Hey, good morning everyone, I'm your host Mark O'Brien, a business director at CM First Group.
I want to thank everyone for registering for today's webinar, which is
entitled "Hosting IBM i Applications in the Cloud" and today you're going to hear
from a couple of industry-leading and rehosting experts. First up, we're
going to have Patrick Schutz, who's the VP of Application Management for Abacus Solutions
the rehosting leader especially
around rehosting for the IBM i platform. He'll provide a great overview on what
it means to move responsibility for your CA 2E repository, from internal
resources to an external hosting company, or even to the cloud.
Then, John Rhodes, CTO and Managing Director of CM First Group will talk about some of the
factors for CA customers that--well--for them to consider rehosting their
hardware and why CM First is partnering with Abacus for this part of the business.
So, some housekeeping details here: you can keyboard questions if you look at
your GoToWebinar console on the right side there. We will gather those and
following the two speakers and some poll questions we will have a Q&A session
for everyone in the audience. So, first we've got a poll question, the first of
four audience polling questions about today's webinar.
It is what version of CA 2E are you on. Each person, you can select one option:
8.7 version, 8.6, 8.5, 8.1, or older than 8.1. We'll give people about 45 seconds
or so to respond.
Second question is what IBM i operating system or OS are you
currently on.
So, IBM i OS 7.3 is the latest GA. There's also 7.2, 7.1, and even some 6.x, or even
5.x people out there. And could we see the results of the second poll question?
We have about 33% in 7.2, 42% in 7.1, and 17% in 6.x, and 8% in 5.x or below. Okay,
so vast majority on 7.2, and the first question about version of CA 2E.
About half at 46 percent at 8.7, about 8% at 8.6, twenty
23% at 8.5, and 0% at 8.1, and 23 percent older than 8.1.
Okay, cool. I'll take it over. Yeah, I just wanted to
take a few minutes to talk about, you know, why we are partnering with
Abacus and what the CM First perspective is on hosting applications in the
cloud, what we've seen among our customers and people who talk to.
And I think it really comes down to, as we've been talking to customers that are
trying to modernize their applications, which is really our business, we're into
helping folks that are on 2E and Plex, take those applications forward and a lot of
times people have told us, you know, we ask what their vision is, they say, "well, you know
eventually we want everything to run on the cloud", and you start seeing people
that, you know, are obviously in a traditional model which is very common ten years ago
or even five years ago or even maybe two years ago,
everything is on-premise, you see them start to look at,
hey, we've gotta move stuff out to the cloud because a number of reasons. One is
we got other applications like Salesforce, or like CRM-type systems, or
Oracle that's running in the cloud, we got to integrate with that, or, you know,
that's just the way the industry is going and we want to focus on what we do
best, which was developed above a software. If you're starting to see a
shift of folks going for this on-premise to, you know,
some variation of cloud, and that's where I think a company like Abacus
really has a lot of value to add for this shift that, you know, they're one of
the few companies that offer an IBM i focused offering. So, as people are moving
to modernize their applications, I think it also makes sense to modernize their
data center and so that's where we think it's a really good partnership between
CM First and Abacus. So, after we'll be talking a lot more about that. But some of
the specific reasons we hear from customers on, you know, why they're moving
this direction is I think first and foremost is, you know, focus. Do you want
to be in the data center business or do you want to be in the application
business? And if the answer is we want to be in the application business, we want to
develop proprietary application to give us a competitive advantage, and the
hardware side of things becomes less important and, you know, maybe that makes
sense to shift off and shift that focus off to somebody else that just focuses
on that. You know, since some other possibilities are around global
applications, a response time, it can make sense to partner with somebody that has
points of presence in different areas, that can make things very very fast,
responsive. I think integration with other
cloud-based apps, I kind of touched on that, things like Salesforce and other
applications, that's where things are moving so to really integrate with those
it could make sense to have your other applications on the cloud as well. So, I
think that's cool, we're hearing really on the direction and you like to
turn things over to Patrick to really get into the details of their solution
and how it can work. So, Patrick I'll turn things over to you
if that's okay sounds. Sounds great, hello everybody, Patrick Schutz here at Abacus. If they'll
be able to show you my screen here. Show my screen. Let me know if you guys are seeing this.
