?

The Infor EMEA System i User Survey 2013Infor’s EMEA System i Survey 2013 was carried out during March and April 2013

with over a thousand manager or higher decision-makers invited to participate.*

Up-to-date IBM i is the key to reliabilityUnsurprisingly, when asked whether their business system is “very reliable”, not one of the respondents running their mission-critical business systems on System i, disagreed. 92.5% agreed and the remaining 7.5% were “neutral”.

System

i 7.1100% Very Reliable

System

i 5.497% Very Reliable

Scrutinising the 7.5% who remained neutral on reliability, all but one were on System i 5.4 or earlier, the earliest version of the O/S still supported and slated for withdrawal of standard maintenance in September 2013 – suggesting that it’s only those who may have fallen behind on updates and maintenance who may be at a slight risk of reduced levels of reliability.

The first ever System i virus? To our surprise, a sole respondent disagreed slightly with the statement that they had never experienced a virus on their System i platform. There is currently no known virus which targets or infects System i, however it is theoretically possible for an infected PC user, to save an infected file to a System i file server. Although harmless to the server, the file can potentially be redistributed to another PC. Additionally, a virus running on an infected PC can potentially damage files on any network drive to which it has access.

Over-confidence in backups? The clear picture is one of System i users having very high confidence in their ability to recover 100% of their data in the event of data loss.

However this high degree of confidence contradicts the anecdotal experience – that many companies rarely test their backups and when it comes to a restore they often find that the backup is faulty or incomplete, that over-used tapes have begun to fail, and supposedly off-site tapes somehow happen to not be off-site at the moment a fire or flood strikes.

Declining skill base When asked whether attracting and retaining critical IT skills was becoming a problem, over half of respondents agreed.

I RPG

86% Confident

12% Neutral

2% Lack confidence

52% Agreed

26% Neutral

22% Disagreed

Mystified about the cloud? When asked whether cloud could help address skills shortages on IBM i more than half of users participating in the survey sat on the fence, suggesting that System i users are unsure as to how the cloud computing model could be applicable to them.

53% Neutral

33% Thought Cloud couldn’t help

14% Thought Cloud

could help

You’re Power™-Hungry It was suggested to participants in the survey that they were uncomfortable with the risk and cost of operating old hardware. A small minority of respondents disagreed with this statement and most agreed they would indeed be more comfortable on newer hardware. The figures were almost identical for IBM i operating system software.

58% Agreed they are power hungry

23% Neutral

19% Disagreed

Green Screen Some might find it surprising that for a platform perceived widely to be green screen, only a quarter of respondents said their users were to some degree unhappy with its appearance or user interface. And the vast majority of those experiencing issues were running early versions of the operating system.

42% Happy

System i is good for business When asked whether users are able to access the data they need to run the business, 71% agreed, with the vast majority of the remainder giving a neutral answer. Only 8% disagreed – proving that even a mature business system, kept up to date, will often continue to serve the business needs very well.

71% Agreed

21% Neutral

8% Disagreed

90% of users appear to plan further investment in the platform:

When asked about four possible areas for investment: Reporting and Analytics, Additional Functionality, Going Mobile, and 24x7 High Availability, 90% of respondents indicated at least one area was either a need or a priority for investment.

Even of the 10% not planning any further development, the vast majority believe that System i would support their business needs for the next 10 years.

Infor would like to thank the participants in the EMEA System i Attitudes Survey for helping to raise €500 for

“Habitat for Humanity”, by their participation. Habitat for Humanity is an international, non-governmental, non-profit organisation devoted to building ‘simple, decent and affordable’ housing for people in need.

* Due to a small minority of end-users maintaining old System i applications purely for archive purposes, and to ensure the survey is representative of businesses running their mission-critical applications on System i, only those still running their mission-critical applications on System i were included in the results.

To access the full survey report please visit: www.inforsystemi.com/survey

©Copyright 2013. Infor. All rights reserved.

Reporting and Analytics

When asked whether total cost of ownership of their system compares well with alternatives, only 5.5% disagreed.

System i still overwhelmingly means value for money

62.7% Agreed

31.8% Neutral

5.5% Disagreed

92.5% agreed

31% Neutral 27%

Unhappy to some degree

24x7 High AvailabilityAdditional Functionality Going Mobile