I just came back from a two hour presentation by IBM that they gave in our office. They were mostly talking about their OpenPower servers, TotalStorage storage and backup solutions, and, of course, about their BladeCenter.
Overall, the presentation was slightly boring and a bit too long. I learned little except for the names of product lines. I was also repeatedly told that IBM is getting cheaper more affordable and more open.
I was also surprised as to how often the word “Linux” came up. I mean it was used almost as often as “IBM”. Every ,and I mean every, slide of the presentation had the word “Linux” written at least once. They even had a picture of tux on a couple of pages. And they mentioned a few times that IBM currently works with Red Hat and SUSE.
The funny thing is that almost every time one of the presenters used the word “Linux”, someone from our guys was turning around and looking at me. I was the biggest Linux and Open Source Software advocate present there. Some people can still remember similar presentations from a few years ago when I would ask about Linux support and presenters would just nod their heads negatively. There has been surely an improvement. Those who don’t support Linux, don’t even come to our office anymore.
The resume of the presentation is still the same as it always was though – a nice fairy tale that you have to sell your organs to live in. You don’t need organs in the fairy tale anyway. The sales people were trying to convince that the situation with expensiveness changed dramatically, but watching how comfortably they were operating with tens of thousands of dollars, I tend to think otherwise.