There we go.
Okay, great.
Well once again,
Patrick Schutz over at Abacus. Appreciate everybody's time.
Hopefully you all can hear me well.
So, want to spend a couple of minutes just describing who and what we
are, and then we can kind of open up to how we fill the void or fill the need
for IBM i clouds, but Abacus has been in business for a...since 2000. We have a
brokerage-heritage background. So what do we do? We do the IBM i, we are a platform
focused provider. We provide server, we provide cloud product services and
offerings around the IBM i, but we also do hardware services, and we also buy IT.
So, we're really a full solution provider and we've grown from a traditional
brokers background to a full system provider status
If I kind of keep going here, really the emphasis of our conversation today and I think the
relationship and the offerings we bring to the table is our IBM i platform
solution focus. Basically, we argue, we do the IBM i better than the rest and we
can do pretty much anything and everything up to the application level.
So what does that mean? That means we have cloud, we have product, we have
business continuity and services. So, sometimes customers desire to go to
cloud, but they need to do it incrementally, sometimes customers want
to stay on premise because of requirements, or operations cost, or
whatever reason, but we have solutions around both of those needs. So, once again
we can bring you to the cloud for some or all, or we can talk about doing
different offerings around customer premise, but we once again argue we can
do the IBM i better than the rest, all the way up to the application level. So, as we
kind of go forward here, and this is a five or six deck PDF that we will provide
everybody when the call is done, but how do we do it? We have a team of 15
plus IBM i technical and sales specialists, and what does that mean? That
means it's more than anybody I'm aware of and in this space, and we're
very focused. Resources: 30,000 square-foot corporate headquarters, we
have lab, we have warehouse, we have testing, we have engineers, we have people,
we have logistics, we have a wide breath of offerings. Data centers, we have
multiple data centers that we run and manage ourselves. Some are owned and some
are through partnerships, but we're in the data center business and we're aware
of all the ins and outs of that. Support 24/7, 365, we have that available. Knock
phone, email, portal, you have access to us in all different ways. Before mentioned
portal, we can get access to us a number of different ways, but that's a preferred
method and that's the best way to get our fastest and best response from our
customers. And certified. So, we are an IBM MSP, we're IBM gold, IBM specialty power,
IBM specialty storage, so our solutions are packaged up with IBM and for IBM for
our customers, and we take an independent approach to that. So, why Abacus?
A couple of, you know, regular words, but we feel these are important. We're focused.
We have expertise. We provide variety. We're fast, we bring value to the table.
Partnerships, obviously we have a large partnership with IBM across the
different boards and we use a number of other offerings to help provide what we
ultimately call in our cloud platform as a service with degrees up into the
mid-levels of operations management. We talk about the Abacus IBM i platformed
customers. We have a nice variance of industry, of region. I would say 95% of
our customers are domestic and they vary across all type of size and verticals. I
would say manufacturing probably would be our most--our number one vertical and
some of these customers you can see would fall into that, but a number of
them across multiple rays. So, this is just a sample of names you may recognize.
