Timothy Prickett Morgan
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In The IBM i Trenches With: Chilli IT
May 9, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
There are many strengths in the IBM i platform besides its hardware and software architecture or the sophistication and ease of programming embodied in its development tools. The diversity of its partner ecosystem is another strength.
As we pointed out last March with the launch of our ongoing In The IBM i Trenches series, globally there are thousands of resellers, each serving tens to hundreds to sometimes thousands of customers, as well as thousands of suppliers of third party maintenance, of technical support, of programming and system management services, and now of hosting and cloud computing. We want to get …
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Power Private Cloud Gets More Cloudy With Pricing Tweaks
May 9, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
As promised two years ago, Big Blue has been gradually and steadily transforming from a business model where it sells machines and perpetual software licenses and support for the both of them to a model where it sells capacity based on usage like a big cloud – like its own IBM Cloud – does.
As part of the May 3 announcements, IBM has made a few changes to its Power Private Cloud Solution – the word “solution” has become basically useless in the context of IT, just like “offering” has, and I tell writers that I work with that if …
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Power9 Servers Get Updated Flash Drives
May 9, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
IBM may be on the verge of launching its entry and midrange Power10 servers in July, as we reported last week, but that doesn’t mean it will not continue to sell Power9-based machines for now and out past the general availability of the Power10-based systems.
To that end, in announcement letter 122-042, IBM is adding new enterprise-grade flash drives in the U.2 form factor that is roughly analogous to a 2.5-inch disk drive. These new drives, which come from an unnamed source, support the NVM-Express protocol that speeds up flash drives (because they stop talking the SCSI disk …
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Entry And Midrange Power10 Machines Coming In July
May 3, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
If an IT supplier never gives a precise date for the launch of a product – and there are plenty of them that do not – then they can never be officially accused of shipping something late when the delivery date slips. But in the era of Coronavirus, all kinds of things are shipping later than expected and one of them is the entry Power Systems servers based on the Power10 processor. The other one is the midrange Power Systems machine based on the Power10.
In a pre-briefing with Steve Sibley, vice president and global offering manager for Power Systems, …
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Subscription Pricing Coming To IBM i And Power Systems
May 3, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
The advent and evolution of cloud computing – or one might say the reinvention based on timesharing and renting that was prevalent for large systems in the early days of corporate computing in the 1960s and 1970s – has had a lot of effects on the IT market in the past 15 years. But perhaps the biggest effect is to shift IT budgets away hardware acquisition and perpetual software licenses with technical support for both and toward a simpler subscription pricing model that spreads the cost out over time and moves spending on IT wares from the capital expense part …
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The Power Systems And System z Mainframe Cycles Start Anew
April 25, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
If you listen to Big Blue a lot, like we do at The Four Hundred, you know IBM spends a lot of its time yammering about hybrid cloud and artificial intelligence, and how it has domain expertise to help develop applications for very precise problems in very specific businesses and markets. And sometimes in its quarterly financial reports, it can go through the whole hour and not mention Power Systems at all.
But thanks to the beginning of the Power10 product cycle last September with the high-end “Denali” Power E1080 server and the launch of the “Telum” z16 mainframe …
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There Were Actually More Power Systems Price Hikes Than We Thought
April 25, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Last week, we told you about two price hikes on Power Systems hardware, software, and services that were announced on April 13 and take effect for hardware and software on May 7 and for selected Software Maintenances services on July 1.
One of the price changes came in our announcement letter roundup and the other came through the business partner network, and on a hunch on Sunday night with another story still needing to be written, I logged into the IBM announcement letter system to see if anything had happened while I was away last week sitting in the sun …
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Inflation Finally Comes To IBM i Platform Prices
April 18, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
With the inflation rates rising around the world, and particularly strongly in the United States, it was bound to happen sooner or later: IBM is raising prices on key software for Power Systems machines as well as on selected Power9 hardware.
With entry and midrange machines based on Power10 iron just around the corner – probably announced in May around the COMMON POWERUp 2022 conference in New Orleans from May 23 through 26 and shipping sometime in June – it might seem like a weird time to be raising Power9 hardware prices. But there could be a logic to it. …
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Systems Of Record On Premises, Systems Of Engagement In The Cloud
April 18, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
It is said that a picture is worth a thousand words. I guess it all depends on the words, and the picture. But sometimes, when you see a bit of market data that displays an industry trend, it nails exactly what the anecdotal evidence suggests is going on in the real world. It saves a lot of words in that regard, particularly if you are looking for some kind of confirmation that your own strategy is one that is prevailing out there in the IT market at large.
So it was with a chart that we came across recently in …
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Reader Feedback On The State Of The IBM i Base 2022: Third Party Software Conundrum
April 13, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Hey, TPM:
I just read your State of the IBM i Base: Third Party Software Conundrum. What you describe is eerily similar to our situation, but with a twist. I’ve been here 25 years as of last week. We installed a third-party ERP shortly after my arrival. Over the years I have made slight modifications, maintained our annual maintenance, and basically built our business around it.
However, in our case the ISV has (for the last 10 years) not held up their end of agreement. Our last version upgrade was 2009, and basically no “modernization” has been done to …
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