Steve Will, Chief Architect for IBM i, showed a couple of charts during a recent presentation to the COMMON Americas Advisory Council (CAAC)–one of which showed that IBM plans support for the IBM i at least through 2025. These charts caused some buzz on Twitter so Steve took to his blog to clarify things a little. His blog post doesn’t really present anything too shocking, but it does provide some very positive reinforcement of the long-term future of the IBM i. For example, he mentions, “our IBM i development team is working on two major releases after 7.1 already.”
Mr. Will explains that getting to the the year 2025 is simply math. He explains, “clearly [releases after 7.1] are going to be delivered at some point, and they will have a period of support. Given how frequently IBM i major releases are produced, and how long they are likely to be supported, it’s pretty easy to build a timeline that carries those releases out into the middle of the next decade.”
For a slightly different interpretation of Mr. Will’s charts, see this article at IT Jungle.
Mr. Will’s blog entry is a short read and very much worth the time. Two of the infographics that Mr. Will showed that generated the Twitter buzz are shown below.
If you do read Mr. Will’s blog post please consider leaving a comment mentioning that you are an ASNA customer and very interested in the future of the IBM i. We like to take every opportunity we can to remind IBM that we aren’t the bad guys and do very good work to extend and enhance the power of the IBM i platform.
One last thing to ponder: In 2025, will the IBM i look as cool as police cars are expected to then?