We've done the homework, so if you are looking at making the decision of going
to the cloud or staying on premise, we've actually done the homework with and for
many of our customers of saying, hey, we really view this from an environmental
science. You can be a basic, a small, a medium or
large environment customer, but ultimately what you really care about or
what most of the customers care about is what's our total cost of ownership going
from a premise to a cloud. So if you want to stay on premise, we can help
support you with support services, operations back up, DR as a service and
whatnot, or we can roll you into our cloud, but ultimately the cloud, if you
are doing higher degrees of best practices, becomes more economical and to
be honest that's not how it was five years ago. Five years ago I don't think
the cloud was more economical and people were still going to it, but now I think
the economies of scale and the commoditization have really turned the
cloud into an option that customers really work for. So, if we kind of sum up
the summary here is we're a full solution provider with an IBM i platform
focused. We can pretty much do any which way but loose and we look forward to
working with the customer, each individual. I'd say 80% of
people have the same things or same things happening, where you have 20%
unique and we're willing and able to do both of those and help our
customers figure out their environments for the short and the long term. So that's
kind of the the platform summary of who and what we are and how we do it, and I
think there's probably, John, some questions and some things that we wanted
to maybe potentially hit on as well? Yes sir, I guess we can take some questions
now and maybe we'll take some additional questions a bit later. So, folks have--
we've seen the question app in the webinar, but yeah please ask your
question there. Obviously we have a few coming in. So we'll take a few more,
then I'll talk a bit more and we can take some additional questions then.
Okay, so we have some--so Mark, you want to take over the questions?
I was wondering if you wanted to do that poll question on POWER8 technology, the latest in IBM i,
and then I've got a couple of questions from the audience for the--for our
panelists. So, are you on currently on IBM POWER8 technology: yes, or no but plan to
in the next calendar year, or third, no plans currently to go on an IBM
POWER8. So if we kind of look at that question, I think that's an interesting
point and I can kind of speak to that a little bit guys. So POWER8 is the
latest and greatest from IBM. POWER9 has been released by IBM, but it's not
going to be available from the AS/400 perspective. I call it AS/400, IBM i,
iSeries, by a bunch of different names.
But from that perspective, the POWER9 is due to come out. We're expecting third quarter of
next year, so if you are not on the POWER8 the assumption is we could help
you get there by shifting to the cloud, that's the technology that we run on, but
we also have POWER8, POWER7+, POWER7, POWER6, POWER5 that we
run all in our cloud. So different customers have different potential needs,
but knowing that POWER9 is coming out in the near future, that's something that
makes an interesting dilemma for customers trying to do an upgrade today.
So if you're looking at doing an upgrade, shifting to a cloud would provide you
the flexibility of getting the POWER9 down the road or, if you're looking at
premise, you may be potentially looking at making a purchase at the end of the
cycle of a system. IBM has some discounts that they're offering to incent
that, but at the same time if there was potential time I would maybe think
about reviewing a waiting for a POWER9. So POWER8 is the latest, and POWER7 and
whatnot sounds like a lot of customers may still be on.
Yes, so the results of
our poll, Patrick, kind of indicate that there's kind of a rift. 40% are
currently on POWER8, another 13% were plan to go there in the next
year, and 47% do not have any plans to go on POWER8.
[indistinct]
Yeah, if you're looking at going to POWER8 that's pretty interesting because
right now, like I said, you have this decision to make and we can help you
steer that. So as a business partner of the highest level from IBM we can give
you the recommendations of going from what you have today to POWER8, or maybe
making that decision to go to wait till POWER9 depending on what the
business requirements are, or once again if you shift to the cloud you would be
moving to a POWER8 technology that's the latest and greatest we have today
and knowing that you have POWER9 upgrade options for no additional cost
going forward, so there's some flexibility in the cloud that you may
not have by staying premise. But it's a good visibility of what
everybody's running on, which I see pretty much below 50% would be on
non POWER8s as that's what we see in the marketplace, that seems to be pretty
correctly trending.
Okay, so our audience is representative of the larger market
as a whole. First audience question is why not go directly to IBM or AWS or
Amazon for this kind of service. Another-- Patrick, you could field that one.
Another great question. Yeah, so from a standpoint, IBM does not actually host
their own direct cloud, first of all. They have SoftLayer, who they had purchased,
has clouds but they're actually not IBM i focused, so from a standpoint IBM does
not present its own cloud and works with partners or MSDs like Abacus to
provide that, and because the marketplace is a diminishing marketplace our tagline
is we want to help run the last 10,000 IBM i environments. And what does that?
