iPulse 2010 Survey Results

The iPulse 2010 Survey, organized by LANSA, ran during September 2010 and was promoted to the global IBM i community via email, social media and publicized by all the leading industry media outlets like Intelligencer Magazine, IT Jungle, CIO Magazine and System iNetwork.

Over 1,700 participants worldwide completed the survey, representing the views from a broad range of industries across 50 different countries.  The survey was taken by a cross-section of people whose job roles were as follows:

• Business Management – 36%
• Developer / Analyst – 36%
• Project Management – 12%
• Operations – 10%
• Other (vendor, journalist, consultant, etc) – 6%

1. Is the future of your IBM i system under threat? This answer is one of the most anticipated results of the survey because there is so much speculation and misinformation about the future of the platform.  The majority of respondents felt that the threat level to the platform was ‘low to none’ and a minority of just 17% felt there was a high level of threat.  The exact breakdown (represented as percentages of the total) is as follows:

• High – 17%
• Medium – 19%
• Low – 38%
• None – 26%

2. People’s future plans for their IBM i applications will, to some degree, correlate with how under threat the platform is felt to be. For instance, it is unlikely that the budget for continuing new development would be found in a high threat situation. The overall survey results indicated that modernizing and continuing new development is what the majority of organisations intend to do.  The full results are as follows:

• 38% will continue to develop new applications on the IBM i
• 25% of applications are idling in maintenance mode
• 20% will modernize their existing applications
• 12% say they will migrate to another platform
• 5% say they are moving to a package

3. Taking into consideration the state of the global economy, it may come as no surprise to learn that virtually half of the respondents stated that their budget for investing in new software for the IBM i is ‘Zero’.  If true, this means that many small vendors without critical mass will struggle and therefore buyers are advised to check the size and financial health of new vendors. Results are as follows:

• Zero to invest – 49%
• Less than $10,000 to invest – 14%
• Between $10,000 and $25,000 to invest – 12%
• Between $25,000 and $50,000 to invest – 9%
• Between $50,000 and $100,000 to invest – 7%
• Over $100,000 to invest – 9%

4. Participants were asked where their software budget would most likely be invested. The most popular investment category was in the area of Application Development.  However, looking at the results, considerable investments are planned in all areas:

• Application Development – 26%
• Application Modernization – 23%
• Web Enablement – 22%
• High Availability and Disaster Recovery – 15%
• Utilities (back-up, ops, scheduling, etc) – 15%
• Business Intelligence – 14%
• Application Integration (B2B, EDI, FTP) – 12%
• Document Management and Workflow – 12%
• Security – 11%
• Other – 9%

5. Finally, we asked participants to list who they perceived to be the leading vendors in the product categories defined above.  This was an optional section, with free text entry, and therefore not a particularly scientific study; but interesting never the less. We have normalised the data such that the score for, say, Vision includes their brand names like MIMIX and iTERA.

The content of this report and all data resulting from the iPulse Survey is the property of LANSA.  This information and data set in whole or in part must not be reproduced, combined with other data or otherwise processed or published without written permission from LANSA.  Such requests should be directed by email to info@lansa.com.  However, this information can be reproduced in the correct contextual format with a citation stating “Data Source – iPulse Survey 2010 – copyright LANSA.”  So, journalists/bloggers, feel free to discuss pieces of this survey on your own web/blog site, but then direct interested parties to this iOpener page (https://blog.lansa.com/general/ipulse-2010-survey-results)  for the full report and analysis.