• Big Blue’s New “WebSpheres” To Surf The Container And AI Waves

  July 24, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Without question, there is a lot of money that can be made on AI training and inference, as is aptly shown by the financial results of Nvidia. That company, which is the darling of Wall Street these days, has gone from datacenter wannabe to datacenter giant in the course of a decade and a half. It has been fascinating to watch, but it is as much the result of lucky timing as hard work, as Jensen Huang, the company’s co-founder and chief executive officer, admitted from the beginning.

  Nvidia has been working on parallel computing architectures for accelerating HPC workloads …

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• As I See It: Chasing Eternity

  July 17, 2023 Victor Rozek

  When I was a kid, my parents enrolled me in a parochial grammar school. One day, my teacher was expounding on the joys of spending eternity in heaven. I didn’t know much about eternity – or heaven for that matter – except that eternity seemed like a very long time. So, I raised my hand and asked her what heaven was like, what would I spend all that time doing? She thought for a moment, no doubt straining to conjure a simple answer that an eight-year-old might understand.

  Then she said, “Imagine your very favorite thing to have for dinner. …

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• IBM Introduces watsonx for Governed Analytics, AI

  May 17, 2023 Alex Woodie

  At its annual Think conference last week, IBM took the wraps off watsonx, a new platform for crunching big data and developing AI and machine learning applications in a safe and governed environment.

  You don’t need an industry analyst to tell you that artificial intelligence (AI) is having a moment in the sun this year. Thanks to the public launch of ChatGPT in late last year, regular citizens (as opposed to AI experts and industry analyst) have become aware of the vast potential of large language models (LLMs) that can mimic humans in very convincing ways.

  While LLMs like ChatGPT …

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• Machine Customers Are Not Customers Who Buy Machines

  April 3, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The world is getting truly strange. I can appreciate that in a world where hundreds of millions to billions of users all make use of humongous applications that have hundreds to thousands of calls to microservices application snippets and service. But somehow, I just cannot make the leap to something that Gartner is now calling “machine customers.”

  The term came to light, for us at least, two weeks ago when two market researchers at Gartner –  Don Scheibenreif, distinguished vice president analyst and leader of Gartner’s research on customer experience, and Mark Raskino, also a distinguished vice president analyst as …

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• It Is Time To Have A Group Chat About AI

  January 23, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The first rule of any technology is that is can be used for good or evil, but generally it is used for something vaguely in between. The second rule, rarely used, is that some technologies need to be tightly controlled because of the global-scale damage they can cause. Nuclear fission and nuclear fusion come immediately to mind. And so does the special branch of machine learning called deep learning, which most people call AI training these days.

  I can’t remember precisely when I first started writing about AI training and the neural networks and frameworks underneath them, but I wrote …

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• On the Spectrum of Application Modernization

  October 19, 2022 Alex Woodie

  What is application modernization? If you ask 10 people in the IT world, you’re likely to get 10 different answers. For organizations looking to keep their IBM i assets relevant in an increasingly digital world, being aware of the spectrum of options available will help them make the best choice for their particular situation.

  Every organization is unique when it comes to its IT journey. Some may have large in-house development teams and would never think of running packaged business applications, while others have no developers and lean on their vendors and partners to keep things running. Some organizations may …

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• IBM i Integration Elevates Operational Query and Analytics

  May 16, 2022 Bill Langston

  Modernization, SQL, RPG, open source, cybersecurity, resilience, compliance, clouds, and AI are the trending topics in enterprise technology. As a result, IT professionals can easily overlook and undervalue software that enables real-time, operational query and analytics.

  In contrast, managers and mid-level staff in accounting, logistics, inventory, sales, customer service, and other departments still place a high value on data access and often wish their IT team could do more to help. Collaboration is the key, because your company isn’t realizing the potential of operational query and analytics if you have narrowly defined it as a dashboard and ad hoc file …

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• More Price Hikes From IBM, Now For High End Storage

  May 16, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The price increases at IBM just keep coming as the company passes on higher component costs, and very likely higher manufacturing and support costs, that it is experiencing thanks to the coronavirus pandemic on to customers. Now we are seeing higher prices on high-end external storage.

  We have covered a number of IBM’s recent price hikes in the past several weeks, which you can see in the Related Stories section at the end of this report. But to characterize them briefly to put the new price increases into context, we have seen inflation in the prices for certain Power9 and …

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• No Kyndryl Involved in IBM i Tech Support, Jarman Says

  February 2, 2022 Alex Woodie

  The org chart has been on an extended spin cycle lately at IBM, with the spin out of the Global Technology Services (GTS) business into Kyndryl as well as the merging of IBM Lab Services and the Services and Support Group. But unless you’re signed up for its IBM i cloud service or had some other arrangement with GTS, you likely won’t be calling on Kyndryl for technical support.

  The question of Kyndryl’s current role with the IBM i customer base came up during the recent webinar HelpSystems held to discuss its 2022 IBM i Marketplace Report. Ian Jarman, …

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• IBM i Community Predictions For 2022, Part 3

  January 17, 2022 Alex Woodie

  Due to an unprecedented response from the community, we are running a third installment of 2022 predictions. The third (and final) round of predictions kicks off with an optimistic prophecy from Charles Guarino, the president of Central Park Data Systems, who has a very bright outlook for the year ahead in IBM i land.

  “As business confidence and optimism rallies, IT budgets will become less restrained,” Guarino tells IT Jungle. “Even those with the least maintained and enhanced legacy systems will experience modernization pressure. This will come from all sources, internal, external and industry compliance, all demanding swift …

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