That means, the translation is it's declining, the footprint is. There's
arguably one hundred, hundred fifty thousand instances today. That number is
arguably decreasing, so an AWS, or a Google, or Azure, those companies don't have
enough customer base to target this, so they don't have a cloud in this area as
well. So you have to come to a provider like Abacus as an MSP who has a
specialty that can also complement your other maybe commodity and other
specialty cloud needs. So ultimately it becomes a hybrid environment which we
see is the as the new normal today.
Cool, great. Another question is, is there
an impact on my CA 2E license if I go this route? I'll give you a perspective
from business development. That--the CA rating system is going to depend on
your developer environment, as you know, and if you do change hardware
it may or may not trigger a license event if the rating and CA's
estimation is a higher one than then it will. If it's the same or lower
then there isn't an impact on the license.
John, do you have something technical-- technically to add to that license
situation?
No, I think you pretty much summed it up, that, you know, if
your license is for a certain tier and you don't increase that tier, then you're
not gonna have a problem with transferring the license. A lot of folks,
you know, if you're not on support maybe that would be interesting, and if you're not on
support but you want to get back on support, it might make real sense to
move to a hosted cloud environment and put your license there because, you know,
probably you could put just a development environment on, like Abacus,
and get a smaller license from CA then may be on your production box that
you have currently running, so maybe you'd be able to save some money there
to get back on support by doing Abacus.
Okay, next question is...
Maybe Patrick has some other, I don't know, licensing comments in general because
he's more experienced in that area.
Yeah, that's a great question.
You know, application drives everything down towards the infrastructure, right? So,
obviously making that application decision, which John and team can help
you facilitate, one. Two, from the standpoint of ownership from what we
provide in a cloud, you will get the OS, you'll get the non-operating licenses,
you'll get the user licenses, we provide all of that into a partition or slice
for the power customers. So we take care of all the day-to-day operations, non-operating
and all the underlying operations and application cost from
that side and then, once again, you know, knowing how it's going to directly
affect your primary application and some activities around that, so I
think the good point is we have all of the day-to-day operations cost covered
at an operation spent expense of the customers.
Mmm-hmm. Follow-up question to that: so what size customer would need either a
tier two or tier three data center, Patrick?
Yes, so another good question.
So from a standpoint on the type of environment that you're looking for, we
do a number of different environments. If you're on an older version system, we can
put you into what we call our traditional hosting offering. So that
could handle customers that aren't current or on older versions. I think
some people said their version 5.x and whatnot, we can facilitate that and the
reason would be to do that because you have a serial number conflict
potentially, but if we were going to be talking about getting into our
enterprise cloud, you're going to want to be at a certain tier data center, which
we have all of the proper tiered and SAS ratings and all the proverbial security
check boxes you're going to look for, and that means you're a Best of Breed, best
of purpose offering. So you don't have to worry about those responsibilities going
forward for customer premise, so we take care of all that with them for you in
our cloud and the data centers that we run in as well.
Another one here, probably for you, John, would be, do you have any CA 2E or
CA Plex customers that have moved entirely to a public cloud like AWS or
similar cloud offering?
Yeah, I guess the short answer is no, we don't have any
that move entirely and the reason is that most of our customers have IBM i's
on the back end and you're not ready to completely get rid of it, really they
have enterprise applications running there and that's really difficult
proposition. We have seen as folks that move parts their applications over. We
have a success story on the website about a company in Louisiana that's in global
logistics, they had a requirement to transition application from something
ran locally for Louisiana to something that ran globally in different locations
on Southeast Asia and South America and Europe. So they move their warehousing
and distribution application to AWS by generating Java from CA Plex
and that worked quite well for them. They're able to really
their operations expense and downtime by shifting that responsibility to the cloud
hosting provider, and they still have an IBM i that runs locally, but that just
does a collection of data type operations. They able to manage, you know,
a global operation from a pretty small staff by using AWS. So in that case I
think it works. I, you know, I don't think that moving everything to the cloud is
something you do in a year or two, that's probably a five-year project
which, you know, Abacus I think be a part of that and we can also help with that
if that's the direction you're headed.
