Timothy Prickett Morgan
-
The IBM i Base Did Indeed Move On Up
January 21, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan
This time last year, in the wake of the 2018 IBM i Marketplace Survey report put together by HelpSystems and based on survey data gathered in the fall of 2017, we said that the IBM i base was ready to move on up to newer iron. And guess what? Based on the results of the survey done in October 2018 and released in the 2019 IBM i Marketplace Survey unveiled last week, it looks like a pretty healthy portion of the base did in fact get off older iron and move to shiny new Power9 iron. In some cases …
Read more -
IBM Boosts Prices On Lab Services Engagements
January 14, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Happy New Year, you have a price increase! On January 1, in announcement letter 319-030, IBM announced a pricing action and you might have not even noticed it, since it was not presented to customers in the normal wrap up of product announcements, withdrawals, and price changes that Big Blue puts out every week. We certainly didn’t see it mentioned. At any event, because we don’t trust that IBM puts everything out at once, we often periodically take a look back in the archive to see if “new” old announcements pop up.
In any event, on January 1, IBM …
Read more -
Listen In To The 2019 IBM i Marketplace Survey Webcast
January 14, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Many of you took the survey last fall, and now it is time to go over the results and take the pulse of the IBM i customer base.
On January 17, Tom Huntington, the executive vice president of technical solutions at HelpSystems, will host two webinars going over the results of the survey, and I plan to attend as do two other familiar IBMers – Alison Butterill, IBM i product offering manager, and Ian Jarman, who had that job before and is now an executive in the IBM Lab Services division – to talk it all out.
This is the …
Read more -
IBM’s Plan For Etching Power10 And Later Chips
January 7, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Last summer, GlobalFoundries, the chip making conglomerate comprised of the foundry businesses of AMD and IBM plus Chartered Semiconductor Manufacturing, put the kibosh on its planned aggressive ramp of 7 nanometer chip making technologies. AMD and IBM, who both depended on GlobalFoundries for their server chip manufacturing, obviously knew well before this announcement that GlobalFoundries was going to be halting development and production ramp for 7 nanometers, so they were not left in as much of a lurch as it might seem.
Lucky for both companies, there is more than one foundry that was trying to stay on the bleeding …
Read more -
Happy Holidays From IT Jungle
December 12, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan
And now we come, once again, to the holiday season here at IT Jungle. This coming year, which we are already planning for, we enter the 30th year of publishing news, tech tips, strategy, and tactics concerning the AS/400 and its progeny. It has been such an education for all of us, and a privilege and an honor to serve the AS/400, iSeries, System i, and IBM i communities all those years, as well as those many shops who hung back in the early years on the System/36 and System/38 platforms while we are thinking about it.
We are …
Read more -
For Entry IBM Shops, Power9 Is About Performance And Security
December 10, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Buying new systems costs money, often a lot of money relative to the size of the overall IT budget and the revenue and profit streams of the companies for which they work and, in essence, actually embody what that company really is. So in a sense, systems are always worth the money if they are actually letting people do their work properly.
That said, there is always an argument to be made for doing an upgrade – often actually a migration because the system itself cannot easily or economically be upgraded – and another set of arguments for waiting a …
Read more -
Goosing Big Iron Power Systems With Power9 Migrations
December 3, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan
The Power9-based servers from IBM’s Cognitive Systems division have been rolling out over the course of the past year, and the big iron has been in the field only since the late summer but has perhaps had the largest impact on the revenue and profit stream for the Power Systems line, excepting maybe the installation of the “Summit” and “Sierra” supercomputers for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Lawrence Livermore Laboratory.
As has been the case since the AS/400 line debuted in 1988 and even with the combination of the System/36 (low-end and midrange) and System/38 …
Read more -
Some Insight Into The IBM i On Power Systems Base
December 3, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan
IBM is pretty secretive about its systems business, but is really no worse than its peers in this regard. Big Blue wants to get enough information out there to keep customers comfortable about the future, keep Wall Street happy about its revenues and prospects for the immediate future (meaning one to three quarters out), and keep its competitors from getting too much insight into how it is doing in the systems racket.
Every now and then, we get some insight into how the Power Systems business is doing, and as part of a discussion we had recently about upgrade and …
Read more -
Japan Is A Different IBM i Market, But The Loyalty Is The Same
November 26, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Back in early November, we did an overview of the IBM i market in Japan, which accounts for about 10 percent of the IBM i installed base and is third to North America and Europe, which have always dominated the AS/400 and follow-on IBM midrange markets.
In this follow-up story, we wanted to dig a little deeper and talked to two downstream resellers, Bell Data (which is a publishing partner of The Four Hundred in Japan) and Star Computer, which is a downstream partner from iGuazu, the largest distributor of Power Systems with IBM i machinery in the country. …
Read more -
Gartner Shaves 2018 And 2019 IT Spending Projections
November 26, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan
There are a lot of different pressures in the 185 countries that comprise most of the economic activity on Earth, and there is no shortage of uncertainty out there. But two things are always constant here in the late 20th century and the early 21st century. The first is that uncertainty is always there, even though it gets more or less volatile from time to time. And the other is that companies will continue to invest in hardware, software, services, and telecom services.
They have no choice, living in the future as we do.
The prognosticators at Gartner have taken …
Read more