Timothy Prickett Morgan
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The Humongous Investment In IBM i People
February 8, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
It has been common knowledge since the Application System/400 minicomputer platform was launched in June 1988 that the vast majority of customers buying these machines either developed their own code in RPG or COBOL – mostly RPG, except in banking and insurance, which had a mainframe heritage and preferred COBOL – or had access to the source code from third parties and heavily customized it to the point where they were self-maintaining the applications at some point. In many cases, they used a mix of homegrown and third party modules and did the integration themselves.
This history continues, and is …
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Taking The Pulse Of The Used Server And Storage Market
February 3, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Those of us who buy certified pre-owned vehicles know a secret that some of our peers in the datacenter also know about buying certified pre-owned servers and storage: You can get a lot better bang for the buck by staying one generation behind, and not really sacrifice much in the way of performance and features.
And in the case of IT, unlike the situations with families buying vehicles, some customers have to stay two generations or more behind because of the limitations of their application software. And so they absolutely need to stay back on vintage iron. Even then, there …
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IBM Readies Power Systems Announcements For February 23
February 1, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
The word on the street is that IBM is getting ready to do a slew of announcements relating to its Power Systems platform at the end of this month, specifically on February 23. Generally speaking, the announcements are going to focus on IT infrastructure modernization, cloud computing, and application modernization, which are obviously things that a lot of the IBM i base in particular has to consider here in 2021.
As best as we can figure, IBM is going to tell business partners in the Power Systems channel a bit about what is happening on February 9, two weeks before …
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Talk Is Cheap, Action Is Costly
February 1, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Companies pick the platforms for their mission critical systems so they can run them for decades. And it is a very, very big deal when they decide to change those platforms. And, furthermore, it is a hell of a lot harder to change these platforms than many people think, and that is because most of the value of those platforms is locked up in the applications and databases that run atop the servers, operating systems, and middleware.
It is with this in mind that we always take any survey data that asks IT executives if and when they are going …
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Taking The Full Measure Of Power Servers
January 25, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Imagine, for a moment, that there was not a drive by the Chinese government to have more of its state-owned enterprises, which are among the largest companies in the country, adopt homegrown IT gear for their data processing needs, an effort that started in 2015 but really built up steam two years later when a trade war erupted between the United States and China. Imagine that trade war didn’t happen, either.
What, pray tell, would have happened to IBM’s Power Systems business over the past several years? Our best guess is plenty. At the very least, perhaps the Power Systems …
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IBM i Software And Power Systems Upgrades Keep Rolling Forward
January 18, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
During tough economic times, I am fond of reminding people – and especially myself as I try to remain calm in a recession or whatever the heck this is we are dealing with now during the coronavirus pandemic – that business, in the aggregate, never goes to zero. No matter how bad it gets, thus far in the modern era starting perhaps with the Renaissance and maybe even longer but certainly since the agricultural and industrial revolutions in the 1700s, people still need stuff and they need people to grow or make it.
That doesn’t mean it is easy, however. …
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Park Place Buys Curvature To Become Maintenance Goliath
January 18, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
The big tend to get bigger, and this is certainly happening in the third-party maintenance (TPM) business for IT equipment. We didn’t catch this when it happened, but back in November, Park Place Technologies acquired rival Curvature for an undisclosed sum. Both companies have substantial businesses supporting IBM Power Systems customers, although they are by no means exclusively focused on providing alternative hardware support for these platforms alone.
We did a story about using third party maintenance providers back in April 2019, and followed it up in September 2019 as Power7 and Power7+ iron was coming to the end …
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More Vintage Power Systems Feature Withdrawals
January 11, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
In with the new and out with the old is a common theme around this time of the year. It may not be officially spring yet – in fact, we are 71 days away from the vernal equinox here in the northern hemisphere – but Spring Cleaning can and does happen at any time in the IBM product catalog.
And so it was as 2020 was coming to an end and after we had out the last issue of The Four Hundred for last year to bed.
In announcement letter 920-167, IBM is withdrawing a number of different features …
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Paving The Road Ahead For A Better Ride
January 4, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
We always sit behind the wheel of the present as we drive to the future with our baggage from the past in the trunk.
It is with this in mind that we contemplate 2021 and the uncertainty of regional, national, and global economies as well as how the coronavirus pandemic will be handled around the world in some pretty tricky political climates. These forces will affect all IBM i customers, of course, and we are not so much interested in describing all of these complex turbulences as they intertwine. What we do want to do is provide a few ideas …
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A Chat With Steve Woodard, The New CEO At Fresche Solutions
December 16, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Here is one way you know that the IBM i market is still a good one. Smart people who like to make money, and in fact have to make money for their investors, keep buying up the big players in the software spaces related to the IBM i platform, and they are also successively profiting from those acquisitions and those sales as they create big conglomerates that serve the IBM i community.
So it is American Pacific Group (APG) has become the majority shareholder in Fresche Solutions, which is based in Montreal and which is without question the largest company …
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