General Manager, IBM AS/400 Division |
AS/400 IN A NETWORKED WORLD
Presented By William M. Zeitler
General Manager, AS/400 Division
IBM
Audience: (Applause)
Mr. Rudy: Thank you, David. And David's always well-equipped and makes sure that we're all well-equipped, too. Thank you.
One of the things that's crucial to be successful in today's technology business world is choosing the right partners and right platforms to support. Today's speaker is a fellow sailor, so I'm confident that we've chosen an excellent partner.
This morning, Borland and IBM announced the new joint relationship between our two companies to assist you in bringing your applications to the IBM AS/400 server. The new AS/400 application development initiative is an excellent opportunity to help you provide this community with information and access to AS/400 client/server applications and enablers. With the largest fleet of enterprise systems installed worldwide supporting tens of millions of application users, IBM's AS/400 is a great potential platform for all Borland developers to support.
Today's keynote speaker is William Zeitler, the General Manager of IBM's AS/400 division. Bill joined IBM as a developer in 1969. After holding a number of significant technical and support positions in New York and North Carolina and San Francisco, he joined the Application Business Systems Division, the home of the AS/400 as the Director of Market Strategy in 1990. He served in several AS/400 executive positions prior to being named Vice President of Marketing for the AS/400 Division in 1993. In '95, Bill moved to Tokyo on an assignment with IBM Asia Pacific as Vice President of Software. He was appointed to his current position on November, 1996. As a former developer and technical manager, Bill understands what it takes to build and effective development program that is beneficial both to the programmer and the platform provider. He has been instrumental in putting together today's announcements and making sure the right pieces are in place. He recognizes the value of Borland's new client/server development tools for the AS/400 and of our development community. We are very appreciative to have him hear to address us today, Mr. Bill Zeitler.
Audience: (Applause)
Mr. Zeitler: Thanks, Jeff, and good morning. I thought maybe David invited me here because it was Dilbert day, but then I found out I was paying for dinner.
Audience: (Laughter)
Mr. Zeitler: We in the AS/400 Division are forming a stronger partnership with Borland. And I think this is a superb time to be together. Not just because of the partnership we announced today, next week IBM is announcing its Java Frameworks, or San Francisco Project, and just yesterday Borland announced its JBuilder association with that project. Next month the AS/400 Division is making the most important announcements we've had in the last nine years since the beginning of the program. Dramatic performance improvements, dramatic price performance improvements, that will put us at the lead compared to any server vendor in our class of products.
Along with that, integrated Java capabilities. A foundation, we think, for the next generation of growth for the AS/400, for our customers, and for partners like Borland that deliver tools that build applications on our platforms. So I am thrilled to be joining you here today.
When I arrived, though, somebody said if you wear a suit you'll be the only geek wearing a suit in the whole place.
Audience: (Laughter) (Applause)
Mr. Zeitler: It turns out that's not exactly true, because Del Yocam is in the front row, and he has a suit on. But I am told that when Del came to the company he looked like this and then he took his suit off. And so I am prepared. I came from New York, this is what they look like there. But I am prepared with . . .
Audience: (Applause)
Mr. Zeitler: I do have a nice AS/400 Advance Series shirt here. You see some of them around.
Audience: (Laughter) (Applause)
Mr. Zeitler: If you would go to Rochester, Minnesota, and if you're going to go, this would be the time of year to go, the next couple weeks.
Audience: (Laughter)
Mr. Zeitler: But we have 5,000 people who develop and build the AS/400. And more of them would look like this than look like what I did when I got here.
What I want to do in the time that we have together is briefly give you some background about the AS/400. My vision, the IBM vision if you will, of what's happening in our industry. And I think you'll see very close alignment to the Borland strategy, the InfoNets they see developing and what we see happening. And then briefly the AS/400 Division's strategy for taking advantage of our product vision for the strategic period. Some of it will be things that we'll announce in the next few weeks. Some of it will be things that we'll roll out in the strategic period.
