Timothy Prickett Morgan
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IT Starts To Feel The Impact Of The Great Infection
April 13, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
You know the difference between an economy and an ecosystem? Me neither.
We stand by our conviction – and that backed up by the economists and market watchers at IDC – that the IT sector is going to fare better than other sectors in the wake of the global coronavirus pandemic and the jarring effects of the lockdown most of us are under. But we are also not surprised that IDC had to revise its estimates of IT spending projections for 2020 and beyond only a few days after putting out its initial thoughts. It’s a fluid situation, with …
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The IT Sector Could Weather The Pandemic Storm
April 6, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
It has been a rough couple of weeks for absorbing exponential data. It is astounding has fast the Great Infection, my term for the combination of the coronavirus outbreak and the reprise of the Great Recession that it looks like it is causing, is upon us. Nearly 10 million people have lost their jobs in two weeks, and my guess is that will more than double again next week and keep building from there, perhaps quadruple until we go from 3.5 percent unemployment in the United States to maybe 15 percent or so.
The hope is that this is temporary, …
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Final IBM i Software Maintenance Price Increases Released
April 6, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Back in early March, we told you that Big Blue was getting set to raise the prices it charges for Software Maintenance, short-handed down to SWMA and pronounced “swamma.” We had some estimated pricing, and on March 30, in an updated announcement letter 320-089, IBM released the updated price increases.
They are a bit different from the pricing that we saw in IBM’s initial presentations warning customers about the price increase, and the updated announcement has a spreadsheet that shows all of the different SKUs for SWMA for the P05, P10, P20, P30, P40, P50, and P60 software tiers. …
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Sending Your IT Department To The Teledoctor For A Checkup
March 30, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Quite a few of us in the world are going to have experience with telemedicine in the coming weeks, if we have not had it already, and so barriers to providing medical service are going to come down. The same kind of remote health experience is available for IT departments from a relatively new company called Chordia Consulting, which has created a remote IT healthcheck that now has a variant tuned specifically for IBM i shops and their special characteristics.
And in the wake of the coronavirus outbreak, Chordia’s co-founders, both ex-IBMer’s with experience in the IBM midrange, are …
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Love – And Business – In The Time Of Coronavirus
March 23, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
We are shaped by bad times as much as good ones. Maybe more.
Some of my earliest memories as an aware young person are of the effects of recession on my parents when they were young people working in the factories of New Jersey. And when I say young, I mean we were all young at the time. Both of my parents lost their jobs in the recession of 1960 through 1970, and they lost them again during the much worse recession from 1973 through 1975. It was scary for me and my siblings, but obviously even scarier …
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COVID-19 Response: Fresche Donates Presto Licenses, Uncaps User Fees For Access To IBM i Apps
March 23, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Web application development tools have suddenly become much more important in the wake of the coronavirus outbreak, and Fresche Solutions, arguably the largest third-party software development tool provider in the IBM i market, wants to help companies with cope with remote workforces.
Like other companies worldwide, Fresche has the majority of its employees working from home during the quarantines that are in effect to stop the spread of the coronavirus, and they are also capable of supporting customers whose end users, programmers, and system administrators are also working from home.
But this is not enough, and Fresche knows this. To …
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The Midrange Gets Pinched A Little More
March 16, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
The X86 server market turned in its best quarter ever in the final three months of 2019, will more machinery going out the door and more money coming in than has ever happened in the history of the systems market. Even if you adjusted sales in past quarters for inflation, it is still true. It was kind of crazy, even with some soft sales among OEM suppliers, the combination of ODM sales to hyperscalers and cloud builders. X86 server shipments rose by 12.9 percent to 3.35 million machines and revenues rose by 6.3 percent to $22.44 billion, according to the …
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Thoroughly Modern: Giving IBM i Developers A Helping Hand
March 9, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
The good thing about the Moore’s Law improvements in compute, storage, and networking capacity is that the cost of a complete IT system more accurately reflects where the real value of that system was always really derived.
In decades gone by, the AS/400 hardware cost represented somewhere on the order of 85 percent of the cost of a server and its storage and the OS/400 systems software accounted for the remaining 15 percent or so. Over time, the hardware costs have dropped to about a third of the overall system cost as systems have also gotten incredibly more powerful. But …
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Big Blue Cuts Deals On Entry Power Systems Iron
March 9, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
With no new Power processors on the immediate horizon, except a kicker Power9’ that is aimed at supercomputer systems providing a testbed for future high bandwidth main memory technology that will debut with the Power10 chips in 2021, IBM has to do something to try to move some iron. Price cuts are always a good incentive.
And so, we see in announcement letter ZAEP0091B, which was quietly updated on March 5, when it came to our attention, after being announced on January 24, when we did not see in the IBM online announcement feed (because it wasn’t there, not …
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Big Blue Raises IBM i Software Maintenance Fees Modestly
March 2, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Back in the AS/400 days when software was a much smaller part of the overall cost of a system, there were relatively frequent prices changes for both OS/400 and related systems software as well as for the software maintenance applied to OS/400 and those related systems programs.
It has been a long time since IBM increased the license or IBM i Group Software Maintenance, or SWMA as we often call it as shorthand (pronounced Swammah). I can’t even remember the last time IBM i license prices were increased, but I know there was an attempt to raise SWMA prices …
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