Counting Companies With An IBM i In The Mix
July 10, 2017 Dan Burger
How many companies are running their mission critical business applications on Power Systems loaded with the IBM i operating system? Not as many as 20 years ago. That’s for certain. But who knows for sure? I mean, who knows the number? Three years ago, IBM was tossing out a worldwide estimate of 125,000. That number has not been officially updated but sources at IBM say the number of IBM i customers remains steady with that three-year-old estimate. On the other hand, I’ve heard people in the IBM i community guesstimate the installed base is under the 100,000 mark. It’s not hard to imagine IBM might be padding its number by a tad or two.
The point is no one really knows. And John Rockwell, self-proclaimed curator of the ecosystem, really wants to know. He’s been pursuing this number as if it was a white whale. Currently he’s sailing in a sea of 32,000 company names and locations. That number comes from a combination of lists turned over to Rockwell – everything from small personal inventories to vendors with statistics compiled from more than two decades in the IBM midrange business.
There is a fly in the ointment, however; the time it takes to verify whether 32,000 companies are still running mission critical apps on IBM i is not inconsequential. So far, the list includes 6,000 verified IBM i shops, or about 16 percent of the total. The oldest verifications were recorded in 2015, which means the list is probably no more than a few percentage points shy of 100 percent accurate. The lists are available without charge on Rockwell’s all400s.com website.
“We went from zero names to 32,000 in a little over a year and a half,” Rockwell says while noting 25,000 of those are companies are located in the United States. “We’re working our way through the list to find and update the current status of each company as fast as we can. The idea is to get the list big enough to combat claims by Microsoft and Oracle that the IBM i ecosystem is small and dying.”
How many businesses are running IBM i? Estimates vary to a large degree.
People working in IBM i shops should keep tabs on their industry competitors that run on IBM i, Rockwell advises. Then if management considers moving off the operating system – which was formerly known as OS/400 and i5/OS – the IBM i team can demonstrate that while the move is costing millions of dollars, competitors that are staying on the platform can dedicate that amount to gaining market share while the company with migration on its mind becomes invested in a risky IT strategy.
Rockwell says his intent in building this list is to possibly end the erosion of IBM i shops by providing a verified accounting, which would demonstrate the widespread use of the system and inspire confidence.
“Many more vendors are contributing information to us about companies who are using the platform and letting their customers know about us so they can use us as a resource when the need arises,” Rockwell says. “A lot of it has to do with re-assuring the companies who use the platform that they belong to a large ecosystem that isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.”
Seven vendors from the IBM i community are sponsoring Rockwell’s all400s.com website and another 20 vendors are listed as supporters.
The interest in the list of confirmed IBM i shops topped 400 downloads last month. Much of that action seems to be attributable to people participating in the all400s.com job board and gaining access to companies that might need to supplement their IBM i workforce. Software vendors and value added resellers are downloading the list to cross-reference with their own lists and determine if any additional companies can be added. The cross-referencing sometimes verifies companies on all400.com’s list as well.
“We think of ourselves as an information-sharing network,” Rockwell says. “The goal is to make the three main segments in our ecosystem – companies that use the platform, people who work on it, and vendors who support it – all visible to each other. That way companies will know they can find people if they need them, people can show they’re available for work, everyone will know the ecosystem is large, and vendors will be able to find new customers.”
Rockwell has worked in the IBM midrange area for more than 31 years. Although he considers himself to be semi-retired, the hunt for IBM i shops gives him a way to help people who are still working on the platform. “It’s a way of getting a ‘helper’s high,’ which for those who know what I’m talking about is a significant reward.”
Somewhere between 5,000 and 125,000 sits the peak of the IBM i installed base in 2017. Rockwell has his sights set on 60,000 to 70,000 active IBM i shops. That’s a goal that he considers the true number of companies using the machine. That will take the acquisition and verification of quite a few more lists. Rockwell is confident that in the future he’ll get more lists that are current.
According to the IBM i Marketplace Survey, an average of approximately 1.2 percent of users will be migrating off the platform during the next five years; however, shops with concrete plans to leave the platform are outnumbered by the businesses increasing their IBM i footprint.
“I’m getting 500 to 1,000 active users each month. There are more than 100 people from all over the world sending me information,” Rockwell says. “The confirmation work is tedious, but it’s like a treasure hunt.”
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I really don’t expect “all400s” ever to be all inclusive for a number of reasons.
#1: The name. I don’t have any 400’s. I do have a few Power machines running IBM i (and other OS’s) however. Why, he might have just as well called it S36/38’s.
#2: Who wants to put their name on yet another marketing list?
#3: It’s rather pointless. If the goal is to convince vendors there’s still a market this list is so doomed to failure it will probably validate their skeptics.
Hi Rob,
With all due respect, here are my responses to the points you made.
#1: The fact that you don’t have any 400’s doesn’t make it logical to project that no company does. One anecdote doesn’t create a fact.
