Informing the IBM Community

All about you: PowerWire backs IBM i user survey

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PowerWire.eu is backing a new survey of IBM i users and we urge all our readers to take part.

PowerWire will share the European findings from HelpSystems’ new IBM i Marketplace Survey exclusively with our readers in early 2015.

Our friends at IT Jungle will release the findings in the States. HelpSystems will then publish a full report and accompany it with a webinar.

Why are we supporting this initiative? Well, back when a fair few of you were readers of British midrange magazine System i NEWS UK, we used to conduct our own yearly survey, as did some of the other i-oriented publications around Europe. This was hugely popular with our subscribers and provided a compelling snapshot of where we were all at.

As the i was subsumed by the Power Systems brand and many magazines disappeared, such exercises went by the wayside, leaving little hard info on the i community. So we welcome HelpSystems’ efforts to revive the tradition with open arms.

To get the full lowdown, I spoke to Tom Huntington, vice president of technical services at the firm, and asked him what it hoped to achieve with the project.

Huntington said: “It’s been quite a few years since analysts have been providing statistical information related to IBM i and so we are trying to resolve the problem. We want to provide to the community information around how organisations and operators are using IBM i, what their challenges are and what their plans are for the future and we want to do this on an annual basis.”

Huntington believes such info can give HelpSystems, other ISVs and “perhaps even IBM”, guidance with their development plans and that this can only be beneficial to the community.

He said: “This information can be used by customers too to help combat the question from upper management about why their company runs IBM i when Gartner and other analyst organisations are not talking about this platform.”

I asked Huntington how important his company thought input was from i users across Europe.

“We think it is critical,” he said. “Europe has a large base of IBM i yet there is very little market information available around IBM i usage and management trends. For those in the community, we think it will be good to compare their situations with peers within the region and across the globe.”

You can take part on the IBM i Marketplace Survey here.

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