A Publication of iSeries 400 Experts Total Information Service

Shearer speaks: Top System i executive
talks shop with Insider Weekly

By Davin Wilfrid
Monday October 2, 2006

As general manager of System i since January 2005, Mark Shearer has seen the platform’s name change from iSeries to System i, introduced V5R4 of i5/OS, and dealt with three straight quarters of declining revenue. Insider Weekly sat down with Shearer recently to discuss some of the hot topics in the System i space, including affordable high availability (HA), the recently launched online community iSociety, and his own future at IBM.

Insider Weekly: Why is IBM so excited about iSociety (IW 9/25/06)?

Mark Shearer: I think the most notable dimension of this business is this incredibly passionate community of clients, solution providers, resellers, and integrators. I’ve visited clients and partners all around the world, and can say that System i customers have a personal, passionate relationship with each other and the platform that is really unique. This community is the source of many innovative ideas for the future.

As we reflected on this business, we felt we wanted to help inspire collaboration across the community. We want to help universities with students looking for jobs find companies with needs for skills. We wanted to help invoke the community to collaborate more across the community. We considered various IBM approaches to doing it, but didn’t want the community to be inhibited in any way. And we wanted it to go in any direction it needed to. I was thrilled that COMMON stepped up to the plate, and I have high hopes for the benefits members can get from participating.

IW: Did you have to sell iSociety to your bosses? It could be seen as a risk because you don’t get to control the content on the sites.

MS: The idea of collaboration is a fundamental part of our business design today. In every part of our hardware business, we’re reaching out to major industry players to innovate together on new things. The System i heritage is that the application solution providers have always created value. It’s always been about the ecosystem, and the basic principles of iSociety are completely consistent with the way IBM sees business in general. We think every industry will need to collaborate more horizontally across companies. It’s an absolutely mainstream business paradigm in today’s world.

IW: What is IBM’s own presence in iSociety going to be like?

MS: iSociety is not an IBM site, but it will have access to all sorts of great IBM content. I think a great deal of the value users get from iSociety is going to come from peers, and people not at IBM. We are going to enable iSociety to be a good portal to get to all the IBM stuff, but I have really high hopes that a great deal of the value is going to be from the networking across the users and solution providers. Whenever I go to a conference and see clients talking together, they always get more value from talking to each other [than from IBM]. You don’t come to a conference to hear about a new product feature or how fast the next processor is, you come to find out how to leverage the stuff. That kind of insight is what’s really going to be hot about iSociety.

IW: You have taken a personal interest in the System i Academic Initiative (IW 8/7/06). Why?

MS: The dimension of that project that I’m most excited about is that we’re not taking a theoretical approach to teaching System i technology at universities. We’re identifying clients in a particular region that need System i-skilled people. We’re identifying a set of colleges in that same region that have students looking for jobs. We’re bringing it all together with a curriculum that provides employment and work-study opportunities to the students. There’s no better spokesperson for System i than the university student who knows Linux, Wintel, and System i, and has a personal understanding of where they all fit in the industry.

IW: Most IT managers cite cost as the primary barrier to implementing high availability (HA) solutions. What can IBM do to help them out?

MS: It’s a fair question. I think it all comes down to business. The value of the HA system is largely a function of the cost of an outage, and ultimately it’s risk management. I think it’s eventually going to vary by industry and by application. There are some industries and applications where it would clearly be worthwhile and the financials would be relatively straightforward, based on the potential cost of an outage. In other industry segments it may not be as mission critical. The Capacity BackUp edition [CBU] offering is priced in an attractive way with the idea that they can move workloads between these two [similar] systems and there will be operational benefits beyond high availability and disaster recovery (IW 8/14/06).

IW: You’re now almost two years into the job, which is longer than many have served in your position. Are you here to stay?

MS: We have been given feedback that a degree of continuity would be a good thing. This was my fourth COMMON, and a lot of people have asked that I stick with it for a while. It’s a privilege to be part of this business. I try to spend time with clients and business partners every single day. It’s a very special community, and I think having a degree of continuity in the business probably does help me do a better job.