Mm-hmm, okay,
last..the one question coming in was, what is going to be different with my CA 2E
system if I move to the cloud. It's kind of a follow on what you were just talking about there
What would be different with your 2E system?
I don't think there being anything different. I think it would be a, basically a non-event. I think
Abacus talks about this and what the transition process would be to move to
their data center, but, as I understand it, what we've seen with the customers that have gone
this route is it's pretty much a non-event because Abacus has things
planned out pretty well. Maybe Patrick you could elaborate.
Yeah, yeah, I can kind
of take that a step further. So, from a standpoint of what's going to be
different that, the goal is none. Obviously, there's planning to work that
goes into it. So how do you get to a cloud? I think that might help
answer the question a little bit more detail. So if we were agreed that you
wanted to go to the Abacus cloud, first of all let's make sure you're a prime
candidate at a current version, right? You had a current version we can then work
towards getting you tested, embedded, so we get your data and we actually
present it in a test cloud and you then establish network, you establish
connectivity so all your users would have access. We confirmed that all is
working well with and for you. Then we would have a window that, we would have
an outage window. It could be minutes or it could be days depending what the
requirements are. We would then take that data, bring it to the updated--we take
your data, we'd update it to the now test cloud
that we'd shift into a production. We then would have you--we convert you and
run you and then test, test, tests, go live. Then you then would open up to your
users to run business as usual. Every once and awhile even have a printer or something
that's not working, you may have a user that has some access, we're very used to
that and we can help solve that in the short term, and then in reality once
you're in the cloud and your applications working and running, you are
business as usual and then you have a greater, larger team and environment to
work from and you have expandability, flexibility, all the regular operation
cost. So there is a planned project that helps you get there, we're very versed in
that and very thorough in that process, but once you're there you're
operating and then I think you have a flexibility to do some things at the
infrastructure level and probably at the application level that you maybe didn't
have before.
Okay, perfect, I have another kind of tactical
question about how does IBM i and VM or docker environment, how is that going to
exist on the cloud?
So let me try to understand that better. So how does the
IBM i environment exist in the cloud or what was the...
Well, I guess, how they coexist?
Oh, okay, so how does a... so a typical customer for us is going
to have three or four IBM i's, they're going to have a production, they're going
to have a dev, a test, and a DR, something of that nature, maybe multiple different
applications running production, then they're going to have half a dozen, a
dozen Windows environments that are going to be a company and those are
going to be very intertwined with the AS/400 traditionally and they're going to
need to reside very close. So we do have a very robust Windows cloud as well and
its purpose is to support our IBM i customers. So, like I said, typical
customer for us is going to have three or four IBM i environments with maybe
half a dozen, a dozen Window intertwined latency concern application surrounding
it and from that perspective we take that all on. Then I think the hybrid
becomes the new normal. If you have commodity Windows workloads and things
of that nature, I think there's probably other providers that
can actually probably do more of an infrastructure as a service offering for
those, and if they're not latency concerned or intertwined with AS/400,
let's bring those to another provider that could probably do a more
commodity cost option. So ultimately, what are we providing? We're providing
platform as a service options and that includes the IBM i and whatever
accompanying windows were closed that would surround it.
One more for you is
the POWER8, does it have a GUI limitation?
All right, now we're probably
fall off my technical cliff here.
[indistinct]
Yeah, yeah, so we've got a whole technical team
behind me as an account executive and so many leads are our managed services
practice, I get pretty technical, but I get you normally to the ninety or ten
yard line and then we have our technical team punch it through, but that also
brings up a good point of we have resources, that 15 plus technical resources is very
deep and wide in the IBM i and we're also diverse in from a scope of age
which is it's traditionally a, I would say an older
demographic in the IBM i space, we have variances in almost every
tier of age that helps us keep and stay young, which will help us support our
customers going forward too.
