Timothy Prickett Morgan
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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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Please Take The 2020 State of Modernization Survey
March 2, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
It wasn’t all that long ago that whatever information that we needed about the IBM midrange community had to come from Big Blue or once in a while one of the big IT market watchers like IDC and Gartner would get paid to think about our community and they would do what we usually considered a half-hearted job of it.
In the past several years, a number of independent software vendors in the IBM i market have taken the bull by the horns and, with the help of publications like The Four Hundred, have gathered up vital intelligence through …
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How SAP HANA Helps Keep IBM i Strong
February 24, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
It has been a good 12 months for Power Systems in the cloud. Not only did Big Blue launch entry Power8 and high-end Power8 machines on its IBM Cloud supporting IBM i and AIX and promise to get high-end Power9 iron on its cloud as well, but Google, Skytap, and Microsoft also launched Power9 iron on their respective public cloud and offered to run Linux, AIX, and IBM i on these machines. Last week, it was the turn for enterprise software giant SAP, which is adding high-end Power E980 systems to its own cloud services so customers can run HANA …
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The State Of The IBM i Installed Base, Part 2
February 17, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
In the first half of our analysis of the IBM i installed base, we looked at the number of machines and the number of logical partitions that respondents of the IBM i Marketplace Survey for the 2020 report gave last fall when they took the poll. We did some math and analysis on this to show that there is a large block of customers with lots of machines and lots of partitions that are just as important to Big Blue as those with big, fat NUMA servers.
In the second half of this series about the state of the IBM …
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IBM Tweaks Prices Up And Down On Memory And Storage
February 17, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Big Blue usually tells customers about price changes on Power Systems hardware and related software, but we have not seen any such price changes in a long time. As it turns out, IBM is telling business partners through their normal announcement channels about any tweaks to price changes, but these are not showing up in the customer feeds that we have subscribed to for three decades.
This could be deliberate, or accidental. We have no idea, and honestly, it would take too long to ask. But now we know, and an intrepid reseller made us aware of a recent price …
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The Distinguished Professionals Of IBM i
February 17, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
We use the term legacy a lot in the IBM midrange and mainframe markets, and not necessarily in the good way we talk about political leaders or business executives or sports stars all leaving a legacy behind of their body of work. I use the term when it means something precise – legacy applications, for instance, are the ones that originated back in time and that have not been modernized in any substantial way because perhaps they don’t need to be.
I prefer the term vintage when I am talking about hardware and software releases because that conveys a …
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The State Of The IBM i Installed Base, Part 1
February 10, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
This is the time of the year that people assess where we are at so we can figure out where we are going. So we think it is appropriate to ponder the current state of the IBM i business.
There isn’t just historical precedent for pondering the state of things this time of year; the pondering, in a certain way, drives history. The end of the prior year is mostly gone from memory and focus shifts toward fulfilling the promise of the current year. It is human nature to mark time this way, driven in part by the seasonal nature …
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