An Update On Power From POWERUp 2023
April 26, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
After so many years of not normal, it is comforting to do something to feel normal, like travel to what used to be the COMMON spring user conference and what is now called POWERUp, and in particular POWERUp 2023. (I am only using the official capitalization there because Jenny will change it during edit if I don’t.) I don’t want to leave the hill I live on, especially after so many years of traveling many times a month, but I must say that I enjoyed myself and had my share of boisterous conversations, beer, and food.
And work, of course. For those of you who could not attend, Alex and I will be going over the highlights and give you the benefit of our eyes and ears. COMMON president Dawn May opened it up with a playful parable, which we are not going to repeat here. (Hopefully COMMON will post it as a video snippet on the POWERUp 2023 site, even if it doesn’t put up the full keynote.) Steve Sibley, vice president and global offering manager for Power Systems at Big Blue, gave the presentation about the IBM i business and the important things that IBM is doing with and for the platform.
Left to right, Power Systems execs: Steve Sibley, vice president and global offering manager; Gina King, director of ISV ecosystem; Dave Nelson, director of IBM i developer; Alison Butterill, the IBM i product manager,
“We had a tremendously strong year in 2022,” Sibley explained. “If you look at results from IBM Power – and remember we launched Power10 at the end of 2021 and we updated it with the scale-out systems just after COMMON last year – we grew double digits last year, and from an IBM i standpoint, a very strong double-digit growth. So IBM i is growing as well or stronger than the platform as a whole. We continue to see customers extend and leverage their capabilities.”
There is not just more money supporting the Power Systems platform thanks to this growth, but there are actually new customers coming to the Power Systems platform. How many, Sibley was not at liberty to say, just like he cannot be precise about IBM i and Power Systems revenues, even though he knows the figures. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission frowns mightily on selective disclosure of financial information.
“I spent a lot of time talking to ISVs and business partners this year, and the other thing that is very interesting to me is that they are actually bringing new customers to the platform,” Sibley continued. “So the community of people that are leveraging the platform and the business overall obviously helps us to continue to invest in the platform and to provide you with what you need to evolve and enhance and grow your applications for your businesses as well. So the IBM i business is really strong for IBM and we will continue to invest in it for multiple generations, and I predict another 35 years of innovation. We have plans certainly for the next decade at least.”
That’s somewhere between 2.5 and 3.3 more generations of Power Systems, depending on when IBM brings Power11, Power12, and Power13 into the field.
Other interesting tidbits of information that Sibley sprinkled throughout his presentation:
- There are more than 100 organizations in the Large User Group, or LUG, and of these, 55 percent of them are using one of the many open-source system software packages that Big Blue has integrated with the IBM i environment. We are a little surprised it is not higher, but we suspect it is growing.
- The integrated Matrix Math Accelerator, or MMA unit, in the Power10 processor has been designed to do AI inference, and right now, in low precision mode doing inference, a Power10 processor all by itself can bet the combination of a Power9 processor and an unknown number of GPUs – presumably the “Volta” V100 GPUs that IBM used in conjunction with its supercomputers back in 2017 and 2018 – by a factor of 8X.
- The Power S1014 is the highest volume Power10 server that IBM ships, and it has shipped “thousands and thousands of them.”
- If you line up the Power9 sales cycle against the Power10 sales cycle, Power10 has exceeded Power at the same point in the rollout and ramp. The revenue figures back this up.
- The Power Virtual Server cloud service from IBM had around 300 customers this time last year, and in the past 12 months it has more than doubled to over 600 customers. Of those customers, a third are running IBM i instances.
- By the end of the year, all Licensed Program Products, or LPPs, in the IBM i stack will be available under subscription pricing as well as under perpetual licenses plus Software Maintenance.
- IBM is offering P05 class machines with hardware under subscription pricing, and sometime in the middle of this year, hardware subscriptions will be available on P10 class machines.
We attended lots of POWERUp 2023 sessions, and have talked to lots and lots of people, and our coverage will continue.
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“…like travel to what be the COMMON…”
Where are you, Jenny?
I think she was too busy laughing to catch the typo… which I supposed is my fault twice over!
Nice to have innovation in licensing / flexibility.
And I know that one have to capitalize on RedHat acquisition and containers.
But… IMHO of course… hyper scale distributed computing does not make sense for a company.
Current OS IBMi architecture is rational and centralized, got subsystems without needlessly instancing tens of “machines” (!), and the current machines have tremendous transactional throughput with well developed software.
Centralized = easy to debug and introspect and explain. These are values.
Have you ever heard of a double entry system, robust accounting package, running your accounts, in the field, that is is distributed around a bunch of machines/containers? I imagine the strong guarantees of such system in terms of transactionality and throughput and how it easy to debug… or a big production system with thousand of fields of information to handle in the business logic?
Not everyone needs to run video streaming or emails to 10 million people.
i.e. that the “next evolution or thing” Merlin, that is a tool for i, runs on “containers”, just leave me with stupor…
IMHO I totally agree with ema.
The AS in AS400 stands for Appication Systems, and application offerings like the hundreds of IBM Installed User Programs (IUPs) which drove literally thousands of new customers to the AS400 in the 1970s have now been totally eliminated from IBM offerings and marketing and in generating IBM increasing revenue and profits.
The IUPS and IBM marketing heve been replaced by the one thousand SAP IBM i customers who do their application processing with SAP.
IBM i executive and senior management has been transformed and reduced from marketing geniuses to mechanics, who cannot even recognize the one billion Microsoft users of Office, or the huge success of Microsoft, Oracle, abd SAP in providing applications that IBM should have provided while dawrfing IBM in annual revenue and profits while IBM declines.