ALL400S Survey Continues, Goes International
June 26, 2023 Alex Woodie
John Rockwell, the driving force behind the ALL400S survey, was close to giving it up. Fewer and fewer people were taking the survey, and so he started telling people this would probably be his last go around. Turns out, that notice may have helped to spur a surge of interest in the survey, which is now underway. And now he’s taking the survey international, too.
Rockwell, an independent, semi-retired IBM i programmer from Florida has been trying to accumulate a list of every IBM i shop on the planet. He shares this work openly through his ALL400s website and the “Company List” spreadsheet that, as of last Friday, had 52,363 individual organizations, entities, or locations around the world that were confirmed to be running an IBM i server or one of its predecessors (or ran it at one time–Rockwell also collects decommission dates).
In 2018, Rockwell decided to expand on this list-gathering work with a survey that would paint a more detailed picture of the IBM i community and its members. His purpose was to show the vitality of the platform that he had worked on for more than three decades, and to provide evidence to push back against the naysayers who claim IBM i is dead.
Rockwell aimed to gather a variety of information about survey-takers, such as their age, what conferences they attend, what name do they use to reference the platform, and whether their company has plans to migrate off it. But the bulk of the questions in the 2018 survey had to do with tools, including tools for development and modernization, change management, job scheduling, security, backup and recovery, and HA and DR. He followed that up with another 25-question survey the following year.
Then COVID hit, and Rockwell stopped doing the survey for a few years. He resurrected it in 2022, when 658 people took the survey. The conclusions, which we reported on, provided some interesting data about the age of IBM i community members, the rate of IBM i adoption among younger IT professionals, and whether the pace of retirements was accelerating.
In early 2023, Rockwell began reaching out to his contacts in the IBM i community and the vendor ecosystem about running the survey again. His goal was to get 1,000 responses, which would be a big increase over last year. He opened the survey, which you can take on SurveyMonkey at this link, in May.
However, when the response was lower than expected, he started having second thoughts. He informed the vendors that would sometimes push the survey to their customer bases that this year’s might be the last. Then something unexpected happened.
“After I told people this would probably be the last year we ran the annual ALL400S IBM i Survey, due to the lack of responses, I started getting more and more inquiries about it from around the world,” Rockwell tells IT Jungle.
What really changed the trajectory, Rockwell explains, is a couple of suggestions by vendors about what to do about the low turnout. Why not expand beyond North America and make it a multi-lingual global survey?
The folks at Maxava offered to translate the survey into Japanese and help promote it there, along with help from IBM Japan. Other IBM i vendors that stepped up to help include Fresche, Eradani, Midrange Dynamics, Kato Integrations, DRV Tech, SrinSoft, and Comarch. Even Fortra (formerly HelpSystems), which runs the annual IBM i Marketplace Survey that (sort of) competes with Rockwell’s survey, offered to step up and help get the word out (the fact that Rockwell’s survey is vendor-agnostic was the deciding factor there, he says).
There are now four translations of Rockwell’s original English language survey available on SurveyMonkey. The French version was translated by Noble Adounkpe and can be found here. The Japanese version was translated by Hiroe Kawai of Maxava can be accessed at this link. The Spanish version was translated by Luis Felipe Valdes Rueda of Proaplicaciones and can be found here. The Italian version was translated by Aldo Succi of Aeffe S.p.A. and is available at this link. Translations for German and Arabic are currently underway, Rockwell says.
The survey is currently slated to run through August, which will give IBM i users around the world time to take it. Once the survey is over, everyone will be given access to the raw data and an analysis of it via links on the ALL400S site, as well as through various social media platforms like LinkedIn and distribution lists that Rockwell maintains, he says.
When it comes to getting information about the IBM i community, more is always better. If you’re interested in helping to get the word out about how vibrant and modern the IBM i server and the IBM i ecosystem currently is, taking the ALL400S survey, as well as the IBM i Marketplace Survey that Fortra will start to circulate later this year, isn’t a bad place to start.
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ALL400s Survey Paints a Picture of IBM i Community
Hi,
The German translation of the survey has been completed and can be found here – https://de.surveymonkey.com/r/V7SL3FC
We’re also looking for someone who can translate it into Mandarin Chinese. Aside from China, that’s also tge official language of Taiwan and Singapore, two countries where there might be several companies using IBM i. An Indonesian version might be helpful too.
Many thanks,
John Rockwell
“John Rockwell, the driving force behind the ALL400S survey, was close to giving it up”
Congratulations to John Rockwell, who has worked brilliantly and creatively for many years to enhance the IBM i community and to provide critically needed visibility to so many with his All400s.com web site.
John provides an IBM i expert programmer’s perspective and background with a literally global view of the actual IBM i world unlike any other, including IBM.
Many other long-time IBM i programmers and customers have already given it up, or are in the process of doing so, while IBM is in a 35 year long deep sleep while IBM competitors florish.
IBM i must announce and implement and deliver radical new technology, software techniology including a powerful new GUI, and a radically better way of programming applications NOW for the IBM i to survive, let alone effectively compete and flourish.
So very sad, but so very true.
Where have all the IBM visionaries gone?
As of 7/20/23 –
The Portuguese version of the survey is ready – https://pt.surveymonkey.com/r/KFV699S
The Mandarin Chinese version of the survey is ready – https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/DT2VXGS
The Traditonal Chinese version of the survey is ready – https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/DT2VXGS
The Hindi version will be ready on 7/21/23.
The Arabic version will be ready on 7/22/23.
Hebrew, Korean, Indonesian, and Turkish versions will be ready next week. That will complete the list of languages we agreed to translate the survey into.
If anyone wants to suggest a language we haven’t covered yet, and there are a significant number of companies using IBM i in countries who use it as their native language, we’ll create a version in that language as long as Google has a translator for it in its basic package. (Surprisingly it doesn’t have a Filipino translator. If it did we’d have included that language too.)
As of 7/20/23 we’ve had 455 responses to the 2023 ALL400s IBM i Survey, 405 in the English language version and 50 in other languages.