Timothy Prickett Morgan
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Will The Turbulent Economy Downdraft IBM Systems Or Lift It?
April 28, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan
We have always contended that recessions accelerate technology trends rather than slow them down. And if we start heading into a recession either in the United States or around the globe – it is hard to imagine one without the other – it is reasonable to assume that companies will be looking very aggressively to take automation up another level to cut costs further, to generate new lines of business, and to push profits as hard as they can in what will probably be a deflationary environment.
There are a lot of assumptions in that paragraph, so let’s pick it …
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50 Acres And A Humanoid Robot With An AI Avatar
April 28, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan
We have made a joke for over the past year that sometime in the not-too-distant future, when we are born, we will be issued three things: Some kind of unique identifier such as a Social Security number in the United States, a software-based collection of AI agents to teach us and to do self-driven education about the world, and a humanoid robot that can embody that collection of AI agents – one might call it a Purson – to keep us safe as we grow.
This would at least level the AI playing field to a certain extent.
All jokes …
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Sundry Interesting IBM i Announcements For You To Ponder
April 23, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan
We are still picking though the latest tweaks and changes to the IBM i platform that came with the April 8 announcements. We are still also working through our disappointment that there was not one single interesting hardware announcement from Big Blue relating to the Power Systems platform. We are having a bit of iron deficiency, it seems.
First thing first, we noticed this week that the official Redbook for IBM i 7.6, which naturally enough is called IBM i 7.6 Features And Functions, has been published, and is jam packed with 215 pages of more details about …
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z17 Mainframes Give IBM Time To Ramp AI-Accelerated Power11 Systems
April 14, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan
We had been expecting for the Power11 processors and their new Power Systems servers to be announced sometime around the spring to early summer of this year and to start shipping in volume in the summer, maybe in June or July, with a nice sales bump in the second half of 2025. However, now the Power11 launch will be in the second half of the year, and IBM’s Systems group will be counting on a bump first from the System z17 mainframes that were launched last week.
This has happened before, and more than once, and it is a good …
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Plotting Out Power Systems And IBM i To 2040 And Beyond
April 8, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan
It may be hard to believe, but with the launch of IBM i 7.6 today, it has been 13,440 days since OS/400 V1R1 was announced on June 21, 1988, and Big Blue has delivered 27 distinct releases of the OS/400 and IBM i platform with dozens of Technology Refresh interim updates between releases in the IBM i 7.X series.
It took nearly three years to go from OS/400 V1R1 to OS/400 V2R1, and there were no interim releases and Technology Refreshes were not going to be invented for a long time. With the V2 series, hardware and software releases in …
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IBM Buys Snowflake Expert Hakkoda To Speed Data Modernization For AI
April 8, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan
The company may be best known for selling systems and software, but IBM still has a pretty large consultancy and services business even after spinning off a lot of outsource and hosting businesses as Kyndryl several years ago. Expertise is important to any consultancy, which means having the knowledge about how to solve pesky problems that can be applied to many clients, speeding up their projects and bolstering IBM’s revenues and profits.
That, in a nutshell, is what IBM’s acquisition of Hakkoda, consultancy founded as a partner to help IT shops move to Snowflake, the cloudy data warehouse system provider, …
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Maybe It Was April Fools In Some Cases: Price Cuts For Selected Power Systems
April 2, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan
What goes up sometimes comes back down again. We have been chronicling the successive price increases that IBM has been levying on Power Systems, storage, and various software and services products throughput 2024 and into early 2025 to help you keep track of it all. And now, we have an actual price decrease in selected areas.
Don’t get too excited. It probably does not apply to you, and the four cumulative and multiplicative broad price increases we have seen in the past year almost certainly still do.
To recap: IBM raised prices in April 2024, then in September 2024 …
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Picking Apart An Ebullient GenAI Spending Forecast
April 2, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan
In one of the big ironies of our time, companies are embedding AI acceleration functions into PCs that most consumers do not actively want while at the same time datacenter operators (be they captive or independent) are actively trying to get AI compute engines (mostly Nvidia and sometimes AMD GPUs) so they can train their GenAI and other machine learning models – and they can’t get enough of these accelerated servers.
Because a lot of PCs are already enhanced with AI functions, more and more PCs are falling under the label of an “AI PC,” and therefore the market for …
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More Not April Fools: Even More Price Hikes For Power Systems
March 24, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan
OK, this is getting crazy. On March 3, IBM announced price increases for various parts of the Power Systems stack and related hardware and software technologies often used with the platform. IBM also announced additional price increases to rebalance its pricing with respect to the US dollar for eighteen foreign currencies around the world in the same announcement. These price increases will take effect on April 1.
These price increases from March 3 were in addition to ones that it made in April 2024, then in September 2024, and then again in December 2024 for parts of the …
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RISE For SAP Could Be A Boon For IBM’s PowerVS Cloud
March 17, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan
German application giant System Analyse Programmentwicklung, better known as SAP, has spent more than five decades to deliver five major versions of application software to help companies run themselves. They are R/1 in 1977, R/2 in 1981, R/3 in 1992, mySAP.com (which became Business Suite) in 1999, SAP HANA in 2011 with its S/4HANA application suite in 2015. And today, the company has over 400,000 customers.
As is well known, SAP wants to create an application system, which is a phrase that resonates with the OS/400 and IBM i faithful. SAP was founded by five ex-IBMers from Germany and started …
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