Timothy Prickett Morgan
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A Few More Power Systems Announcements Before Year End
November 17, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan
We don’t expect a lot of announcements from IBM at this point in the year relating to the Power Systems platform, and in fact, we don’t expect a lot of announcements from Big Blue at all. Except maybe for the usual end-of-year “workload rebalancing,” the 2025 edition of that we saw recently being reported in the Wall Street Journal with very little details.
Here is a weird one. In announcement letter AD25-1276, IBM is reselling an AMD W6499 graphics card, which is based on its RDNA 2 architecture and which has 4 GB of GDDR6 frame buffer memory, …
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Bang For The Buck On Entry Power10 And Power11 Machines
November 10, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Back in early October, after IBM released detailed performance specifications for Power11 machines running IBM i, we put together a detailed matrix of processor configurations from Power8 through Power11 machines, marking every different processor combination for all machines. There are dozens of possible server form factor and processor configurations across those four generations of machines, and it would be very difficult to get pricing information out of Big Blue for all of them.
We poked around the IBM site for Power10 many months ago ahead of the Power11 announcements in July and then did it again after the Power11 …
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Gartner Raises 2025 IT Spending Forecast, Puts Out 2026 Prediction
November 10, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan
If you have your boss pegging your pay increases to the growth in the IT market, you are going to outpace the inflation that is helping to buoy IT spending worldwide. The spreadsheet wizards and economists at Gartner have just raised their forecast for IT spending for the third time this year for 2025, and have also recently put out an initial forecast for what IT spending will look like in 2026.
As a refresher, here is how Gartner pegged IT spending by the major categories back in its July forecast for both 2024, which had ended, and for 2025, …
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What Price Power?
November 3, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan
One of the things that is great about the cloud is that the cost of a configured server instance with a given compute, memory, storage, and network capacity has a published list price, including volume discounts for reserving instances over relatively long periods of time. Similarly, sellers of X86 servers – mainly Dell and Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and mainly for entry and midrange X86 machines – still have online configurators that allow customers to see all of the pricing on components and to actually configure the machines they want to order, making tradeoffs for overall price and feature function and …
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Cloud Revenues Saved By The GenAI Boom
November 3, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Growth in spending by end users on the clouds was slowing and slowing even more as time went by as we expect in a mature and competitive market from the end of 2021 through the end of 2022. And based on the trends that were happening at that time, about this time growth would have probably slowed to maybe 2X to 3X of the growth in global gross domestic product, which is how you know (in my opinion) how a subset of the IT market is mature.
IT markets tend to always grow faster than GDP, unless something weird is …
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Power Systems Grows Nicely In Q3, Looks To Grow For All 2025, Too
October 27, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Here’s a funny thing, or maybe not. In its conference call with Wall Street analysts going over the financial results for its third quarter ended in September, neither Arvind Krishna, IBM’s chairman and chief executive officer, nor James Kavanaugh, the company’s chief financial officer, said “Power” or “Power Systems” or “Power11” or anything directly relating to IBM i or AIX. Nary a peep, even though the Power11 upgrade cycle has begun in earnest and it looks like growth was pretty good in the third quarter and will be decent for all of 2025.
For a long time now, Big Blue …
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Sundry IBM i And Power Stack Announcements For Your Consideration
October 27, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan
There is always a little mop up after major IBM i and Power Systems announcements, and there is usually a trickle of announcements that are not tied to the bi-annual launches of Technology Refreshes, which we generally expect in April and October. This latest cycle is no exception, and we have the mop and bucket out to finish out the current cycle.
In announcement letter AD25-0006, IBM says that it will allow customers to mix and match shared utility capacity for latency compute and main memory activated using Power Enterprise Pools 2.0 om-site capacity on demand with pay per …
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Please Take The IBM i Marketplace Survey
October 27, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Time is running our for you to take the annual IBM i Marketplace Survey from Fortra, and we are asking you to take a few moments and give us all some insight into what is going on inside of your IT organization.
The annual survey, which is in its 13th year, opened up on September 15. You can give back to the IBM i community and help nudge IBM and ISVs in directions that are helpful to you by taking the survey, which you can do at this link.
The results of this survey are an invaluable resource …
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A Bit More Insight Into IBM’s “Spyre” AI Accelerator For Power
October 20, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan
If anything is clear right now, it is that Nvidia does not need to get any richer in the GenAI revolution, and neither does its foundry partner, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. But everyone else, including IBM and specifically its Power Systems business, desperately needs to do something to catch the GenAI wave and make some money in this once-in-a-millennia opportunity.
Our thesis, as you well know, is that for IBM i shops, code assistants that can help document, update, modernize, or port RPG and COBOL application code to newer languages and modular programming techniques is the killer app for GenAI, …
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Big Blue Converges IBM i RPG And System Z COBOL Code Assistants Into “Project Bob”
October 13, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan
We have been anticipating the rollout of the Watsonx Code Assistant for RPG on the IBM i platform ever since IBM previewed a code assistant for the System z mainframe platform in August 2023 to help COBOL shops port their applications to Java on the mainframe. And lo and behold, the Rochester team followed suit, but with a slightly different approach, creating a Watsonx Code Assistant for RPG, which was also created using IBM’s homegrown “Granite” large language models.
Well, apparently, forget all of that. At the TechExchange 2025 developer conference last week, IBM was showing off a new, unified …
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