August 14, 2023

Alex Woodie

If you are a consumer of mainstream news, it can be hard to find anything about IBM i. The proprietary business platform isn’t marketed by IBM in advertisements and it receives very little coverage in mainstream IT publications. But a salesman for an IBM i business partner has come up with an easy yet compelling way to boost the visibility of the platform.

Earlier this month, Josh Bander, who is an enterprise account executive at Briteskies, shared a recent conversation he had through his LinkedIn page .“Over the weekend, I spoke to a few of my friends in IT, and they all told me #IBMi is dead,” Bander said. “To prove them wrong, I plan to take pictures of items in my house made with IBM i for the next week.”

The first picture featured Bander’s car, a Honda. The Japanese carmaker’s US subsidiary, American Honda Motor Company, has used one or more IBM i servers at its Torrance, California, facility for years.

Day three brought an image of a shoe by Nike. The legendary Oregon company has been an IBM i shop since at least 2003, when Nike acquired Converse, and it was still using IBM i in 2021, according to the list of IBM i shops maintained by All400s.com, which Bander used for his project.

A range hood for a stove made by Broan-NuTone appeared on day four of Bander’s IBM i journey through his home. The Hartford, Wisconsin-based manufacturer, which makes a variety of fans and air quality products, is also a confirmed IBM i ship.

Do you have Kleenex in your house? If so, then you have a product made by an IBM i shop, as the Irving, Texas-based Kimberly-Clark, maker of the Kleenex brand of facial tissues, is another confirmed IBM i user.

What about Taster’s Choice? It may not be everybody’s favorite cup of joe – Starbucks, the coffee goliath from Seattle, Washington, is a longtime IBM i shop – but the iconic coffee brand has IBM i in its veins, since it is owned by Switzerland-based Nestle, which is the largest food company in the world and another IBM midrange system user.

Maybe you have some shipping labels lying around. If they’re made by Avery Dennison, the well-known manufacturer of shipping labels and packaging materials based in Glendale, California, then you’ve found another everyday product made by an IBM i shop.

You don’t have to live the California wine country life to shop at Williams Sonoma. But if you do buy from the popular retailer, you can rest easy knowing that at least some aspect of the San Francisco company’s business is managed by IBM i.

Another iconic American brand, Rubbermaid, is also an IBM i shop. The Atlanta, Georgia company, which is now owned by Newell, was known to have run the IBM i as of 2021.

Bander’s LinkedIn posts of household items made by IBM i shops attracted quite a bit of attention from the IBM i ecosystem, and the hashtag “IBMiEverywhere” began trending. Apparently, IBM i professionals enjoy seeing that well-run and world-famous consumer brands are longtime IBM i users.

So why doesn’t IBM do this, or something similar? We have pestered Big Blue server execs many times over the years about the lack of marketing and advertising support for the platform, and rarely come away with satisfying answers.

To IBM’s credit, it does write and run case studies about IBM i customers. It has a section of its website where it has around 100 case studies of IBM i customers, as well as stories about a few business partners. Honda is on that list, as well as brands like Carhartt and Lamps Plus.

But there are many, many more name-brand companies that rely on IBM i that have never been officially mentioned by IBM as customers. Some of the world’s largest and most profitable companies run at least a small part of their businesses on the IBM i system, and while that in itself is not a reason for other companies to follow suit, it at least shows that world-class companies are continuing to invest in it and that has value.

IBM execs often say they wish they could do more to tout the great companies that rely on IBM i, and there’s no reason not to believe them. The truth is, the companies themselves often are not interested in participating in a formal IBM case study, marketing campaign, or to be featured in actual advertisements – and if they are, they often expect something in return for their cooperation.

That makes rogue efforts like Bander’s all the more fun and entertaining. John Rockwell does his best to keep the All400s list up to date, and while there are companies on the list that are actively moving off the platform or planning to, there are plenty more that are happy customers that aren’t going anywhere.

In the end, sharing unofficial lists of companies that run on IBM i seems to be a good way to boost morale for the IT soldiers in the trenches, who hear a lot of FUD and may be questioning their choice of platform. As it turns out, there are a lot of great companies that continue to rely on the box, which continues to run business software reliability, securely, and efficiently decade after decade.

They may not be shouting their IBM i success from the rooftops. But sometimes actions speak louder than words.

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