But the focus of my remarks are what we think is happening in the industry and how we can work together to take advantage of it, particularly as Borland delivers more and more powerful tools in the Java server space.
And I just want to start with that. The Borland projects that we have together with the AS/400. At our business partner executive conference in February, Borland announced their Delphi 400 Client/Server Suite of products. I imagine that some of you are already using this suite of products to develop applications on the AS/400. There are hundreds of people like yourselves doing so, and it is a suite of products that is getting very strong acclaim in the industry.
I saw last week, and I was showing to some people, a report from an AS/400 newsletter, AS/400 Client/server. Borland didn't have anything to do with this report, and neither did we. As a matter of fact, usually they're not so positive (laughter).
Audience: (Laughter)
Mr. Zeitler: This one compares Delphi 400, Visual Basic, PowerBuilder on 15 things one would look for in a suite of products. And Delphi is the only product that is a leader in all of them and shows itself to be far ahead.
Audience: (Applause)
Mr. Zeitler: This paper which contrasts these products talks about the reason that so many developers and so many customers are findings value for Delphi 400. And it quotes some customers and it talks about the key advantage is you get native access built into the product. Internet access, database access, and one after another, the customers say it's fast. Not just fast to develop, but it's fast when you deploy.
So I think we're off to a good start with this project, and it's not just because of what IBM says or what Borland says, it's because of what customers say. And it's beginning to show itself.
C++Builder AS/400 Client Suite, I think this was on the Borland Web site last night. The AS/400 development initiative is being announced today. A joint project between IBM AS/400 Division and Borland to help developers move applications to the AS/400. We're opening up our porting centers to help developers move and test applications on our platforms. We have a 15-city tour planned together to help recruit people into this environment. We're very convinced that together we have a great market opportunity. The application developer's initiative is about supporting you as you take advantage of that opportunity.
And then as I mentioned, the extensions to the San Francisco Project which were announced yesterday, San Francisco will be announced formally next week.
Okay, that's what we've done together so far. I thought I would give you a little bit of background about the AS/400, for those of you who aren't familiar with it. It's the world's most popular midrange server. Over 450,000 of these systems shipped and installed, 16 million users logging on daily, mostly PC kinds of users although there are some network PCs and network clients and dependent terminals.
We're in every country of the world, support over 40 languages, and over 8,000 business partners have developed the world's largest portfolio of midrange server applications for our product.
We offer products that scale starting from the very small, starting at about $7,000, to the very large, supporting over 7,000 users and well up over $1 million. We have 64-bit RISC processors throughout our product. We have a unique architecture that allows us to protect customers' applications so that don't have to change them as we introduce new hardware technology. We're very proud of the fact that last year we introduced a 64-bit RISC technology. Nobody had to recompile any programs to take advantage of this. We shipped over 75,000 of these systems with just excellent quality, very strong reliability, and the best customer satisfaction we have ever had.
The hallmarks of this product are reliability, quality, built-in security. In the end of the AS/400 commercial, a broad range of customers. There are customers around the world using this product for mission-critical applications. They run their business on it. Every casino in Atlantic City, the Disney properties, every Saturn dealership, every Heineken brewery and Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines. This little thing you can't quite see is the U.S. Rodeo Association. So from Royal Caribbean to people who run rodeos. Nintendo. You may have seen some recent ads that we and Nintendo have done together. A good example of a company, a very fast-growth company, that started with us at the beginning. Stanley Tools. Bayer, the $30 billion German pharmaceutical operation. Enterprise Rent-a-Car, another example, started with one AS/400, now run their entire fleet of 300,000 cars on 23&
nbsp;AS/400s supporting their districts throughout the country. The reason people use these systems -- they're easy to use. They don't take the technical staff that other products do, but most importantly you can deploy them quickly and you can get benefits to your business.
We've had a good history. We have a very, very solid set of loyal, enthusiastic customers and a good, solid base of applications. And it's from there that we launch off for our future.
