Timothy Prickett Morgan
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The Subscription Pricing For The IBM i Stack So Far
September 18, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
We have been following the transformation of the pricing and packaging of the IBM i operating system, its integrated database, and the suite of Licensed Program Products, or LPPs, that are commonly installed alongside of the operating system to create a mostly complete system software suite. Last week, we talked about how the machines in the P05 and P10 software tiers would be moving to all-subscription pricing, and this week we are following up with the pricing information we have been able to gather to date as well as talking to Big Blue about the changes.
IBM has been clear …
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New IBM i User Group For The US Midwest Formed
September 13, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Here is something that we don’t see every day in IBM i Land: The formation of a new user group. But that is what Briteskies, an IBM i consultancy and application development and modernization firm based in Cleveland, Ohio, has done by launching the IBM i Mid-West User Group, or iMWUG for short.
“We founded this group to help fill a gap that we noticed in the geographical locations of IBM i user groups,” Leah Avner, IBM i coordinator at Briteskies, tells The Four Hundred. “While Ohio seems to have once had a user group, it doesn’t seem to …
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Low-End IBM i P05 And P10 Tiers Go Subscription-Only Pricing First
September 11, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
We were away for our annual summer hiatus relating to the Labor Day holiday in America when Big Blue decided, as we anticipated in mid-August, that it would begin the shift to all-subscription pricing for the IBM i operating system, the integrated Db2 for i relational database, and the related IBM i Licensed Program Products (LPPs) that have been commonly used by Power Systems customers all through the OS/400, i5/OS, and IBM i generations.
Back in February, subscription pricing for the IBM i operating system and its integrated Db2 for i relational database was made available under subscription …
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How Long Before Big Blue Brings Code Assist To IBM i?
August 23, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
IBM Research and Big Blue’s Software group have been collaborating to bring generative AI capabilities to market through the Watsonx stack of large language models and related tools. Watsonx is a basis for customers to create customized LLMs based on data from their own businesses and to integrate the quasi-cognitive capabilities of LLMs into their applications.
Watsonx is also being used by IBM to augment some tools of its own, and the most recent one that will be in tech preview in September and generally available sometime in the fourth quarter is called Watsonx Code Assistant for Z, which as …
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Say Sayonara To The IBM i Integrated Server
August 21, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
One of the neat things about the AS/400 platform and its progeny is that it takes integration seriously, even to the extent of wrapping the OS/400 and IBM i platform around competitive platforms to bring them into the fold. The File Serving I/O Processor (FSIOP), which became the Integrated Netfinity Server, which became the Integrated xSeries Server, which became the IBM i Integrated Server is a good example of this.
This integrated server approach brought a real, discrete, physical X86 server running Windows Server, OS/2, Novell NetWare, or SCO Unix under the skins of the AS/400 and IBM i Server. …
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Software Price Inflation Helps Boost IT Spending In 2023
August 21, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Datacenter and client device sales are slumping and are expected to be down from spending levels in 2022, according to the latest prognostications for worldwide IT spending from market researcher Gartner. But thanks to exploding budgets for software and services, the market for IT spending across all categories is anticipated to grow at a fairly healthy rate this year – and will do better in 2024, if Gartner is right.
That is a big “if” of course. The only way to accurately predict the future is to live it – and even that is looking dubious sometimes. (Wink.) …
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Generative AI Is Part Of Application Modernization Now
August 21, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Generative AI is funny in that it is both an application in its own right when equipped with a chatbot interface and some intelligent prompting with guardrails to keep it from hallucinating and it can also be used as a tool to either generate chunks of applications based on large language models tweaked with a library of code.
This is the first time that we can think of where the application is the tool or the tool is the application, and it presents a kind of chicken and egg conundrum for IT departments all over the world. Mainly: Where do …
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With Fresche’s New CEO, There Are No Problems, Just Solutions
August 16, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Joe Zarrehparvar was just finishing up his first 100 days as president and chief executive officer at Fresche Solutions when the company has begun its transition to a new subscription licensing model and when he finally had enough time in the job to sit down and talk with us about where IBM i customers, and therefore Fresche Solutions, would be going under his stewardship.
Zarrehparvar has a long and varied career in the IT industry, which started with a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering and electronics from the Manchester College in England and a master’s degree in engineering management from …
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Don’t Have A Conniption If Big Blue Goes All Subscription
August 14, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Big Blue has been pretty clear that it is not only going to put Power Systems machinery in its own cloud as well as those run by its business partners, but that it going to offer hardware and systems software alike under a cloud consumption model with as much of a unified pricing scheme, based on subscriptions, for on premises, IBM Cloud, and partner cloud deployments.
As we have already reported back in February, the IBM i operating system and its integrated Db2 for i relational database is already available under subscription pricing, which includes the license to use the …
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AWS: A Temperate Zone Among A Global Climate Of Other Clouds
August 14, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
It might feel like Amazon Web Services has a monopoly on the cloud, but it does not. As it turns out, AWS does not even come close to having a monopoly, which means having somewhere north of 80 percent of the revenue and probably damned near all of the profits in any given market according to our definition.
Synergy Research has just put out its latest quarterly report on cloud revenues by vendor, and AWS is amazingly consistent over the past six years with about a third of revenues across the hundreds of suppliers of infrastructure services, platform services, and …
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