Timothy Prickett Morgan
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Situation Wanted
March 13, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
There have been a tremendous number of layoffs in the tech sector in the past several months, and we are grateful that the IBM i market is part of the economy but also somewhat set apart from the go-go tech sector that sometimes engages in irrational exuberance. But we also know there is a talent shortage and a skills gap in this IBM i market. The question is, what can we do about it?
Well, The Four Hundred can do one simple and easy thing: We can start a Situation Wanted column, which are doing today to help get people …
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The IBM i OS Base Is Older Than We Think, But Moving Ahead
March 6, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Hardware upgrades are costly in terms of money and while it is always exciting to get a new system with that “new computer smell” – and you know what we are talking about – at least IBM i operating system and systems software upgrades don’t carry such a high price – provided you are on Software Maintenance and you do proper testing on your software before you make a jump to a new release.
The other great thing about IBM i systems software is that any given release not only runs on the current new Power Systems hardware at the …
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We Know Security Is A Concern, But What Is Actually Going On?
March 6, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
It is an uncomfortable truth that security is a very high concern among IBM i shops – and consistently has polled as the most important concern for the past several years – but that concern does not always translate into dedicating more resources to security tools or the expertise of others with managed services who can help.
It is one thing to know that security is top of mind, but it is another thing entirely to have a sense of the relative prevalence of different kinds of attacks and the actions of hackers in the wake of a successful attack. …
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The Power Systems Base Is A Little Less Rusty
February 27, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Another three years, and another upgrade cycle that can bring about the modernizing of the Power Systems iron that supports the IBM i customer base. Or, more precisely, another four distinct upgrade cycles that customers are on as they move off legacy iron to something more current than what they have.
What we mean by this is that some customers are stuck on older releases because they are cheapskates by necessity or they have applications that can only run on older releases like OS/400 V5R3, i5/OS 5.4, or IBM i 6.1. Others are stuck on IBM i 7.1. Or IBM …
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IT Spending Growth Will Not Be As Robust In 2023
February 27, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
If you are like other companies in the world, your IT budget as 2023 is getting caught in the pinchers between inflation making IT hardware, software, and services more expensive and the jitteriness of the economy, both locally and globally, that is making company owners and managers a little less hesitant to spend in the first place.
The good news, as we are fond of saying, is that an economy cannot go to zero unless there is a zombie apocalypse, a nuclear war, an electromagnetic pulse event, or an invasion by aliens. The funny thing about February 2023 is that …
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IBM i Subscription Pricing Comes To All Power9 And Power10 Iron
February 20, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Big Blue has been gradually “cloudifying” the packaging and pricing of its Power Systems hardware and IBM i software stack as an alternative to buying hardware outright and acquiring perpetual licenses to the operating system and pay Software Maintenance. Subscription-based pricing came to hardware and software for the Power10-based Power S1014 server running IBM i 7.5 last year, and now IBM i subscription pricing is more widely available.
As outlined in announcement letter 223-030 on Valentine’s Day last week, IBM i subscription pricing is now available on all Power9 and Power10 servers, top to bottom, and on the four current …
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A Hodge Podge Of Power Systems Stuff
February 20, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Sometimes Valentine’s Day falls on a Tuesday and ends up being a kind of lightweight Power Systems announcement day. That happened last week as IBM’s top brass in the Power Systems division discussed the priorities for the Power Systems line in 2023, which we covered in the top story in last Wednesday’s issue, and the subscription-based pricing for IBM i on all Power9 and Power10 machines, which we covered in this week’s top story.
There is always some other stuff that IBM does on Power Systems announcement day, and February 14, 2023, is no exception.
Announcement letter 120-017 has …
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IBM’s Power Systems Battle Plan To Take On 2023
February 15, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Human beings treat every year as if they are distinct, and that means businesses have to do the same. Strategies evolve over time and deal with discontinuities like recessions, but tactics are ever-changing as companies cope with the conditions on the ground, not the view from the headquarters. And thus, the Power Systems segment within IBM’s Systems division within its Infrastructure group is no different, but this year is a bit different as the top brass in Power Systems are actually giving us some insight into the battle plan for the year.
Ken King, general manager of the Power Systems …
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AIX: The Last Standing Commercial Unix
February 13, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Nearly six decades ago, a bunch of researchers at AT&T Bell Labs, MIT, and General Electric started work on a new multi-user operating system for General Electric mainframes called Multiplexed Information and Computing Service, or MULTICS. After four years of work, the project was mothballed, but was reborning when Ken Thompson, a researcher at Bell Labs, created a single-user operating system based on the ideas behind MULTICS to run on a PDP-7 that Ma Bell had laying around.
And thus UNICS – and what would eventually become Unix and the whole open systems revolution – was born. With Unix came …
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Cutting IT Costs Is Not A Priority, And That’s Good News
February 13, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
For the past nine years that Fortra (formerly HelpSystems) has been putting together the IBM i Marketplace Survey, one of the first things we always look at is the Top IT Concerns part of the survey results. It is a barometer that tells you what IBM i shops are thinking might happen in the future even if it is not an actual prediction about what will happen in our economy and the IBM i community.
It’s sentiment informed by the budgetary processes that were at work as 2022 came to a close.
The most important thing I look at every …
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