I want to talk just a little bit about our vision for what's happening in the industry. I think that whether you call it InfoNets or, as we call it, EBusiness, it is very, very clear that the industry is moving beyond web publishing systems and Internet access kinds of systems, to full, Web-based transaction systems. Companies are getting competitive advantages by deploying the Internet, their traditional systems and new kinds of client/server deployments. Borland offers an excellent strategy for doing this. We think the AS/400 offers a strong platform for doing this.
And from industry, you see examples of people doing this. Our vision, my vision, is to take the AS/400 proposition, advanced technology made simple, and bring it to this world of EBusiness, so that people will be able to deploy these InfoNets or web-based transaction systems more quickly without the technical staff and still get the security, reliability, and guaranteed quality that we've been known for.
How are we going to do this? First, incorporate superior integration of industry-leading technology. Not just IBM technology, but the technology that's important to the industry, Java, all of the Internet protocols, and the rest. Faster deployment of solutions I've already talked about. And leadership, service and support to our business partners and to our customers, that's entirely based on the Web. EBusiness, web-based transaction systems used by us in support of our customers.
And the reason we're doing it now, we think, first and foremost, there are fundamental changes underway that are driving companies, governments, to deploy this technology in ways they haven't before. I think when people look back this year, next year, are going to be turning points in the Information Age, when people finally began to get the advantage of network computing, and the content that they have available to them.
And this example, I was in Tokyo for a couple of years working, as Jeff mentioned. And there are examples around the world of people using these technologies today. Banks are a good example. The quote here from the American banker talks about the fact that banks might be doing this from a defensive standpoint, because people like E-Schwabb are getting into this so aggressively. They might also be doing it because Bill Gates said they were dinosaurs. I don't know.
Audience: (Laughter)
Mr. Zeitler: One thing is clear. They have to respond as every other industry has to respond.
Some of you may have seen an article recently about the Salutation Consortium. Salutation is a group of over 30 vendors made up of office equipment suppliers in the main, but also some computer manufacturers, started in the Far East as a response to something Microsoft started called Microsoft At Work, which you probably forgot because it went the way of Bob.
Audience: (Applause)
Mr. Zeitler: Microsoft At Work was going to be an attempt to create a monopoly on the protocols for copiers, fax machines and the rest. People who make copiers, fax machines and the rest, most of whom were in the Far East, thought this was a particularly unsporting proposal. And . . . .
Audience: (Laughter)
Mr. Zeitler: . . . started off on something they called the Salutation Consortium to use the Internet to allow any fax machine to talk to any copier, any copier to be a printer for any network and any device, like a Zorus handheld device, to get to any fax machine or copies.
The first of these products have been delivered. There's a standard set of protocols. The TCP/IP stack, Java virtual machines, will be embedded in all of these devices as we go forward. It's clear this technology doesn't just change banks, it's going to change every kind of device, every kind of office appliance and consumer appliance that people see and come in contact with, every kind of company.
Harley Davidson is an AS/400 customer. They're using the AS/400 for their Web site from their HOG, Harley Owners Group, rally. This is their 95th anniversary rally. You might not think of Harley as being on the leading edge of deploying Internet kinds of technology. But they, like every company, are trying to reach out to broader sets of constituencies.
Last month Caterpillar acquired the rights to an Australian mining software package called Mincon. I don't know if anybody saw this. In the same article, they talked about the fact that Caterpillar had a joint development agreement with Trimble Navigation, the people that make GPSes. Earlier this year, there was a release from OrbCom, low orbit satellites, about their first tests with Caterpillar. What are they doing with all this stuff? They're putting GPS and engine monitoring devices on heavy equipment in mines, in roads and diesel engines so that they can return information to Caterpillar distributors, who by the way use AS/400s all over the world, as well as to the Caterpillar headquarters so they'll know when the machine needs service. They're going to completely revolutionize their part of the business by virtue of combining low-orbit satellite technology, Internet and TCP/IP and Java protocols, and a set of servers that will support this.
