Timothy Prickett Morgan
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A Few Power Systems Items At The Cusp Of The New Year
January 10, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Welcome back, everyone. We hope you had a joyous vacation, and that you took your vitamins and got your rest to take on a new year.
It is generally pretty quiet in the IT racket in late December of one year and early January in the next year, and the bridge between 2023 and 2024 is no different. But there were a few items that came to our attention that we want to make you aware of.
In announcement letter AD23-1087, dated December 12, 2023, Big Blue has put some 5250 Enablement features that were withdrawn from marketing in …
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In The IBM i Trenches With: LightEdge Solutions
December 13, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
The nature of the IBM i market is changing as the nature of the IBM i installed base is changing. With skills in short supply – and getting shorter by the day – and the work piling higher and higher as companies try to tackle application modernization and integration, different ways of acquiring and consuming compute and storage, and modern data analytics and artificial intelligence, we are entering an age where managed service and cloud suppliers will usurp the position formerly held by the business partners who worked downstream from IBM peddling and supporting on-premises Power Systems machinery.
Because variety …
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Many Different Kinds Of Cloud, Very Big Piles Of Money
December 11, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
From the very beginning, there have been many kinds of clouds. Yes, Amazon Web Services started out with the Simple Storage Service (S3) object storage service in March 2006, and quickly followed it up with the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service, and even though it cannot decide if service is part of a product name or not, AWS set the stage for how infrastructure services (IaaS) and then platform (PaaS) and application software (SaaS) services would be layered on top of raw, virtualized iron.
Many observers thought that in the end, everything would go PaaS and SaaS and IaaS would …
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Happy Holidays To You And Yours From Us And Ours
December 11, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
First of all, thank you.
It is a great privilege and an honor to do the work we do for the IBM i and Power Systems customer base and the software vendors, hardware sellers, and service providers who also serve customers like you. If history has demonstrated nothing else in the more than five decades of IBM midrange computing, it is that we are one single ecosystem, that we are all in this together and always have been.
We did a little bit more content earlier this year, and so that means we can get our Christmas break a little …
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Getting [Stuff] Done Done With Briteskies
December 4, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
The IBM i ecosystem is big enough, and changes enough with the times, that we are still finding companies who are relatively new to the base but who have been around for a bit of time who are doing interesting things and who are not quite on our radar. Part of what we do is seek these companies out so we can tell you about them, what they are doing, what they see in the market, and how they can help you.
Such is the case with Briteskies, a consultancy based in Cleveland, Ohio, that we have written about …
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IBM i Momma Bear Retires
December 4, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Alison Butterill is probably the most famous IBM i visage in the world. For as long as we can remember – which is not necessarily any kind of test we realize – Butterill has been front and center, calming and thoroughly explaining the IBM i platform, being the interface between customers and engineers steering its development, and being its official spokesperson alongside of IBM i chief architect Steve Will.
We are sad to report that Butterill retired as worldwide IBM i offering manager from Big Blue on November 30. And in a manner that is absolutely consistent with her calm …
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IBM i Development Is Getting A Fresche Start With Some Ground-Breaking Subscriptions
November 27, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Cash flows into and out of a business, and capital expenditures are always interrupting those flows. They are yanked out of the revenue streams and depreciated over long periods of time, meant to reflect the value these expenditures deliver. In most cases in the IBM midrange, the machines sit around longer than the depreciation schedule the accountants use, and that is perceived as a kind of free money when it is really a kind of mounting technical debt as machinery and the software that runs upon it fall behind both technically and economically.
Eventually, the technical debt bill always comes …
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AWS Inks Deal With Connectria To Have a Power Play
November 15, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
The long road of history has not been made impassible by the charred marketing tanks and flaming sales assault vehicles of those who have tried to breach Fortress Rochester, but there are a whole lot of rusting machines off on the horizon cluttering the road and more than a few smoking machines nearby as well as some sizable holes in the ramparts out on that cornfield in Minnesota.
While the proprietary minicomputer businesses and the Unix server businesses of the competition of the AS/400 and IBM i platform have all been destroyed and that IBM is indeed the last bastion …
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New GM Wants To Push IBM Power With Hybrid Cloud And AI
November 13, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Three months ago, the Power division within IBM’s Infrastructure group got a new general manager. This changing of the guard happens every couple of years as Big Blue moves executives around so they can get managerial experience across different lines of business, and this time around, it is Tom McPherson who has been tapped for the top job in the division that is the home of the IBM i platform.
McPherson got his bachelor’s degree in electrical and electronics engineering from Rutgers University in 1990 and got his master’s degree in computer engineering from Syracuse University in 1994. We don’t …
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IBM Finally Comments On Db2 Web Query For i Withdrawal
November 13, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
A little more than a month ago, in announcement letter AD23-0691, IBM abruptly announced the end of marketing for all variations of the Db2 Web Query for i data analytics tool.
At the time, neither IBM nor its partner, TIBCO Software – which is part of Cloud Software Group, a conglomerate that owns TIBCO (which bought Information Builders and Spotfire), JasperSoft, and Citrix Systems (which includes products from Citrix, NetScaler, ShareFile, and XenServer) – had anything to say about the partnership between IBM and TIBCO/Information Builders coming undone.
But something has happened between Big Blue on the one hand …
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