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I worked with a financial trading firm that was interested in evaluating a POWER system. They called IBM, who arranged a meeting our our offices. From memory,
by __d 6y ago
I worked with a financial trading firm that was interested in evaluating a POWER system. They called IBM, who arranged a meeting our our offices.
From memory, about 8 IBM people showed up. They didn't seem to actually know each other, but were from several different groups within IBM.
We sat down, and started by explaining what we did with our existing x86-64 systems, and what we thought we'd like to try with the POWER system. We asked for a single box to evaluate, roughly the equivalent to our existing HP DL380 dual-Xeon boxes.
The folks from IBM then spent the next 40 minutes arguing with each other about exactly which system we should be using. Five minutes before the meeting was scheduled to end, one of them took charge and said they'd figure it out offline, and get back to use with the details.
Several more rounds of email were exchanged, but we never actually got to the point of being told what system we could have, or what its specs were, let alone actually being able to physically get one and test it.
It was perhaps the most absurd situation I've seen in 30 years in the industry.
- foobar1962 6y agoThere used to be a joke that IBM sales reps don't have children because all they do is sit on the bed and tell their spouses how good it's going to be.
- xparco 6y agoPlease, this not Reddit...
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- dsr_ 6y agoThat's really amazing. Rather more than 20 years ago, a DEC/COMPAQ salesperson cold-called me to see if the ISP I was working at would like to switch to Alpha servers. After about 20 minutes, he offered a six-month free loan of a mid-range server -- probably $10-15K, I don't recall. It arrived a week later. We determined the hardware was pretty nice but the operating system was a major PITA -- this was when you expected to compile a large fraction of your software -- so it mostly sat on someone's desk for the last four months of the loan before the salesperson came to claim it.
- jeffbee 6y agoCompaq also used to provide publicly-available "testdrive" Alpha servers that you could just shell into. This was way before the idea of cloud computing was mainstream. A lot of gnu+linux/alpha development happened thanks to testdrive.compaq.com (which is dead now, of course).
- dsr_ 6y agoThis was before the Alpha port of Linux happened; if it had been available instead of OSF/1, we would have done more with the machine. But, yes: if you want to market hardware that nobody else can supply, you need to get it into the hands of people who will use it and evangelize for it.
- bluedino 6y agoA couple years ago, I worked at a company who's ERP system ran on an IBM System i (formerly known as AS/400). At a user conference, IBM had a table setup with a couple sales guys and a pair of servers on the table. The first one was the latest server that could run Series i. No big deal, we were coming to the end of our maintenance contract and would probably be buying a new machine in the next year or so. The second one was a 2U, 48-socket POWER server. They bragged about it running thousands of Linux VM's at a time. I found it a bit odd because nobody who would be running this particular ERP software would be running thousands of Linux VM's.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- stevespang 6y agoWhat month and year ?
- icedchai 6y agoI had decent experience with an IBM reseller, back in 2005 or so. I forget the exact term. VAR? Solutions provider? Anyway, we were able to get the latest POWER system (POWER 6, I think) and evaluate our AIX-based app on it for about 2 weeks. They even set us up with a small SAN! Unfortunately, the reseller was not terribly skilled technically, so they were unable to configure the SAN. I had to figure that out myself.
- W-Stool 6y agoIn a 30+ year professional IT career I've had exactly three interactions with IBM, and every one of them went very much as you described. How this company stays in businesss I'll never understand.
- protomyth 6y agoBig IT contracts and their VAR doing the actual selling. [edit]We bought our new iSeries (Power9-based) through a VAR this year with an IBM rep helping us with what we actually needed. It was a bit of a drawn-out experience, but overall, I wasn't displeased. It was easier than dealing with some PC vendors (looking at you Dell and HP). I would imagine it will be another 15 years before we have to buy another one.[/edit]
- kjs3 6y agoBingo. Going to an IBM VAR/Partner is really the only decent/sane way to navigate the IBM sales bureaucracy unless you're talking about US$(high 7-figure plus) orders. It's also really the best way to get the best price, because the VAR will work to figure out all the discounts and such a customer might be entitled to. On an IBM sales team, the left hand doesn't always know or care what the right hand is doing. When I worked at IBM, I usually called in a favor from friends at a local VAR whenever I needed to order something to get a BoM, because even internally the process was opaque.
- johnvanommen 6y agoThis is why VARs exist