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.
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Admin Alert: When Was The Last Time That Library Got Backed Up And More
February 6, 2013 Joe Hertvik
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What’s That Name, Again?
February 6, 2013 Paul Tuohy
One of the great things about writing articles and tips is that people will drop you a note to ask a question or tell you how much they liked (or disliked) what you wrote. But even better is when someone drops you a line to let you know they have taken what you wrote and extended it.
Such was the case with my last tip, What’s That Name?, which described how to go about getting a “record layout” in Run SQL Scripts. I received an email from Lynne Noll, who said she had just written 128 stored procedures, and
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Looks Like IBM Has Some PureSystems Announcements Coming
February 4, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan
We know, as The Four Hundred reported last week that IBM is getting set to launch new Power Systems based on the Power7+ processors on February 5. And it looks like Big Blue is going to be making some PureSystems announcements a week later.
See for yourself:
I have no idea what the announcement is about, but it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that if the two-socket Flex p260+ server node for the PureSystems family was given a Power7+ processor back in November then it stands to reason that IBM will put the Power7+ processor soon into the
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The Supply Chain Is Good To Manhattan Associates In Q4
February 4, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Supply chain and warehouse management software maker Manhattan Associates continues to do well in a cut-throat market, and to do so with organic growth and good, old-fashioned software development.
In the fourth quarter ended in December, the company’s revenues were $95.4 million, up 14.2 percent compared to the year-ago period, with net income rising an even faster 18.5 percent to $12.5 million. That’s a very respectable 13 percent of revenue dropping from the top to the bottom line.
During Q4, software license sales at Manhattan Associates actually fell by 13.9 percent to $14.4 million, but services revenues more than compensated
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IBM Sells First Power 770+ In Europe, And It Runs IBM i
February 4, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Big Blue has announced its first big sale for the new Power 770+ servers announced last October in Europe, and the deal was done at SLIB, a software maker and service provider that specializes in for securities order, clearing, settlement, and risk analysis, among other things.
SLIB, which is based on Paris and which was founded 25 years ago, has over 100 employees and creates software it sells to broker-dealers and a back-end system to run its securities trading platform as a service. Interestingly enough, its securities trading platform, which processed some 15 million stock orders in 2012 for
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Pondering Possibilities With More Power7+ Machines Impending
February 4, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan
With new Power Systems and PureSystems machinery in the works and hopefully set to shake up the market and chase some of those server dollars that Intel is already counting on, now is a good time to stop and have a good THINK. Just like Tom Watson admonished us all to do soon after taking over what became International Business Machines nearly a century ago. If we were sitting in a bar together, we might even think and drink at the same time, as Watson himself did as a young man before he became a teetotaler.
Here’s a funny story,
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Pure Systems Customer Count Breaks 2,300 While Power Takeouts Continue
January 28, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Anything that makes Power Systems–and now PureSystems–stronger makes the IBM i platform that more viable for that more time because IBM’s interesting in any technology is precisely proportional to the amount of profits it can consistently extract from that technology.
And so it was good news to the IBM i platform when Mark Loughridge, chief financial officer, during his conference call last week with Wall Street analysts going over the fourth quarter and full year financial results, dropped a statistic that Big Blue now had more than 2,300 PureSystems in over 70 countries who had bought its PureSystems modular, converged
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Avnet Saw IT Budget Flush Spending As 2012 Came To A Close
January 28, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Not everybody saw IT spending tick upward as last year came to a close, but IT and electronics component distributor Avnet did.
In its second quarter of fiscal 2013 ended in December, Avnet said that its overall sales were only up one-tenth of a point to just a hair under $6.7 billion, with net income dropping 6.5 percent to $137.5 million. But you can’t blame the Technology Solutions side of Avnet, which is a master distributor of server, storage, and networking gear as well as software and services for the data center.
“Our overall Q2 results reflect a stronger than
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IBM Italy Helps Push Power Systems Gear With Rebate Deals
January 28, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Last week in The Four Hundred, I told you about a deal that IBM was offering in Europe to Power Systems resellers who peddled ISV software on top of the systems. As it turns out, IBM Italy has another similar deal aimed at getting customers to upgrade to new Power Systems machines using Power7 processors, and in one special case, a Power6+ server.
In announcement letter ZA132-1014, which was announced on January 15 and then amended on January 23 (when I actually saw it pop up in the increasingly crazy IBM announcement database), IBM is offering rebates to
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IBM Mainframes Jump, Power Systems Drop Ahead Of Power7+ Rollout
January 28, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan
If IBM could control the situation its way, it would probably never launch new Power Systems and System z mainframe systems anywhere even close to on the same cycle because keeping them spaced would allow its Systems and Technology Group to operate more like a multi-cylinder engine, running smoothly, rather than a pile driver, sometimes up and sometimes down. But managing chip designs and system rollouts is complex–being late is normal and being on time is unusual–and companies still think on annual cycles.
I continue to believe that IBM intended to ship the Power7+ chips back in October 2011, which