Timothy Prickett Morgan
-
The State Of The IBM i Base 2022: Third Party Software Conundrum
April 11, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Aside from death, most problems are not intractable. But people surely can be, and sometimes are. But luckily not often, and the thing about people is that, generally speaking, they can be reasonable when they are reasoned with. It is with all of this in mind that we come to the next in the State of IBM i Base stories for 2022, where we want to talk about the software trap that the remaining OS/400, i5/OS, and some IBM i shops have gotten themselves into and how we might help them get out of it to the mutual benefit of …
Read more -
Reader Feedback On State Of The IBM i Base, IBM i Salaries
April 11, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Hey, TPM:
I have been enjoying your series on the state of the IBM i environment. Those and other recent IT Jungle articles have helped me better understand some of the things that I am seeing as a training vendor.
As you and I have often discussed, the IBM i market has divided into two groups: the roughly 30,000 active customers and 120,000 others. My company, Manta Technologies, has customers among both groups.
As a former math professor, I tend to think in Venn diagrams. I had to fight the urge to pull out the colored pencils when I read …
Read more -
7.1 Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest
April 4, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
We think there is a lot of Power7, Power7+, and Power8 iron out there in the Power Systems running IBM i base, and we think there is a lot of IBM i 6.1 and IBM i 7.1 running on that iron. Our assertion is based on years of anecdotal evidence from the resellers and business partners we talk to, the customers we talk to, and a whole lot of spreadsheet witchcraft that we do based on survey data we see.
The point is not just to come up with this data and then drop it and run, but to face …
Read more -
Father, Son, & Co: Kisco Systems Drills Down On Security
April 4, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Rich Loeber was a divisional IT manager for over 16 years before he founded Kisco Information Systems in June 1984, four years before the AS/400 was launched. The System/36 had just launched the year before, and the System/38 had been around and in production for a handful of years at that time. Loeber founded Kisco – presumable named after Mount Kisco, a town in the Hudson Valley in New York State – to offer data processing services to IT shops in the New York metropolitan area.
Two years later, Kisco became an independent software vendor in the IBM midrange, and …
Read more -
The State Of The IBM Base 2022, Part Three: The Rusting Iron
March 28, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
In the past several months, we have been drilling into the results of the annual IBM i Marketplace Survey that HelpSystems does every fall and then reports on each January. We have been taking our time going through the results, and in a number of cases we have been doing our own spreadsheet magic on top of the raw data to provide what we think is better information that describes the current state of the IBM i base.
In our first story, we talked about the distribution of operating systems over time, spanning from the 2015 report to the …
Read more -
Yet More Trimming In The IBM Power Systems Catalog
March 28, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
It is hard to say what is really happening at this point, but either IBM has simply run out of features for Power8 and Power9 servers, it can’t get anyone to manufacture any more of them, or it simply wants to use every means it can to get the market ready to move to Power10 machines when they come out in May or June.
Perhaps it is a bit of all three, eh?
In announcement letter 922-018 last week, IBM said that effective on March 22 it was no longer selling the RISC-to-RISC data migration feature #0205 for the Power …
Read more -
In The IBM i Trenches With: LaserVault
March 21, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
When somebody says they have been doing the same job for three or four decades, that is a big deal in the 21st century because that kind of long-term employment is just not something anyone counts on. In the OS/400 and IBM i market, such constancy and longevity is, well, normal. Unremarkable. Expected. Good.
So it is with Brad Jensen, the founder and chief executive officer of Electronic Storage Corporation, a company that is perhaps best known for its LaserVault virtual tape library software, but since the company was founded in 1989 in Tulsa, Oklahoma, it …
Read more -
If It Can Move To Cloud, It Will; If It Can’t, It Won’t
March 21, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Cloud is a distribution model more than it is a technology transition in the datacenter, and even before Amazon Web Services launched in March 2006, a lot of us were contemplating returning to the time-sharing, utility model of compute. It was a natural thing after enterprise IT shops dealt with decades of best-of-breed computing and systems integration as well as a wave of outsourcing. If you could pay IBM to run your IT shop as it is, why not just pay someone to create a better one and put it on their books?
This cloud thing – which has the …
Read more -
Fresche Takes On IBM i Security With Trinity Guard Acquisition
March 14, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
There are things that you worry about that you can’t do anything about, and there are things that you worry about that you actually can do something about – and have a fiduciary responsibility to do. Death and taxes are in the former category, and the security of mission-critical IT platforms are in the latter.
Fresche Solutions, which expanded from its core application and database modernization business with the acquisition of Abacus Solutions last October, has been on the hunt to do more deals to help IBM i customers tackle the hard problems they face and give them new …
Read more -
IBM Brings OpenShift Cluster Management Native On Power Iron
March 14, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
If you went out to GitHub and grabbed the source code for the Kubernetes cloud controller, you could compile it in C/C++ or set up the runtimes for the Python chunks of it, and you would probably find some Go buried in there and you could the toolchain and get the raw Kubernetes to work on Linux partitions; you might even be able to get it to run natively on AIX, and if you were really clever, you might even be able to get it to run on IBM i.
But you wouldn’t have very much that was useful given …
Read more