.

“Maybe some of you are anticipating that we’ve got something to announce,” Zollar told his audience. “Well, I’m happy to tell you that we’ve got a huge announcement. This announcement is maybe the biggest thing we’ve really ever done. Ladies and gentlemen, I’m glad to announce to you today our CL enhancements . . . I’m telling you, this is hot. We’ve integrated Java, integrated XML, integrated cascading style sheets. What you get with CL now is really a first-class programming language.”

After the laughter and genuine applause over the CL announcements subsided, Zollar got on to the real deal, which, of course, was the new i5 server. Zollar beamed as he pulled black covers off an i5 Model 520 tower server and an i5 Model 570 rack-mounted server. The two servers embodied the battles IBM’s Rochester group fought and won to get the new Power5 chips to market before the pSeries group, based in nearby Austin.

But this was San Antonio, home of the Alamo and the defending-champion Spurs basketball team, who bested the visiting Los Angeles Lakers earlier that day in a playoff game, and it was time for the iSeries group to do some swaggering and a little trash talking of its own. “We’re not just beginners at this 64-bit game,” Zollar says. “In fact, this is our fifth generation of Power-based 64-bit systems and the ninth generation of 64-bit technology overall. I think this is in stark contrast to some of our competitors, which are somewhere between one and two, and struggling and changing their roadmap.” Zollar, of course, was referring to Intel and its 64-bit Itanium processor, not the pSeries group. (See last week’s issue of this newsletter for our first look at the new eServer i5 machines.)

Following the Town Hall meeting, attendees filed onto the expo floor, where more than 100 hardware and software vendors awaited with information on their latest wares. Officials with several vendors said attendance at the expo–which has long been a sticking point with vendors, which have said COMMON hasn’t done enough to rearrange education sessions to encourage attendee participation–was the best they had seen in years. What’s more, some vendors said they received hundreds of leads and were overwhelmed with interest from attendees on the show floor. That was the case for BCD Int’l, where five BCD representative weren’t enough to handle interest from attendees during peak hours, when COMMON rolled out the food and drinks carts. “We had very good attendance on Sunday,” said Eric Figura, BCD’s sales and marketing manager. “It was the best response we’ve seen in three years.”

The festivities continued into the night at a nearby hotel where iSeries reseller Avnet and IBM threw a party for all COMMON attendees after the iSeries Nation Town Hall and the welcome reception on the expo floor. With margaritas flowing, taquitos cooking, and dancers kicking up a show on stage, iSeries.mySeries-tattoo-clad revelers enjoyed the biggest iSeries bash since the famous “Dance of the Sugarplum Fairies” at the Baltimore COMMON, in late 2000, when the iSeries Nation debuted and OS/400 server sales were in decline.

IT’S THE ADVERTISTING

For the first time in years, there was nary a complaint about IBM’s marketing efforts for the iSeries server during the “sound off” component of the Town Hall meeting, where anybody with a compliment or a gripe is free to speak his mind to IBM honchos from Rochester and Somers. One of the reasons for the deafening silence might have been the abbreviated nature of “sound off,” which was cut short by about 30 minutes because of an extended on-stage skit about the superiority of the iSeries server over Windows servers, performed earlier by PeopleSoft executives during the Town Hall.

But the main reason why nobody complained about IBM’s marketing was simply that IBM is now starting to market the box they way users have been telling them to for years. That, of course, means TV advertising. Cecelia Marresse, IBM’s vice president of marketing for the iSeries line, was pleased to announce that IBM will be running trial TV ads featuring the new eServer i5 boxes in Missouri this month. The company will evaluate the results of the trial based on feedback from viewers in St. Louis and Kansas City.

While TV advertising has been a major sticking point among AS/400 aficionados–who have described their horror at watching IBM eServer ads on TV, but for the loathsome xSeries–that wasn’t the only marketing medium in IBM’s bag of tricks. Zollar was happy to display the full-page ad taken out in the Wall Street Journal last Monday, introducing the new eServer i5 (there was also one in Business Week). Then there were the “guerilla” marketing tactics making their way around San Antonio, which smacked of IBM’s chief iSeries propagandist Malcolm Haines, namely that of a diesel truck driving around with a giant billboard in the back introducing “the next big, big, big, big thing,” which, of course, was the eServer i5. Temporary tattoos were also spotted on numerous iSeries enthusiasts, including iSeries product manager John Reed, who elected to have a big red one applied to his neck area.

COMMON felt less like a wake and more like a party again, if not for the attendees–who by and large are still cold to the renaming of the AS/400, let alone to the conversion of the iSeries to “i5”–then for everybody else who showed up. There was the sort of optimism one associates with spring, and give Mother Nature her due. San Antonio’s warm, clear days and mild nights contrasted sharply with the poor weather experienced during the previous two shows. The spring COMMON in Indianapolis, held in winter during a blast of air from the Arctic, brought below-zero wind chill factors, while the heat and humidity of the fall COMMON in Orlando, Florida, held during the summer on the tail-end of a tropical storm, made people think twice about leaving the regulated confines of the Gaylord Palms dome, even if a cheeseburger there cost $15. San Antonio was a great location for promising announcements by IBM and its third-party vendors, and COMMON showed signs of being fun again.

COMMON and IBM would do well to work together to ensure that the party atmosphere continues into the future. It makes a more memorable experience, and it makes for better business.