So Harley, Caterpillar, banks, office equipment manufacturers, governments. And I'm sure many of you have seen what's going on in Malaysia, the multi-media super corridor. And the kinds of vendors that are supporting the initiative of this government to bring themselves into the next century. Sony, Motorola, IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, Sun, all of the main players are helping these people develop the future because they think this technology's not going to just transform businesses, it's going to offer them the opportunity to transform the way their people live and work going forward.
Dr. Michael Holly, from MIT Media Lab, came to Rochester in January, pretty amazing eh, to talk to every person that we have in Rochester, 5,000 people. And it was fascinating. What we talked about is how this technology is going to pervade every kind of industry going forward.
And we'll talk later, and I'm sure Larry Ellison will talk tomorrow about Network Computers. And it's true, Personal Computers and Network Computers will exist. Network computers will have a strong place in the market. It is also true that there will be a set of devices connected to networks far in excess of anything we've previously imagined. One, two orders of magnitude more devices attached.
There's a soft drink manufacturer in Japan currently putting processors in 680,000 vending machines in Japan. Karaoke machines.
There's a whole class of devices the industry calls tier-zero devices. What are they? Regular appliances, TVs. Things like this that have TCP/IP stacks and Java virtual machines and browsers in them, so they can connect to the network. You can change the way you do customer care. You can change the way you do hospital care. You can change the way your business works. You can change the way to educate people. You can change the way you live.
So we believe EBusiness, InfoNets, this whole series of technologies is accelerating, it is a tremendous opportunity for vendors like ourselves and vendors like Borland and people like yourselves. And how well we do depends on how quickly we respond to it.
And that's what I'd like to talk about for a few moments now. I think we think the AS/400 is well positioned in this market. I won't give a sales pitch here, but we have an object-oriented structure. It is well suited to the way Java is built. And we think we'll have a very strong Java environment. We've made the transition to 64-bit RISC technology. We're using it in conjunction with the RS6000 and IBM Research to accelerate our delivery of technology into the market. And as I was saying, next month we'll see the kind of performance we've never seen in our class of products.
We think we have quality, reliability, security and availability. As the customers bring their businesses to the Web and bring their businesses to new customers and to their suppliers, how secure the system is, how available it is, is it reliable and there all the time are going to be very, very important measures by which somebody is going to evaluate a product like a server.
I'm going to talk about three things here. The first is how we're going to grow in performance and scalability. The second is how we're going to integrate seven specific technologies into the AS/400. And then close with how we're using this technology ourselves to extend our customer satisfaction and quality.
On the product side, scalability and growth comes from the processors themselves, and we think we have a very strong family of 64-bit RISC products. And importantly, that when we made this shift, the operating systems and the applications immediately took advantage of it.
We're in a scale, additionally, with additional SMP enhancements, and extend our clustering capability, which currently allows us to support 32 by 4 ways, and in the next month or so, we'll be 32 by 12 way clusters.
What you see in front of you is a graph that we were using at the beginning of this year to describe the performance we're going to deliver to the market. And the orange bars were 70 percent compound annual growth. And the gold bars were what we actually had in plan at the beginning of this year.
It's worth noting that last year, we deliver 2.8 times performance into the market with our delivery of 64-bit RISC. We're going to more than better this chart. We'll do more than that this year, matter of fact next month. And we're going to go from 4-way systems to 12-way, from 4 gigabyte main memories to 20 gigabyte main memories, and just extend this family. It doesn't stop next month. It doesn't stop next year. We have in front of us the most exciting portfolio of technology behind this product. It's a reason that I would ask you to consider, as you are building server applications, the AS/400 as a very solid foundation in this strategic period.
But performance is only part of this. Most important is what kind of underlying software technology goes with it. And I'm going to talk about these seven -- one could talk for a long time.
Internet and Intranet, data warehousing, Domino, Java, IBM's network station, and then close with two things on NT. How we're integrating more closely there.