Mm-hmm. One general question here about when you say
cloud you mean accessing the IBM i on your premises or ours and talk a little
bit about that, about some of the options that there are for people moving
in this direction.
Yeah, so I don't think everybody just cannon balls into the
cloud, right? You do it in steps, so if you're thinking about making a refresh
you may want to start with a backup as a service, DRs a service, maintenance,
operations management. You stay on customer premise, we do those operations
with you remotely and for you, so we can basically complement what you're doing
today. And then when that cycle happens down the road, whether it's in a year for
POWER9 or three or five years whatever, it's for POWER10 you want to
say, hey, I don't want to do the harder refresh I actually just want to go to
the cloud, we could then facilitate that. What's interesting I think what we try
to show on that sample pricing is all things being equal, you could probably
run it cheaper and better in our cloud than you can on premise, but at the same
time not all customers are ready or willing to do that because you could be
remote, you could have certain type of regulations that require you to be on
premise and if that's the case we can augment what you're doing today, do the
same set of services locally at your premise and we can run that
AS/400 environment for you going forward.
So once the customer is on
the cloud, how do they scale their IBM i from that point forward?
Yeah so, traditionally if you buy an IBM i, so let's say you're going to
buy a new POWER8 what you're gonna look at it traditionally, you say, okay
what's my undetermined need, I'm going to over purchase and so let's say you're
going to increase your traditional purchase would be, you increase 30 to
40% of whatever you had today. So you're planning for the inevitable or
the unplanned event. So in the cloud, what we try to do is we try to give you what
you need today and then you have virtual scalability. So we present our processor
in slices and you can increase your quantities as much as you need. Our
storage is virtual enterprise sand, so all flash storage arrays so you can
increase by gigabyte. Our backup is the same situation, networking that you would
parlay off our existing networking. So the moral of the story is if you go to the
cloud I think you have more flexibility, more enterprise options, but also you can
scale for what you need down the roads. You don't have to plan or over purchase,
which I think has some financial bean counters in the backend, you know, always
challenging how big of a system you need. You can just buy for what you need today
and know you have the scale to go if you have growth or your purchase or you have
a new acquisition, we can facilitate all of that.
Great.
That kind of does it
for the, you know, our audience apply questions. Some really, really insightful
insightful ones there.
We do have one remaining poll question. We'll see if John, if we can get to that
to that last question, here we go. Our last poll question would be, "how
concerned are you about IBM operation staffing?" Either first, a very--I'm very
concerned, this is a critical staff that have already retired, or I'm somewhat
concerned because we do have plan retirements within the next 12 months or
so, or lastly, we're not concerned. So, if our audience could check in for this
last question, that'd be great.
So, interestingly, only 7% are quite concerned and about 21% are somewhat because they've got
people coming up, but the vast of majority people here, two-thirds to three-quarters, are saying that they're not
they're not concerned about that, so they've got things covered on the staffing side.
This really concludes the poll question and we've got one more
one more screen to pop-up to the audience, basically about today's activity and,
so, you know, what do you think about rehosting. I hope that you got to get exposed to some things
and perhaps some concepts that you might not be particularly familiar with,
especially on the IBM i. So, you know, basically, takeaways are that hosting make
sense, a lot of sense during a variety of different modernization
processes. It allows you to focus on new application development as you spin up
dev and test environments really efficiently, and combining Abacus as an
MSP with CM First can be a good solution because you've got Abacus
taking the hosting and then we can handle all other aspects of the of your
CA 2E repository as well as, you know, data, your databases in all of your IBM i
services and so forth that are related to 2E and your other
code bases on the IBM i. So, that concludes our presentation and
webinar today. Thank you very much and I'll be getting out copies of our
content to you shortly. Thanks.
Thanks everybody.
Thank you Patrick, thank you John, and thank you audience members.
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