• How Are You Doing, And What Are You Doing?

  October 18, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The IBM i Marketplace Survey is still open, and it is time for you to take a moment and let us know what is going on in your IBM i shop.

  The annual survey, which is in its tenth year now, and its accompanying report and the webinar that goes over the results of the survey, are an invaluable resource for the IBM i community. This is particularly true since IDC, Gartner, Forrester, and the other IT market researchers and consultancies have long since stopped tracking Power Systems in any kind of detail and certainly don’t spend a lot of …

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• Please Take The IBM i Marketplace Survey

  October 16, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Can you believe it? This is the tenth year that Fortra, formerly known as HelpSystems, is taking a survey of the IBM i customers base so it can put together a report to tell us what is going on in the community surrounding the platform that we are all depending upon in some fashion.

  The IBM i Marketplace Survey and its accompanying report and the webinar that goes over the results of the survey, which are both presented each February, are an invaluable resource for the IBM i community. This is particularly so since IDC, Gartner, Forrester, and the other …

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• This Is Your IBM i Market, And Therefore Your Annual Survey

  October 4, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It has been a decade since the IBM i Marketplace Survey was conceived of by the late Dan Burger of IT Jungle and Tom Huntington of HelpSystems, now known as Fortra. We miss Dan a lot, and you don’t want to miss a chance to help the community better understand itself, which is what all of us at IT Jungle and at Fortra really are after as we ask you, once again, to take the survey.

  We are coming into the home stretch of the 10^th annual IBM i Marketplace Survey. That means time is running out for you …

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• It’s Time To Tell Us How It Is And What You’re Doing

  October 2, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The IBM i Marketplace Survey and its accompanying report and the webinar that goes over the results of the survey are an invaluable resource for the IBM i community. This is particularly so since IDC, Gartner, Forrester, and the other IT market researchers and consultancies have long since stopped tracking Power Systems in any kind of detail and certainly don’t spend a lot of time on the IBM i portion of it.

  Big Blue itself may have lots of insight into its customer base, but it certainly shares very little of that information with the IBM i community. (We get …

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• The IBM i Marketplace Survey Needs Your Input

  September 27, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It is hard to believe it, but this is the tenth year that Fortra, formerly known as HelpSystems, is taking a survey of the IBM i customers base so it can put together a report to tell us all how we are doing.

  The IBM i Marketplace Survey and its accompanying report and the webinar that goes over the results of the survey, which are both presented each February, are an invaluable resource for the IBM i community. This is particularly so since IDC, Gartner, Forrester, and the other IT market researchers and consultancies have long since stopped tracking Power …

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• Unattended IBM i Operations Continue Upward Climb

  March 15, 2023 Alex Woodie

  One of the IBM i server’s traditional strengths is its capability to run for long periods of time in an unattended manner. While manual intervention is inevitably necessary at some point in time, the human resources required to manage IBM i is far less than other business platforms. And according to the latest data from Fortra IBM i Marketplace Survey, more than three-quarters of IBM i shops are embracing automation.

  In late 2022, Fortra (formerly HelpSystems) peppered a couple of hundred IBM i shops with a variety of questions about their IBM i setups, including the number and type of …

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• You Ought To Be Committed

  March 13, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  There is a phrase that we learn as teenagers, concomitant with the kinds of peer pressure that close friends can bring to bear early in our lives to nudge us, that applies in an inverse way to a portion of the IBM i customer base, or probably more precisely, to the upper management at a portion of the company that thinks – erroneously – that getting off the IBM i platform is somehow going to magically fix their particular IT problems.

  All talk and no action.

  Don’t get us wrong. We are not trying to get people to move off …

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• The IBM i OS Base Is Older Than We Think, But Moving Ahead

  March 6, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Hardware upgrades are costly in terms of money and while it is always exciting to get a new system with that “new computer smell” – and you know what we are talking about – at least IBM i operating system and systems software upgrades don’t carry such a high price – provided you are on Software Maintenance and you do proper testing on your software before you make a jump to a new release.

  The other great thing about IBM i systems software is that any given release not only runs on the current new Power Systems hardware at the …

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• Cutting IT Costs Is Not A Priority, And That’s Good News

  February 13, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  For the past nine years that Fortra (formerly HelpSystems) has been putting together the IBM i Marketplace Survey, one of the first things we always look at is the Top IT Concerns part of the survey results. It is a barometer that tells you what IBM i shops are thinking might happen in the future even if it is not an actual prediction about what will happen in our economy and the IBM i community.

  It’s sentiment informed by the budgetary processes that were at work as 2022 came to a close.

  The most important thing I look at every …

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• The IBM i Power10 Upgrade Cycle Forecast Looks Favorable

  February 6, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As we talked about last week in going over IBM’s financial results for the fourth quarter, the Power Systems business increased its revenues by 6.5 percent in 2022 thanks to a Power10 upgrade cycle that started in the fall of 2021 with high-end machines and built momentum in the summer of 2022 as the entry and midrange Power10 machines were delivered in the market.

  In general, IBM tells Wall Street to expect that its overall Infrastructure business group will have flat revenues, with some quarters up during the beginning of an upgrade cycle and down at the end of it. …

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