Timothy Prickett Morgan
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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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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 …
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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 …
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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 …
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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 …
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