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The Long And IBM i Road That Leads To Your Door
March 11, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan
It is hard to find a modern platform that has such a long heritage as the machine on which your company’s business runs. Depending on when you want to draw the lines, the IBM i platform running on Power Systems iron dates back to the System/3 in 1969 or the System/38 in 1978 or the System/36 in 1983 or the AS/400 in 1988. No matter which line you want to draw, that is a long time for a continuously upgradable and upgraded operating system and database platform combination and its underlying hardware.
Not only do the predecessors of the IBM …
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The Cloud Is Part Of The IBM i Present, And A Bigger Part Of Its Future
February 26, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan
As obvious as this might sound in hindsight, if you want to get the right answers, you have to ask the right questions in the first place. And as inquisitive communicators, we will be the first ones to admit that this is not always as easy as it sounds.
It is hard to draw the line in the timeline sands for when the first true cloudy instance of a Power Systems machine running a rentable license to the IBM i operating system was announced, but it is safe to say that various hosting providers have been renting out parts of …
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The State Of The Power Systems Base 2024: The Operating Systems
February 12, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan
What stays in the field longer? The hardware or the software? Well, if you are talking about the IBM i installed base, or indeed that of any legacy systems out there like z/OS or Windows Server, the hardware can often be upgraded easier than the software and so it tends to not stay in the field as long. On average, of course.
In the real world, it all comes down to specifics. And you have to analyze and interpret the trend lines very carefully so as to not jump to the wrong conclusions.
So it is with the decade long …
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The State Of The Power Systems Base 2024: The Systems
February 5, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan
The foundation of any system is its processor. It is the central processing unit, or CPU, which used to be part of what we called the main frame in a multi-frame system, that ultimately does the calculations that make computing useful. There have always been many things that wrap around this CPU that turn it into a complete system – memory, networking, other kinds of I/O, various levels of storage, all in their own hierarchies. But if you ask someone what kind of system they have, beyond the vendor and the brand, the next bit of data they will …
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2024 IBM i Predictions Part 3 – The Final Chapter
February 5, 2024 Alex Woodie
Punxsutawney Phil, the famous groundhog who forecast an early spring on Friday, is said to have a long-term success rate of about 31 percent with his forecasts. What’s the accuracy rate of the IBM i experts who contribute to these yearly predictions? To borrow a line from the Magic 8 Ball, the answer is hazy at the moment. But one thing is clear: The IBM i ecosystem as a whole maintains an unabashedly optimistic and sunny disposition.
One of the brighter stars in the IBM i galaxy, Connectria regional sales director Peg Tuttle sees several trends emerging in the …
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IBM i Shops Are Still Getting Their Generative AI Acts Together
February 5, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan
One of the great things about participating in the annual IBM i Marketplace Survey put together by Fortra – and one of the reasons why our beloved colleague Dan Burger helped HelpSystems create the survey a decade ago – was that we get to have input into how the survey is created and how it evolves over time.
During the survey, our host Tom Huntington, executive vice president of technical solutions at Fortra, does an instant poll for attendees, and rather than ask the same question as last year, which was about where people get their information about the IBM …
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The IBM i Base Is Ready To Keep Investing In The Future
January 29, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan
We are at the beginning of a new year, and of course that means that it was time for us to participate in the annual IBM i Marketplace Survey webinar, which is sponsored by Fortra and which is now in its 10th year. We enjoy the webinar that Forta hosts to have a bunch of people from IBM and myself riff on what the survey results mean – and what they don’t mean.
Our host on the webinar was Tom Huntington, executive vice president of technical solutions at Fortra, and we were joined by Douglas Gibbs and Dan Sundt, who …
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New IBM Champion Class Grows Nearly 40 Percent
January 29, 2024 Alex Woodie
IBM unveiled a new crop of IBM Champions this month, and the first thing that stands out is the size of the 2024 IBM Champions class. Big Blue gave the honor to 1,155 individuals this year, a 38 percent increase over last year. Just about everyone who applied was named an IBM Champion, says Libby Ingrassia, the IBM program director, who also noted there was considerable overlap between IBM Champions and the new IBM Rising Champion Advocacy badge program.
IBM launched its IBM Champions program back in 2008 as a way to boost the visibility of customers and business partners …
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Top Priorities in 2024: Security and AI
January 17, 2024 Alex Woodie
Two sometimes opposing forces will be at play in 2024: the threat of cybersecurity breaches on the one hand and the promise of tech disruption thanks to AI on the other. Tech leaders, including IBM i professionals, who chart a course through these obstacles will be well-positioned to help their companies and their careers in the years to come.
First, let’s cover security. It’s no secret that cybercriminals have been ramping up their game over the past few years. Since the Covid-19 pandemic gave online activity a turbo-boost four years ago, cybercriminals have been having a field day with people’s …
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In The IBM i Trenches With: LightEdge Solutions
December 13, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
The nature of the IBM i market is changing as the nature of the IBM i installed base is changing. With skills in short supply – and getting shorter by the day – and the work piling higher and higher as companies try to tackle application modernization and integration, different ways of acquiring and consuming compute and storage, and modern data analytics and artificial intelligence, we are entering an age where managed service and cloud suppliers will usurp the position formerly held by the business partners who worked downstream from IBM peddling and supporting on-premises Power Systems machinery.
Because variety …
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