#2: The companies who have voluntarily sent me their name to add to the list seem to be willing to deal with the marketing list issue. Since I don’t include any contact information on it the people who create marketing lists would still have to do some research, i.e. spend some money, to find out who to put on any marketing list that people would find worth buying.
#3: There are actually four goals for the website – convincing companies that there are plenty of people who still know how to work on the machine (via the Hiring Board) is one of the most important. Giving people who are out of work visibility to companies they might have not known are using the platform is another. Providing IT departments with solid evidence that there’s no need to move off of the platform despite what the competition might say to scare them is another.
As for not expecting “all400s ever to be all inclusive”, that’s a reasonable statement. Even IBM doesn’t have a complete list of all the companies who are using all of the iterations of this platform. The idea is make the website valuable to all three segments of the ecosystem. The fact that there are a number of companies and organizations willing to sponsor it, including the recent addition of the Large User Group (LUG), shows we’re heading in the right direction.
Regards,
John
Great writeup. Thanks for the coverage all400s.com efforts.
This fantastic article, “COUNTING COMPANIES WITH AN IBM I IN THE MIX” by Dan Burger is potentially, by far, the very most important article published by ITJungle in years.
This article is not about bits, nor bytes, nor sockets, nor CPWS, nor DRAM, nor SQL or any other technical issue with IBM, or IBM i, nor the perspective of Steve Will, las these topics really do not matter in the future of IBM and IBM i.
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Instead this article, thanks to Dan Burger and John Rockell, provides for the first time an opportunity to understand and address the entire IBM i worldwide customer base, and to understand and address the fundamental issues causing the decline of IBM and the IBM i.
And, this article provides the incredible opportunity to potentially ask the fundamental questions causing this relentless decline of IBM i of thousands of customer CEOS and CFOs rather than answers to supplied questions by perhaps one hundred CIOs.
Congratulations to John Rockwell for actually taking the initiative and making this fantastic effort, and provide the opportunity to actually find out why thje IBMi is in decline from CEOs and to fix it and to quickly grow IBM and IBM i again.
I have been personally aked by muktiple corporate CEOs “How do I get rid of this clunker IBM computer?” and endless variations on that theme, as the CEOs have no idea what their IT department is doing, hor how to manage it, or how to reduce bloated it costs, or how to use IT as a competitive advantage.
Perhaps asking the CEOs of thousands of IBM i customers their acute concerns and opinions about IBM i and then actually making the iBM i incredibly better in all of the CEOs concerns would seem to be appropriate to someone at IBM, and have immediate positive results.
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Great article. IBM’s obfuscation of the platform over the years, and refusal to allow its own people to sing its unique praises, has decimated its visibility and deserved position as the superior business computing platform. IBM’s sacrifice of it in favor of just selling Websphere and WS consulting has stifled the new user penetration.
Those of us using it know the value. After almost two decades on UNIX and others, I fell in love with the platform in 1991 and have been dedicated to it since. This heartfelt effort by John is exemplary. He is doing this for the good of the ecosystem, and it is a very “non-profit” effort.
If you can contribute by validating the use of the platform by any companies on the list, shoot him an email and he will update the validation date.
I propose a toast to John!
An EXCEPTIONAL article and initiative and clearly the LUG (Large User Group) also think so!
For those that have followed this for a while, it is clear that is truly a SELFLESS endeavour, to provide the installed base with FACTS and not FUD, which has been in oversupply in recent years.
Instead of criticising it, we should all step up to the plate and DO what we can, to stem the tide and get rid of the FUD.
Ira. I wholeheartedly CONCUR! John, THANK YOU!!
Dan, IT Jungle, thanks for publishing such a balanced view!
In-depth answers to the most frequently asked questions about the ALL400s project can be found in a blog that Profound Logic recently published. This link will take you to the blog if you’re interested – https://goo.gl/BvTjyZ
Thank you for covering the progress that John Rockwell and All400s.com is making. This initiative is definitely of interest to many of us in the IBM i community. In my opinion, John Rockwell’s project serves a number of purposes and has significant value to individual IBM i programmers and companies developing and selling solutions into this market.
In response to the criticism of the all400s.com website name in the comment above, IBM’s ever changing platform name game leaves some IBM Business Partners very frustrated. So much so that two of the well recognized IBM i market software brands in our portfolio are in the process of changing all the platform references in our web and print content back to AS/400! We have concluded that the end customers are confused and the largest share of them relate to AS/400. Based on history, we can expect the platform name to change again in 2 or 3 years leaving us with a abandoned and barely recognized platform name in all of our web content. We are not willing to make changes to hundreds of documents, e-materials and web content over and over again nor should John Rockwell have to be in the same position.
Where I work we still call it the 400 period!!
The IBM i is evolving to be a core business machine. Providing and consuming web services, integrating seamlessly with C, Java, PHP and other open source languages. Free format code is easily read by programmers from other languages. An RPG programmer can find themselves at the center of mission critical commercial activities providing reliable, accurate solutions. Beyond all that, the IBM i retains its status as the only platform that has not been breached by hackers. When something works that well and the OS supports it, you support the old program objects and keep running them.