People are currently using the AS/400 for Internet and Intranet deployments. And here are some examples. In every kind of industry, with 450,000 systems shipped and hundreds of thousands of customers, you can imagine that in every sort of industry, we have examples of people who started with Web publishing and are now building the interactive Web-based transaction systems that are the future.
Pacific Brokerage is a good example of one of these. If you went to their Web site, it would look like this. We have in the AS/400 a capability to take our regular AS/400 screens and put them in HTML format. And they use this working with one of our business partners to build an on-line brokerage system. I think now they're up to the point where 40 percent of their business comes over the Internet. They have had just tremendous growth. They get about 2.5 million hits a day on their AS/400 Web server. You can do on-line stock, not just quotes but trades. And as a matter of fact, if you went to the AS/400 Web site, you can get interactive tickers from Pacific Brokerage on that site as well. Just one example of how people are using this technology today with tools available today.
What we're doing going forward is investing first and foremost in security. Next month we'll deliver an integrated firewall. The firewall integrated on the bus, completely protected. We've had our -- they call them ethical hackers. That sounds like kind of an oxymoron.
Audience: (Laughter)
Mr. Zeitler: These are these people that work in research and hack into systems for companies, and they tried to penetrate this system. It is secure. It comes integrated into the AS/400, and it is a powerful and exciting technology. Encryption and authentication, SSL technologies, and of course the electronic commerce capabilities that IBM offers and Lotus offers. Net.commerce, Domino.merchant and the rest.
Data warehouse is another exciting area of opportunity for people using an AS/400. Here's just an example of some of the name-brand companies that you would find using this product. Sports Authority. They have AS/400s in 146 of their stores. Every night they get 30,000 SKUs out of those stores into the AS/400 and use it for data warehousing sales analysis. The same is true of people like Nabisco, Bristol Meyers, Toys 'R' Us has internationally over 300 AS/400s installed in stores. And I think that's part of the story here. There's AS/400s everywhere and it's just a great opportunity for people like yourselves. It's a great opportunity for people like us, too, coincidentally.
Audience: (Laughter)
Mr. Zeitler: And one of the reasons they use AS/400s for data warehousing is it's fast. There was an article in Information Week not that long ago about three people who tried to do this on NT and decided that wasn't the way to go and did it on an AS/400. Why? Because they can get it installed more quickly. They could get it deployed more quickly. It was simpler. And that's the story about Toys 'R' Us. It's the story about Sports Authority and a number of the rest of these.
We think that we have thousands of these people doing this already and that this is going to be an important element of these new EBusiness kinds of systems that are built as people want to get access into sales information, share order information and the rest, and analysis with people and their supply chain and the like. And we're extending our capabilities, not just with the kinds of content we manage, but with what would be called universal server concepts, ANSI standards and the rest. And particularly taking advantage of the parallelism we have not just in the SMP, but in the very broad clusters that we have currently.
Lotus Notes is another important initiative for us. Here are some customers using it. The most important thing, not Notes for itself, but Domino and its ability to give you these interactive Web-based transaction systems. HTML, dynamic HTML pages, interactive systems on the fly. And we have a very aggressive program underway. We have this available now on our product, and we've shipped thousands already on what we call our integrated server. But we're going to have a native version and it is in beta test now, and it's enjoying considerable success. The primary value here, you can do it quickly and scale up to 5,000 or more users.
There's probably no single phenomena as important in the market currently as what's going on with Java. Not just for vendors like ourselves or people like Borland, but for customers and software developers who are interested in the real promise of interoperability. The ability to move software from -- have it developed once and move it from one platform to the next. It's enjoying more enthusiasm than any phenomena like this. And I think, very, very importantly for us, and one of the reasons that we want this strong relationship with Borland is the role that Borland has played from the very beginning with JavaBeans, Sun and the rest.
