Company Locations - IBM i on Power (AS/400, iSeries, System i)

Anyone who’s ever downloaded the free Company List from the ALL400s website already knows it can be filtered many different ways to come up with a much shorter list of the companies you’re really interested in. A list like that is never quite as good as a map you can filter the same way because the information doesn’t pop out at you the same way. A few years ago the website had maps you could drill down on to get a better picture of what was out there. 

Now, thanks to the efforts of Jerry Ponnoth, we have the maps back again. He’s on LinkedIn so if you find the maps useful it might be nice to send a ‘thanks’ his way. Like most of the rest of us he has a job and family so squeezing in the time to do this was no easy chore.

If you go to the home page on the website - https://all400s.com/ - you’ll see something that says ‘IBM i on Power Systems Company Locations’ in the Additional Information section. You can click on the text of the map below it to get to the newest version of the maps. They’ll be updated every month at the same time every month when the Company List is uploaded to the site.

Here’s a picture of the first thing you’ll see when you go to the maps (there’s a lot of data being loaded behind the scenes so it might take a minute for the map to come up). I shrank the screenshot so you’d be able to see everything that’s on the first page. The actual picture is larger. 

What you’re seeing is the 1st tab – the IBM i Statistics Dashboard. There are three main areas on it- the map itself, a Filters section over on the right, and some blocks of summary information at the bottom.

All of the data for all of the years is included by default so if you want to get a more accurate picture of where companies still using the IBM i on Power are located the first thing to do is change the ‘Confirmed Period’ filter. The easiest way to do that is to uncheck the ‘All’ checkbox and then put a checkmark in the current and prior two years boxes. If you only want to see companies you’re absolutely sure are still using the system then only check 2020 box in the Confirmed Period filter.

If you compare this picture with the previous one you’ll see the Grand Total has dropped from 38,045 companies down to 13,297 companies in the leftmost box at the bottom of the screen.

You might have noticed a couple of strange choices in the ‘Confirmed Period’ list. â€˜Off platform’ is the one that usually catches people’s attention first. The label is a placeholder for companies who were on the system at some point in time and then either migrated off of it, closed down, or were merged out of existence. They’re kept in the dataset in case someone sends in an old list of companies using the system and it has one of these companies on it. If the company is already on the list with that label then it’s not added as a new one.

The boxes that have a year with ‘Off Platform’ beside it show what companies were planning to migrate off of the system and when we looked into them. There have been several times when we come back a year or two later and find a company failed to migrate. If that’s the case then we drop the ‘Off-Platform’ part of the ‘Confirmed Period’ description.   

The middle block at the bottom of the screen, ‘State’, ranks states according to the number of companies in them based on the filters. If you click on a state like Texas, which I did in the screenshot on the next page, the numbers in the ‘Industry’ block will change too to give you some idea about the relative strength of each industry in the state.   

One caveat – since only about half of the companies on the Company List have had their industry defined this is more of a ballpark view. At some point all of them will be filled in but that’s going to take some time. We have to confirm all of the corporate locations for companies first. A lot of times lists will come in with only branch locations on them so we have to go find out where their corporate location is, which takes time. (There’s a column on the spreadsheet you can download that you can use to filter the list down to only companies with confirmed locations, a critical piece of information for job hunters and marketing campaigns.)

To get back to the national view just click on the state again.

The ‘Industry’ block at the bottom of the page works the same way the ‘State’ one does. Clicking on an industry will show you how the companies in that industry are spread out over the map. Clicking on it again will bring back the national map.

Here’s a screenshot showing what the map looks like when you pick a specific state. You could also select the state by clicking on the state itself.

The 2nd tab is the ‘State Dashboard’. The picture below shows what comes up on it if you haven’t narrowed it down by any filter criteria. The circles give you some idea about the concentration of companies in any given geographical area. It would be hard to use the mouse to click on some of the states because their borders aren’t very clear so there’s a state filter on the right-hand side you can use to pick the state you’re interested in.

In this picture we picked Texas again with a Confirmed Period of 2018-2020. The results show there are 920 companies that fall within that range, and most of them fall on the eastern side of the state.

There’s a list of those companies at the bottom of the screen. If a company has its website listed in the ‘Web Site Main Page’ column and you don’t have pop-ups blocked then you can click on the site and it will come up. It’s an easy way to get to companies and check their career pages to see if there are any job openings.

This is what the 3rd tab, the International Dashboard, looks like. Countries act like the states did on the 1st tab. If you click on one it will show you how many companies are in that country and display a list of the company names below the map. 

The ‘Confirmed Period’ filter on this map works the same it does on all of the others. 

This is what the 4th tab, the Companies Dashboard, looks like. This has ‘Country’ and ‘State’ filters which can be used to see a list of the detail records that were used to provide the counts in the other maps.  If a company has a website beside it you can click on it. A pop-up box will appear with a grid symbol showing to the right of the word ‘Exclude’ in the pop-up. If you hover the cursor over it will say ‘View Data’. Clicking on that will display the View Data page. From there you can highlight the website, right-click on it, and click on the option to go to the website.

There are many ways the tableau can be used but one that might not occur right away is to capture changes over time. For instance, it can be used to capture time-lapse changes. 

This picture shows 3 snapshots running in a clockwise direction. It's based on the 38,000+ US companies in the Company List shown to be using the system between its start as an AS/400 to its current evolution, an IBM i on Power System, as of the end of March 2020. (If there are really 120,000 companies currently using it worldwide then the location concentrations are likely to be higher but probably not significantly different.) The 1st picture is from all Confirmed Periods, the 2nd shows 2018-2020, and the 3rd shows 2020.

The tableau can be used for many things, like marketing campaigns and job hunting. The only limits are the users’ imagination.      

We will probably be adding enhancements to the Tableau in the near future but a couple of other projects have to be completed first. 

** If anyone comes across an application error when they're using the tableau and it can be repeated by following a specific path could you send the error path to me at john.rockwell@all400s.com? Every now and then an error message box comes up but we can't figure out the path that caused it. We need to know that so we can figure out what's going wrong along that path. Thanks.

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