Timothy Prickett Morgan
-
The IBM i Power10 Upgrade Cycle Forecast Looks Favorable
February 6, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
As we talked about last week in going over IBM’s financial results for the fourth quarter, the Power Systems business increased its revenues by 6.5 percent in 2022 thanks to a Power10 upgrade cycle that started in the fall of 2021 with high-end machines and built momentum in the summer of 2022 as the entry and midrange Power10 machines were delivered in the market.
In general, IBM tells Wall Street to expect that its overall Infrastructure business group will have flat revenues, with some quarters up during the beginning of an upgrade cycle and down at the end of it. …
Read more -
Cloud Software To Drive Enterprise Application Growth
February 6, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Even with something on the order of 242,100 layoffs at the top 40 tech companies in 2022 and another 106,950 layoffs in January alone, according to the analysts at Jefferies, it is still very difficult to find talent to update and extend application software. And that is one reason why the market researchers at IDC think that enterprise software sales will continue to grow in the coming years.
To be specific, IDC reckons that worldwide revenue for enterprise applications – meaning real applications, not systems software that underpins applications – accounted for $279.6 billion in sales in 2022, and will …
Read more -
How Do You Stay In Touch With The IBM i Community?
February 6, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
The IBM i community is global and diverse. There is a lot of things going on in our part of the IT industry, and it can be tough to keep up with everything that is going on with the IBM i platform.
But it is nonetheless important for us all to understand how people are keeping up to date on new technologies and other cultural and corporate things that are happening in our community. Which is why Tom Huntington, executive vice president of technical solutions at Fortra (formerly known as HelpSystems), did a quick poll during the 2023 IBM i …
Read more -
2023 IBM i Predictions, Part 4
February 1, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
We are still getting predictions coming in from the IBM i community, and so we have extended this to 2023 IBM i Predictions, Part 4, even though we are now into February and technically the Prediction Season is unofficially over. You can’t really say “Happy New Year!” starting today, either, not with Punxsutawney Phil coming out of the ground to prognosticate about the short term winter/spring weather tomorrow.
Several people from modernization tool maker and cloud provider Fresche Solutions piped up with their predictions. Marcel Sarrasin, newly appointed as chief services officer and general manager of the transformation business at …
Read more -
Power Systems Did Indeed Grow Revenues Last Year
January 30, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Back in September, when Blue Blue took a huge write-off to offload some of its pension and retirement burdens to an independent third party, it posted a pretty hefty $3.21 billion net loss. But IBM’s underlying business was functioning about as well as it could under the circumstances and it was reasonably profitable and looking ahead to pretty good Power10 and System z16 upgrade cycles. We forecast that IBM would actually grow revenues for Power Systems for 2022, and according to our model, IBM indeed has done it.
And by a much larger margin than the company has grown overall, …
Read more -
Join The 2023 IBM i Marketplace Survey Webinar Tomorrow
January 25, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Last fall, many of you took part in the 9th annual IBM i Marketplace Survey that is done by Fortra, formerly known as HelpSystems. And on Thursday, January 26, Fortra will host the webinar covering its results at 10 a.m. Eastern. A whole bunch of us will be on hand to present historical trends and analysis on those results.
You can sign up for the webinar at this link, which is free and which will last for an hour.
Among the many topics that will be covered are:
- Power10 adoption and future plans
- How organizations continue to
-
It Is Time To Have A Group Chat About AI
January 23, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
The first rule of any technology is that is can be used for good or evil, but generally it is used for something vaguely in between. The second rule, rarely used, is that some technologies need to be tightly controlled because of the global-scale damage they can cause. Nuclear fission and nuclear fusion come immediately to mind. And so does the special branch of machine learning called deep learning, which most people call AI training these days.
I can’t remember precisely when I first started writing about AI training and the neural networks and frameworks underneath them, but I wrote …
Read more -
Multiple Vulnerabilities Pop Up In Navigator For i
January 23, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Why do we network computers again? Remind me.
A new security bulletin was released for the Navigator for i system management interface for the IBM i platform on January 18, which rolls up four different vulnerabilities for Navigator for i that leave it open to log file access, to obtaining file attributes, and to SQL Injection attacks due to multiple other vulnerabilities.
You can read about this security bulletin at this link. The most severe of the issues is the SQL injection attack, which has a CVSS Base score of 6.3 out of 10. According to the bulletin: “IBM …
Read more -
Participate In The 2023 IBM i Marketplace Survey Discussion
January 23, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
It is late January, that means it is time for a discussion about the results of the 9th annual IBM i Marketplace Survey. The survey is performed by Fortra, formerly known as HelpSystems, and the webinar talking about the results of the survey will be held on January 26 at 10 AM Eastern.
You can sign up for the webinar at this link, which is free and which will last for an hour. Among the many topics that will be covered are:
- Power10 adoption and future plans
- How organizations continue to support remote workforces
- The trend towards
-
Is That What You Think Modernization Means?
January 16, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
When most IBM i shops think about “modernization,” what they are talking about is taking legacy applications and in some fashion – and quite possible with many different methods – making those applications work better on newer kinds of clients and/or using newer front-end technologies to make them function better or look better. The researchers at IDC have a more expansive definition of modernization, at least according to a whitepaper that the market researcher recently did on behalf of the Power Systems line at IBM.
That whitepaper, entitled The Key Requirements of Modernization and the Role of IBM Power10, …
Read more