At any rate, we have a controlled beta underway with this product. We have our own set of capabilities integrating Java into the AS/400. If you would visit our booth downstairs, they can talk to you about what we have. If you would visit our Web site, you can see some of the capabilities that we have. We are absolutely and firmly committed to having a world class, second to none, native Java implementation on the AS/400. We know the system itself is well suited to do this. We are convinced that we're working with partners, like Borland, as well with things like our Application Developers Initiative, that we will be able to attract a wide following who will use the AS/400 as one of the server targets for their Java development.
We see a world where PCs exist with network stations along with a whole class of devices, network appliances. IBM, of course, announced the network station last year, and is enjoying considerable success in the market. There will still, of course, be millions of PCs, but that these products will enjoy a strong place.
Beneficial Finance is a good example of a customer rolling these out with AS/400s in this case, into about 1,000 finance offices around the country. There are many other examples of companies large and small, colleges, around the world, who are beginning deployments of these products.
Where we're going in this area is to extend the capabilities first in performance, to give the product more capability for native Java and Java-GUI kinds of uses, but second to deploy what you might call industry-specific units. There are particularly in the retail, banking, point of sale kind of areas, a lot of customers who would like the simplicity of deployment, security, ease of operation of a network station at their teller station, at their cash register, at their kiosk. And so we've already begun demonstrating devices along these lines. We think there'll be a whole class of things here, and we're investing pretty aggressively to take advantage of it. Run on AS/400s on 390s or on any PC server or AIX.
The final area I want to talk about is integration with NT. Many of our customers, like many of yours, have made the decision to use Microsoft Windows 95 or NT as their desktop. We've worked very diligently to make sure that we have seamless integration with that environment and you can manage an AS/400 as an extension of that environment.
In February of this year, we began shipping something we call Operations Navigator. If you're on your Windows 95 screen and you see the ICON that says My Computer, next to it you could see one that says My AS/400. Double-click on that.
Audience: (Laughter)
Mr. Zeitler: I thought it was pretty clever.
Audience: (Laughter)
Mr. Zeitler: It might even refer to Bill's AS/400s, because he has a bunch, too. If you double-click on My AS/400 you'd see something like you see in the screen in front of you. This one, this network had two AS/400s on it. And you could run any kind of thing, operate any function from this Windows 95 or Windows NT terminal as if you were running on a regular AS/400 console. As a matter of fact, you are.
For people from the AS/400 world, they'd say, "Why would you want to do this?" But for people from the Windows NT world or Windows 95 world, this is a very logical extension to the way they're used to dealing with things. And it's fully ActiveX -- it's based on ActiveX. And we have seen some considerable enthusiasm among the users who have started with this product.
Finally, we have a lot of customers who told us that they liked the security, integration, ease-of-use of an AS/400, but they needed personal productivity apps from NT. Sometimes in their insurance agency, their auto dealership, their finance office -- places where we had tens of thousands of AS/400s installed.
We started a while ago working with these customers. And we now have a capability that we're going to announce shortly to have NT on the integrated server in the AS/400. You'd manage this as if the NT product was running on an AS/400. And as a matter of fact, it's on a processor on the bus. We've done this about eight times before. We did it with Novell, and we've had very good success with it. We did it with Lotus Notes. We did it going back years to wireless adapters. So it's a technology we're comfortable with.
The customers that have seen it are very, very impressed. It gives you the ability to manage this as if it was an AS/400. Do all the backups and restores, all the software distribution, all the operations that way, and yet give the personal productivity as if it were NT, because in fact it is. You can put any NT program into the CD reader on the AS/400 and it will run. It is a very powerful technology. It builds on this architecture that we have. It allows asymmetric multi-processing capability. And it's allowed us to get back into multiples in places that wanted this manageability and security of the AS/400 environment yet wanted to take advantages of some of these capabilities from NT.
So lots of product enhancements on the hardware side. As a matter of fact, as dramatic as we have had since the introduction of the program. Lots of enhancements on the software side. Integrating leading-edge technology from Microsoft, Sun, Lotus and the rest.
We're going to extend our capabilities in the customer satisfaction and quality area using this same technology, Internet and Intranet technology, to our own benefit. Extend the way we do service and support, and then some direct electronic support capabilities.
