Timothy Prickett Morgan
Timothy Prickett Morgan is President of Guild Companies Inc and Editor in Chief of The Four Hundred. He has been keeping a keen eye on the midrange system and server markets for three decades, and was one of the founding editors of The Four Hundred, the industry's first subscription-based monthly newsletter devoted exclusively to the IBM AS/400 minicomputer, established in 1989. He is also currently co-editor and founder of The Next Platform, a publication dedicated to systems and facilities used by supercomputing centers, hyperscalers, cloud builders, and large enterprises. Previously, Prickett Morgan was editor in chief of EnterpriseTech, and he was also the midrange industry analyst for Midrange Computing (now defunct), and its editor for Monday Morning iSeries Update, a weekly IBM midrange newsletter, and for Wednesday Windows Update, a weekly Windows enterprise server newsletter. Prickett Morgan has also performed in-depth market and technical studies on behalf of computer hardware and software vendors that helped them bring their products to the AS/400 market or move them beyond the IBM midrange into the computer market at large. Prickett Morgan was also the editor of Unigram.X, published by British publisher Datamonitor, which licenses IT Jungle's editorial for that newsletter as well as for its ComputerWire daily news feed and for its Computer Business Review monthly magazine. He is currently Principal Analyst, Server Platforms & Architectures, for Datamonitor's research unit, and he regularly does consulting work on behalf of Datamonitor's AskComputerWire consulting services unit. Prickett Morgan began working for ComputerWire as a stringer for Computergram International in 1989. Prickett Morgan has been a contributing editor to many industry magazines over the years, including BusinessWeek Newsletter for Information Executives, Infoperspectives, Business Strategy International, Computer Systems News, IBM System User, Midrange Computing, and Midrange Technology Showcase, among others. Prickett Morgan studied aerospace engineering, American literature, and technical writing at the Pennsylvania State University and has a BA in English. He is not always as serious as his picture might lead you to believe.
-
IBM Previews New Power Tech At TechXchange Event
October 21, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan
I wish we could tell you what was up, but we don’t know what it is. But we do know that all of the top tech brass at Big Blue related to the Power Systems platform are going to be participating in the keynote address at IBM’s TechXchange 2024 event in Las Vegas – what we used to call PartnerWorld – on Tuesday.
Like a bad AI model with not enough parameters and not enough data broken down into tokens, we have to try to infer from first principles what IBM might be announcing and therefore what we might see …
Read more -
IBM Working On Making Enterprise Java Easier
October 21, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Java is important in the enterprise, and getting more important, and IBM wants to help make managing and using Java easier.
At this time last year, there were 26.3 million application developers in the world, and according to CodeNinja, about 20 million of them were reasonably fluent in JavaScript, nearly double the number six years ago. (We are not sure if CodeNinja is counting Node.js as a variant of JavaScript, as it probably should.)
Java, a much older cross-platform language and the lingua franca of business logic in the enterprise, is not as large but is seeing a bit …
Read more -
Sundry Hardware Announcements Accompany IBM i TR Updates
October 14, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan
With high-end Power10 machines coming out in September 2021 and most of the Power10 lineup coming in July 2022, we don’t expect much in the way of substantial Power10 system announcement at this point in that processor’s lifecycle. The “Bonnell” entry Power S1012 machine from this year May is, in fact, probably the last Power10 machine to come out the door until Power11 systems come out next year some time.
But IBM is always tweaking things here and there when it comes to hardware features and bundles, and so it is with the October IBM i platform updates. We saw …
Read more -
Power Systems Management Stack Updated Alongside TR Updates
October 14, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan
If there are Technology Refreshes for the IBM i stack and new Technology Levels for AIX, then that means IBM has also updated a slew of systems software and middleware that runs atop these stacks. This being the fall, then we knew that TRs were coming for IBM and we therefore knew that updates were coming for PowerVM, VIOS, PowerVC, Cloud Management Console, and the Hardware Management Console.
The enhancements for these collections of software were part of the October 8 announcements, were detailed in announcement letter AD24-0630, and will be available for electronic download on December 12 this …
Read more -
Private PowerVS Pods Now Available For On-Premises Power10 Iron
October 7, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan
The number of system vendors that also run clouds, or cloud vendors that also sell systems, is very small because doing both is exceedingly capital intensive – one for research and development, and the other for acquiring gear and deploying it so its capacity can be rented to others.
Dell and Hewlett Packard Enterprise, the two biggest server OEMs in the world, both tried to build clouds and failed, and so did VMware now that we think about it. Oracle bought its way into the systems business with its 2009 acquisition of Sun Microsystems, and while it no longer …
Read more -
What Exactly Is IBM Cloud Pak System Software Suite 2.3.5?
October 7, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan
When I moved to New York City back in 1989, I didn’t have to worry much about directions. Like most new New Yorkers, I built a small town of my own out of the locations of my apartment, my work, a few restaurants, and a few bars, and the rest of the vast island of Manhattan was a big, living movie set.
It wasn’t until I had my first child a decade later that I was in a car and understood how maddeningly bad signage was in the Big Apple, and indeed in many other places. And it was so …
Read more -
IBM Is Running Out Of DDR4 Memory Faster Than It Thought
September 25, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Back in August, we told you about how Big Blue was shifting away from the DDR4 main memory chips and towards DDR5 main memory chips for Power10 systems, which were designed expressly to support both types of memory.
This is just like Power8 servers were designed to support both DDR3 and DDR4 memory, with the latter coming halfway through the Power8 product cycle. The Power9 machines used DDR4 memory solely, and the Power10 is getting support for DDR5 a little late in its cycle, given that we expect Power11 servers next year. Presumably the Power11 servers will just support DDR5 …
Read more -
How Ya Doing Out There?
September 23, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan
We keep track of a lot of things on your behalf here at IT Jungle.
We cover all of the major product announcements from Big Blue, giving you the feeds and speeds, competitive analysis, pricing and performance analysis, and other issues that you need to consider as you keep your Power Systems platforms current and supporting your business.
We watch all of the changes in the IBM i stack, Technology Refresh and PTF updates, and we do the best that we can – and we think better than anyone else in the market – to keep track of what the …
Read more -
Big Blue Makes The Case For IBM i P05 And P10 Subscriptions
September 16, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan
We have been chronicling the transformation of the IBM i software stack from perpetual licenses with tech support to the more modern and now more normal subscription pricing that we have for both commercial and consumer software and other services these days.
The last program in the stack to move from perpetual to subscription for the IBM i P05 and P10 software tiers was Backup, Recovery and Media Services for i (5770-BR1), which was sunsetted on August 27 in announcement letter AD24-0665, and on January 1, 2025, you will not be able to order a perpetual license to BRMS …
Read more -
CICS Transaction Server For IBM i Is Sunsetted
September 16, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Way back during the Y2K crisis at the turn of the century, there were a lot of IBM mainframe shops that decided to port their COBOL applications and their related CICS transaction monitoring software to OS/400 rather than try to move to a new language and a new transaction monitor.
Mainframe COBOL and CICS are a bit different from OS/400 – and now IBM i – COBOL and CICS, but there was enough similarity that companies with large COBOL/CICS estates could make the jump from the ES/9000 to the AS/400 and IBM i platform, and thousands of such companies – …
Read more