• Entry Power S812 Gets A New – But Still Short – Lease On Life

  March 18, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Despite the fact that Moore’s Law increases in performance in CPUs have been slowing for years, for many customers, the growth in the throughput performance of processors as more cores and threads are added to a Power9 chip have outstripped the capacity growth requirements for many IBM i shops. For many of these customers, a single core Power7, Power7+, or even Power8 processor did the trick just fine, and is better suited to their needs than an entry Power9 machine with just one core running IBM i.

  We would argue – and have argued many times – that what IBM …

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• Five Acquisitions You May Have Missed

  March 13, 2019 Alex Woodie

  The New Year has started off with some wheeling and dealing, as some software company owners look to bulk up while others look to hand off responsibility to somebody else. Those operating in the IBM i marketplace aren’t alone in making acquisitions. Here are five under-the-radar deals in the midrange that you may have missed.

  Attunity‘s line of real-time data integration software will now be sold through Qlik, which acquired the publicly traded company in a $560-million in late February. It was a natural enough move for Qlik, the well-regarded BI vendor that was acquired by private equity …

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• Enterprises Spend On Systems, Hyperscalers Tap The Brakes

  March 11, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  For many enterprises, the current generations of processors that come from IBM, Intel, AMD, and the Arm collective are plenty good enough – and available at reasonable price/performance relative to each other and to their predecessors – that the end of 2018 was a perfectly reasonable time to buy what is on the truck. But hyperscalers and public cloud builders, who live and die by the total cost of ownership of their systems as gauged by raw compute power, space required, and power consumed, have to take a longer view. So with new processors coming from Intel and AMD on …

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• Tweaking Systems And Withdrawal Symptoms

  March 4, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  A system product line does not always come out finished and complete, all at once, and its retirement from the sales catalog and the field is not always a simple and smooth thing, either. After a certain amount of criticism from its largest customers, Big Blue last year decided that it would get a little bit more orderly about the latter, as machines are withdrawn from marketing and eventually support. As for the former, well, there are always some nips and tucks that are done here and there as parts of the system are tweaked to meet specific customer demands. …

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• Settling In With IBM i For The Long Haul

  February 11, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If nothing else, the IBM i platform has exhibited extraordinary longevity. One might even say legendary longevity, if you want to take its history all the way back to the System/3 minicomputer from 1969. This is the real starting point in the AS/400 family tree and this is when Big Blue, for very sound legal and technical and marketing reasons, decided to fork its products to address the unique needs of large enterprises (with the System/360 mainframe and its follow-ons) and small and medium businesses (starting with the System/3 and moving on through the System/34, System/32, System/38, and System/36 in …

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• Domino And Notes 10 Finally Come To IBM i

  February 11, 2019 Alex Woodie

  They say good things come to those who wait. The IBM i community has waited over 10 years for a new release of Domino and Notes, and they were rewarded last week when IBM announced version 10 is now available on IBM i.

  Domino and Notes 10 is the first major release of the server component of the business collaboration platform since Domino 8.5 was released way back in 2008 (version 9 was a minor release). The future of the platform was up in the air for a while, and many people who have dedicated a chunk of their careers …

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• More IBM i Predictions For 2019

  February 6, 2019 Alex Woodie

  We kicked off our 2019 soothsaying last week with predictions from IBM i leaders on what the New Year will bring. We keep the ball rolling this week with another batch of predictions from our friends around the IBM i community.

  According to Alison Butterill, IBM‘s the program director for offering management for IBM i, the platform will build off the momentum generated with last year’s 30th anniversary celebrant.

  “The excitement begun in 2018 as we highlighted client innovation around the world will continue into 2019,” Butterill says. “The momentum continues to grow as clients are looking at ways …

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• Meet The 2019 Champions For IBM i

  February 6, 2019 Alex Woodie

  It’s a new year, which means a new crop of champions has emerged from IBM. More than 600 souls can call themselves IBM Champions this year, but only 64 identify as IBM Champions for Power Systems. We whittled away the AIX and Linux experts to leave you with the folks who will lead the IBM i charge in 2019.

  IBM does not have a specific category for IBM i Champions. Big Blue breaks out its System z leaders, along with champion categories for Data & Analytics, Cloud, Collaboration Solutions, Storage, Watson IoT, Blockchain, and Security.

  For the Champion program, IBM …

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• One Repository To Rule The Source – And Object – Code

  February 4, 2019 Floyd Del Muro

  (Sponsored Content) The concept of a single repository for source is not necessarily a new one. When I interviewed with ARCAD back in 2011, I did so at the at the Rational conference called Innovate in Orlando. The research and development team and our chief technology officer were already in dialogue with IBM to resell ARCAD technology alongside its Rational development suite, adding power to Rational Team Concert that development organizations could effectively have a similar repository for IBM i and open source applications.

  At the time, RTC supported the open source world very well, just like Git …

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• Power Systems Keep Growing To Finish Off 2018

  January 28, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The Power Systems line, buoyed by the deliver of high-end Power E980 systems for big AIX and IBM i jobs, a steady stream of IBM i system upgrades, and some traction in Power-based Linux clusters for HPC and data analytics workloads, turned in a pretty good final quarter for 2018, and capped three prior quarters of growth during 2018 to turn in a full year of growth.

  You can’t tell how much growth, of course, but in the lead story of this issue of The Four Hundred, I took my best stab at modeling the quarterly revenue stream of …

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