Timothy Prickett Morgan
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How Ya Doing Out There?
September 23, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan
We keep track of a lot of things on your behalf here at IT Jungle.
We cover all of the major product announcements from Big Blue, giving you the feeds and speeds, competitive analysis, pricing and performance analysis, and other issues that you need to consider as you keep your Power Systems platforms current and supporting your business.
We watch all of the changes in the IBM i stack, Technology Refresh and PTF updates, and we do the best that we can – and we think better than anyone else in the market – to keep track of what the …
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Big Blue Makes The Case For IBM i P05 And P10 Subscriptions
September 16, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan
We have been chronicling the transformation of the IBM i software stack from perpetual licenses with tech support to the more modern and now more normal subscription pricing that we have for both commercial and consumer software and other services these days.
The last program in the stack to move from perpetual to subscription for the IBM i P05 and P10 software tiers was Backup, Recovery and Media Services for i (5770-BR1), which was sunsetted on August 27 in announcement letter AD24-0665, and on January 1, 2025, you will not be able to order a perpetual license to BRMS …
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CICS Transaction Server For IBM i Is Sunsetted
September 16, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Way back during the Y2K crisis at the turn of the century, there were a lot of IBM mainframe shops that decided to port their COBOL applications and their related CICS transaction monitoring software to OS/400 rather than try to move to a new language and a new transaction monitor.
Mainframe COBOL and CICS are a bit different from OS/400 – and now IBM i – COBOL and CICS, but there was enough similarity that companies with large COBOL/CICS estates could make the jump from the ES/9000 to the AS/400 and IBM i platform, and thousands of such companies – …
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IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 26, Numbers 34 And 35
September 11, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan
It is not only a relatively quiet time still for PTFs, but it is also Ketchup Week since The Four Hundred has been on a light publishing schedule during the past several weeks of the summer.
We do have one security vulnerability and a few patches to deal with. First, we have Security Bulletin: IBM i Modernization Engine for Lifecycle Integration is vulnerable to multiple vulnerabilities, which you can find out more about here. The affected products include IBM i Modernization Engine for Lifecycle Integration 1.0 through 1.4.8 and 2.0 through 2.0.2.
Here is the rundown of PTF Groups …
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IBM Shutters Systems Research And Development Labs In China
September 9, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan
What a change four decades makes, and what a bigger change even a decade has made, when it comes to the relationship between the United States and China.
Four decades ago, when Big Blue started to do business for real in China, the only reason to believe that the Middle Kingdom might one day rival the United States economically and militarily was the vastness of its population, the breadth and depth of its natural resources, and the patience and tenacity of its command economy. China was the anchor economy of the so-called BRICS – Brazil, Russia, India, and China – …
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How Managed Service Providers De-Risk Technologies For Customers
August 21, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan
When you run your own IT shop, you can only absorb new techniques and technologies as fast as your people can learn about them. Managed service providers, on the other hand, generally have a higher level of expertise and they spread the cost of learning about and investing in new technologies across hundreds to thousands to tens of thousands of customers, and they can develop expertise across different solutions, targeting various industries and use cases.
But perhaps more importantly, MSPs take the risk out of you trying something new, which makes it far more likely for you to deploy technologies …
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Getting A Handle On What GenAI Might Cost
August 21, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Because of my other day job at The Next Platform, I can give you a pretty good idea about what it costs to train an AI model or run inference against it once it is trained. But I have seen very little data that tries to give any of a sense of what it costs to add generative AI functionality to applications.
But interestingly, Gartner analysts embedded some such data in a report about how it expected many GenAI projects to be abandoned by the end of 2025 after their proofs of concept fail. That so many PoCs will …
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IBM Kills Off Entry Power Server Hardware Subscription, Old Features
August 19, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Big Blue has been talking about offering a complete IBM system, including hardware, software, and support, as a single offering and under a single price, for more than two years now. The company talked about it back in July 2022, and we got the full scoop on pricing on the IBM i System Subscription, the first instantiation on the Power S1024 server, back in September 2022.
This looked like the wave of the future, with a single per user cost of around $50 per month per user for a machine, which as we pointed out at the time, is …
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IBM Tweaks Power10 Hardware: Fatter Memory, Other Stuff
August 19, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan
We haven’t seen a lot of hardware announcements this year from Big Blue for the Power Systems platform, and you really should not expect much in the way of new hardware when Power11 systems are expected to be launched in 2025 and the Power10 machines have been in the field since late 2021 for the Power E1080 and since July 2022 for the rest of the line.
To be fair, we did have the entry “Bonnell” Power S1012 machine come out in May this year. So it has not been a total drought. But hardware launches are not on an …
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Some Thoughts On Big Blue’s GenAI Strategy For IBM i
August 12, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan
In a world that has gone half mad with generative AI, it is refreshing to see the people who control the IBM i platform being skeptical, hopeful, and practical about how the technology might be used to help the companies who choose Power Systems running IBM i as the platform for their mission critical applications.
IBM Rochester has always been practical and often innovative when it comes to adopting hardware and software technologies, so the strategy that IBM i chief technology officer Steve Will laid out in a recent IBM i & AI – Strategy & Update as part of …
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