• Big Blue Goes After Healthcare With Aggressive Power Systems Pricing

  March 13, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We often gently admonish the vendors in the IBM i market that they have to make news to be in the news and also to do something snazzy, like a special promotion or a price cut to get the attention of customers as well as to stimulate a little business for themselves and their partners. IBM is not excepted from this advice, and is actually doing it – at least for customers in the healthcare industry that run their applications on Power Systems iron.

  In announcement letter AD23-0111, dated March 12, IBM has put out a new 24-core Power10 …

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• It Would be Uncommon For IBM Announcements To Not Be In May

  March 11, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  For as long as we can remember, there is a general trend of spring and fall announcements for the IBM midrange. It is not a perfect correlation, of course. The original AS/400 announcement was done on the summer solstice on June 21, 1988, which does not fit the pattern we are talking about. But in general, the spring-fall pattern is something that goes back long before enterprise Linux releases and OpenStack releases all shifted to an April-October cadence.

  This being a new year and the POWERUp2024 conference being held May 20 through 23 in Fort Worth, Texas, we are …

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• Power Systems Grows For The Second Year In A Row

  January 29, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Here at The Four Hundred, we take good news very seriously, and so we will just cut to the chase scene and tell you that IBM’s Power Systems business has grown for the second year in a row.

  Take that in for a second. Savor it.

  Think about the dozen years of dramatic decline we saw in the RISC/Unix and IBM i parts of the Power Systems business in the wake of the Great Recession in 2009, when the X86 platform from Intel finally got enough features – as did Windows Server and Linux – to compete effectively against …

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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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• IBM i Chief Architect Will Gives N2i Some Platform Pointers

  January 10, 2024 Alex Woodie

  It’s hard to find someone more knowledgeable about the ins and outs of the IBM i platform than Steve Will, who holds CTO and chief architect titles at IBM. So when Will accepted an invitation from COMMON’s N2i (New to IBM i) group to speak to IBM i newcomers this week, it was a good chance to pick up something new.

  One of the first things that IBM i newcomers will notice about the IBM i is that it’s an unusual platform, in several regards. For starters, it’s older than many platforms, being able to trace its lineage back to …

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• A Few Power Systems Items At The Cusp Of The New Year

  January 10, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Welcome back, everyone. We hope you had a joyous vacation, and that you took your vitamins and got your rest to take on a new year.

  It is generally pretty quiet in the IT racket in late December of one year and early January in the next year, and the bridge between 2023 and 2024 is no different. But there were a few items that came to our attention that we want to make you aware of.

  In announcement letter AD23-1087, dated December 12, 2023, Big Blue has put some 5250 Enablement features that were withdrawn from marketing in …

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• 2023: An IBM i Year in Review

  December 13, 2023 Alex Woodie

  With another year nearly in the books, it’s time to take a stroll through the IT Jungle archives and reconsider some of the 728 stories we published in 2023. Here’s a look back at the biggest IBM i news stories of 2023.

  January

  The top concern of IBM i professionals, according to Fortra’s annual IBM i Marketplace Study, was once again security, a position it has held for six straight years. The latest crop of IBM Champions unveiled in January featured about 90 members from the IBM i community, out of a total of 839 for the year. Is …

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• CloudSAFE And Focal Point Solutions Group Combine Services, Unify Brands

  November 27, 2023 Doug McMaster

  IT solutions providers Focal Point Solutions Group and CloudSAFE are unifying under the CloudSAFE brand. Both providers have a history of delivering outstanding IT services, so joining forces follows a natural progression for both organizations.

  “This unification represents a transformative step forward not just for us, but for our customers. By merging Focal Point’s specialized expertise in IBM technologies with CloudSAFE’s comprehensive IT service offerings, we are uniquely positioned to meet and exceed our customers’ evolving IT needs,” says Ron Venzin, chief executive officer at CloudSAFE.

  Creating A Comprehensive Service Provider

  Focal Point’s specialization in IBM technologies, including IBM i, …

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• AWS Inks Deal With Connectria To Have a Power Play

  November 15, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The long road of history has not been made impassible by the charred marketing tanks and flaming sales assault vehicles of those who have tried to breach Fortress Rochester, but there are a whole lot of rusting machines off on the horizon cluttering the road and more than a few smoking machines nearby as well as some sizable holes in the ramparts out on that cornfield in Minnesota.

  While the proprietary minicomputer businesses and the Unix server businesses of the competition of the AS/400 and IBM i platform have all been destroyed and that IBM is indeed the last bastion …

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• New GM Wants To Push IBM Power With Hybrid Cloud And AI

  November 13, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Three months ago, the Power division within IBM’s Infrastructure group got a new general manager. This changing of the guard happens every couple of years as Big Blue moves executives around so they can get managerial experience across different lines of business, and this time around, it is Tom McPherson who has been tapped for the top job in the division that is the home of the IBM i platform.

  McPherson got his bachelor’s degree in electrical and electronics engineering from Rutgers University in 1990 and got his master’s degree in computer engineering from Syracuse University in 1994. We don’t …

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