I'm just going to show you these examples to give you some view of how we're using this, how it's changing the way we do business. If you went to our Web site you could get into currently any of thousands of articles that our direct support center. We have 650 people who do phone support in Rochester for customers. The site contains thousands of articles they've published so that end users, developers, can get the benefit of knowledge as quickly as we get it. On our site, you can go to technical support and get access to any of these kinds of information direct to support line, Web builders workshop of the tools available for end customers or developers, so that they'll be able to develop applications more quickly. We get thousands of downloads from these sites into customer locations, not just for technical problems, but to help build the future applications.
The Year 2000 and the hundreds of customers, the hundreds and hundreds of vendors who are already certified as Year 2000 compliant. So this whole thing is extending not just into submitting problems or asking questions, but it's crossing everything we do to deliver support from ourselves to our customers and the developers with whom they work.
We're doing the same thing with some electronic capabilities we have. This is an example of a product we call PM/400, Performance Manager 400. Some of you not familiar with the AS/400, it's always had a capability for sort of phone home, if it was broken to call back and say, "Send some parts and fix me." Perhaps connected to the Star Wars beginning the other night.
Audience: (Laughter)
Mr. Zeitler: Perhaps not. PM/400 allows us to take, if a customer wished, performance measurements and send it back to them saying that they should do some performance tuning and things like that. So we're delivering this over the Web now as well.
And we're going to extend these two ideas into everything we use to do business. The way we take orders. The way we track orders. The way we do configurations. As well as all the service and support. And the real benefit of this is, it gives direct access for every kind of customer, every size customer, into the full support organization that we have.
Okay, that's what I wanted to say about what we see going on in the industry and what we're doing with the AS/400, in three particular areas. We're making the strongest investments we've made since we started the program. I was here at the beginning, nine years ago. In extending scalability and growth. Exploitation of 64-bit RISC, SMP capabilities, broader clustering capabilities, high-end growth as well as very substantial performance improvements on our product priced in the $7,000 range currently.
Second, integrating industry-leading technology so that it'll be simpler for customers to deploy. Things from the Internet space, data warehouse tools, Java, Domino -- just as examples.
And finally, using this technology ourselves to extend what's already a leadership position in customer satisfaction, quality, reliability and availability.
So our vision, maybe like the Borland vision, is that customers are on the very front edge of taking advantage of Internet client/server technologies to build the next generation of applications that will give them competitive advantage. It's true of customers like Caterpillar, Coca-Cola. It's also true of very small firms like Pacific Brokerage and everybody in the middle, governments, schools, and people of all types. That we're just at the very, very beginning of network-kinds of devices that are going to drive two orders of magnitude more transactions into the server kinds of systems that you're building and that we're building. We're convinced that the AS/400 and IBM can play an important part in this by being the integrated, easy-to-use, secure, reliable proposition of the AS/400 to this world of EBusiness. And the way we're going to do it is integrate industry-leading technology whether we invent it, whether Borland invents it, Sun or anybody. If it's industry leading, we want to integrate it into our environment in a totally open way. The benefit the customers get is that they can deploy these systems more quickly, get benefit to their business more quickly, and see the returns from these investments more quickly.
Finally, we're convinced that not just customers like ours, not just people like ourselves, but customers in every kind of industry are going to be able to set new kinds of customer satisfaction, quality kinds of benchmarks, using this same-exact technology. We certainly are committed to it, and that's where we're going.
It's an important time to hold a meeting like this, not just because of the announcements that are being made yesterday and today, but the announcements next week of our Java Frameworks or San Francisco initiative. The announcements next month of the best AS/400 we have ever brought to market. And the opportunity next month, next year, for the next decade, to help customers together with people like Borland, build these InfoNet, EBusiness kinds of applications that are going to characterize the next generation of the Information Age.
I'd like to thank Borland for inviting me. Thank you for your attention. Enjoy the rest of your conference.
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