Timothy Prickett Morgan
-
Thoroughly Modern: Resizing Application Fields Presents Big Challenges
February 10, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
It sounds so simple. You need to change the size of one or more fields in one or more applications. How hard can that be? Quite time consuming and labor intensive, as it turns out, if you don’t do it right. To get a sense of the issues that companies face as they tweak the fields in their applications, we sat down with Ray Everhart, a product manager at Fresche Solutions, who knows a thing or two about this issue after many decades in the field.
Timothy Prickett Morgan: Can you tell us a little bit about your experience in …
Read more -
We Need Your Help Gathering Some Intelligence
February 10, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
In the absence of good information about the customer based out of Big Blue, a number of prominent companies in the vendor community have stepped up to support surveys of the IBM i customer base that give us a sense of what is going on in the base. We have an enlightened self-interest – several of them, in fact – in seeing a large number of participants from across the IBM i base – customers large and small, across many countries, with all make, model, and vintage of machines – take part in such surveys. No question about it.
And …
Read more -
What The New Top Brass At Big Blue Means For IBM i
February 3, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
We have been expecting such an announcement for many years, but now all of the pieces are in place and Ginni Rometty can retire to chairman of the board and let other executives steer International Business Machines for the next decade or so.
Sam Palmisano, who was an assistant to former IBM president, chief executive officer, and chairman Louis Gerstner, without question saved IBM from disaster in the early 1990s, tapped Rometty to be president back in October 2011. It is the tradition that IBM’s president becomes the next CEO and eventually chairman, so succession is not a question …
Read more -
Chasing AI Inference, And Other Power Systems Stuff
February 3, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Without question, the Power AC922 is one of the best platforms for running HPC simulation and modeling workloads or machine learning training workloads, as is attested by the adoption of this platform for two pre-exascale systems at the U.S. Department of Energy dubbed “Summit” and “Sierra” by their respective Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory homes.
As you know from our past coverage of this platform, the Power AC922 gets the bulk of its compute capacity from the Nvidia Tesla GPU accelerators embedded in the system, which can have four or six of the “Volta” V100 GPU …
Read more -
Power9 Enters The Long Tail
January 27, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
There is no way to sugar coat this, so I will just say it: It is going to be a long year for the Power Systems platform this year, and I will be so pleasantly surprised and happy to be wrong about that. But I don’t think I will be.
The Power Systems platform, as we have explained in the past, had a great 2018, with revenues up 9.5 percent to just a tad over $2 billion as far as we can tell from our financial model, which we have painstakingly developed. Now, mind you, the Power Systems market exited …
Read more -
Thoroughly Modern: Taking The Pulse Of IBM i Developers
January 22, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
It takes someone who has experience in application development to create and sell tools that help make a developer’s job easier. We think about the tool creators, but when it comes to getting people to adopt a new technology, the technical sales team at any software company is the bridge that connects developers of tools to the developer of applications who can be helped by those tools. In this edition of Thoroughly Modern, we are talking with Stephen Flaherty, a technical engineer at Fresche Solutions, about what IBM i developers are thinking about and doing today.
Timothy Prickett Morgan: …
Read more -
IBM i Shops Walking A Flatter Upgrade Path In 2020?
January 20, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
In general, there is a rough correlation between growth in online transaction processing workloads and related enterprise applications, and the growth in the overall economy. At some point in the past, when OLTP was relatively new and many companies were still doing batch processing, OLTP workloads grew many times faster than gross domestic product – much as many data analytics, storage, and machine learning workloads are doing today.
So when we see that IBM i shops are looking to upgrade in 2020 at a much higher level than we would expect based on historical and anecdotal trends, it gets our …
Read more -
Reality Reflects IBM i, Which Reflects It Back
January 20, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
In the fullness of time, the datacenters of IBM i shops will reflect the trends in the overall IT sector and in the respective industries and IT scale of their peers who have other back-end systems of record and a mix of systems of engagement. Give or take.
That’s why we pay attention to the larger trends going on in the IT sector. The IBM i base may be coming a little slowly to true cloud compute, storage, and networking capacity, but it is getting there finally thanks to the efforts of IBM, Connectria, Skytap/Microsoft, Google, and others.
It takes …
Read more -
There’s Always A New Last Laugh With Legacy
January 13, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
On my bookshelf beside my desk is a shelf that has all of my relevant AS/400 books and copies of the first decade of The Four Hundred, back when it was a monthly newsletter printed on paper. Sometimes, when I get stuck for ideas, I page through my history and yours, and I am often amazed at the wealth of information that myself and my colleagues – as well as many, many sources – helps us to create. AS/400s were a lot more expensive than IBM i machines, and helping people save money was our primary mission, and there …
Read more -
Participate In The 2020 IBM i Marketplace Survey Webcast
January 13, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Every fall for the past six years, HelpSystems puts out the call for the IBM i community to participate in its annual survey of the base so we can find out what is going on out there in your shops. And then as the new year just gets going, the company hosts a webinar that goes over the results of the survey with commentary from a bunch of people.
Tom Huntington, the executive vice president of technical solutions at HelpSystems, will host the webinar, and I plan to attend as do two familiar IBMers and a new one. That would …
Read more