A Letter from the

President

President’s Message

Welcome to LISUG’s Annual May Education Day. This is the third year of our expanded event with two

speaker tracts and a vendor expo. I will begin this session with the proclamation: “The AS/400 is dead, long live the

IBM i”. Our platform started out in 1982 as the System/38. At that time the hardware and the operating system

were codependent. One without the other didn’t work. Over the years the hardware platform has been renamed

several times: AS/400, eServer iSeries, iSeries, System i5 and System i, to name a few. The operating system has

been called OS/400, i5/OS and now is simply called IBM i. The co-dependence that had been true for 26 years has

now ended with the announcement of IBM’s POWER models. The newest IBM systems run AIX (IBM’s Unix),

LINUX and IBM i on a common hardware platform. This radical change has been in the works for years and finally

has come to fruition. IBM i now has a home for as long as IBM has the POWER platform.

Not just the IBM hardware platforms are changing, but the entire IT world is changing. Until a few years

ago, hardware always provided the most revenue to IBM. Today hardware is third behind services and software. So

many things have changed from the time we started our careers, back then...

* Computers were expensive and programmers were inexpensive; today it is just the opposite

* Companies wrote their own programs; today it is mostly off the shelf “solutions”

* Output was to “green screen” displays and 132 column green bar paper; today it is to almost anything

electronic - PCs, Blackberries, cell phones, cars, and perhaps your refrigerator

* Users who accessed your computers were people who worked in the same organization as you; today users

are customers, vendors and ... everyone on the planet with internet access

* Today communication is the internet; before it was ... very complicated and unreliable

* Storage was in bits and bytes; today it is giga-, tera- and peda-bytes

* Computers and programmers were internal; today IT may be outsourced

The list goes on and on. But change is inevitable. Those who change with the times can survive and

prosper. Those who can’t keep up are forced to look elsewhere. The IT world is exploding; computers are doing

more things than ever before. Things that were never possible can be done now that we have inexpensive hardware

and the Internet. The rate of change in the IT world is accelerating. The number of on-line servers and the amount

of stored data is increasing rapidly. Change is opportunity for those who can step up to the task.

LISUG’s role in the changing IT world is to provide education to keep our members aware and

knowledgeable of IT current events. Our plan is to branch out beyond IBM i to complimentary technologies in

order to keep your skills vital and current. I encourage you to contact LISUG board members and voice the topics

that are important to you and we will do our best to provide the most relevant speakers and topics.

This year we are saddened with the loss of Al Barsa, Jr. Please read his Memorial that appears later in this

journal. AS/400 education was so very important to him and that is why he was such a strong supporter of LISUG.

We will miss him dearly for all that he has done for us.

This year our speakers are the finest we have ever assembled: Skip Marchesandi, Debbie Saugen, Barbara

Viola and MindSHIFT/Invision. A special thanks goes out to all of our expo vendors for their support and

participation. And finally, this event would not be possible without the considerable efforts of the LISUG board of

directors to make our May Education Day a success.

Thank you to all and have a great, fun, and educational day.

Charles Kaplan

Barsa Consulting Group, LLC

Barsa Systems Distribution, Inc.