• Power Systems Grows Nicely In Q3, Looks To Grow For All 2025, Too

  October 27, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Here’s a funny thing, or maybe not. In its conference call with Wall Street analysts going over the financial results for its third quarter ended in September, neither Arvind Krishna, IBM’s chairman and chief executive officer, nor James Kavanaugh, the company’s chief financial officer, said “Power” or “Power Systems” or “Power11” or anything directly relating to IBM i or AIX. Nary a peep, even though the Power11 upgrade cycle has begun in earnest and it looks like growth was pretty good in the third quarter and will be decent for all of 2025.

  For a long time now, Big Blue …

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• Please Take The IBM i Marketplace Survey

  October 27, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Time is running our for you to take the annual IBM i Marketplace Survey from Fortra, and we are asking you to take a few moments and give us all some insight into what is going on inside of your IT organization.

  The annual survey, which is in its 13^th year, opened up on September 15. You can give back to the IBM i community and help nudge IBM and ISVs in directions that are helpful to you by taking the survey, which you can do at this link.

  The results of this survey are an invaluable resource …

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• It Is Time To Tell Us What You Are Thinking And Doing

  October 6, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It is the beginning of fall, or autumn if you are in Europe, and you know what that means. No, it is not the deciduous woods turning to the colors of fire. Not it is not football (or soccer for that matter), or harvest time. But it is the time when Fortra opens up its annual IBM i Marketplace Survey, which has been running for more than a decade now.

  The annual survey, which is in its 13^th year, opened on September 15. You can give back to the IBM i community and help nudge IBM and ISVs in …

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• Talking Training And Skills With System i Developer

  September 29, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Between 2007 and 2021, the partners in System i Developer – Susan Gantner, Jon Paris, and Paul Tuohy – hosted two RPG & Db2 Summit events per year to help OS/400 and IBM i shops create better databases and the applications that ride atop them. The coronavirus pandemic put the kibosh on these in-person events and were, frankly, a lot of work for the partners to bring together and represented a huge financial risk as all in person events always do. (I know this from personal experience over at my other job at The Next Platform.)

  But after Tuohy …

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• Power11 Entry Machines: The Power S1124 And Power L1124

  July 21, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  For several decades, a two-socket server was the workhorse machine in most datacenters, whether they were running a database machine for transaction processing or a scale-out cluster of machines for distributed Web applications and their related back-ends. And for many OS/400 and IBM i shops, the two-socket machine was the one that provided the right balance of compute and storage expansion and density.

  But, over the years, as Power processor cores have gotten more powerful, customers have needed fewer and fewer cores to run their relatively modest (by comparison) and relatively static (they grow along with the business, but not …

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• With Subscription Price, IBM i P20 And P30 Tiers Get Bigger Bundles

  July 8, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Big Blue has been noodling how it might tweak the subscription pricing for the P20 and P30 tiers since getting feedback on the first pass it did on its big iron Power Systems machines way back in February 2023. That feedback from the company’s biggest IBM i customers was not entirely glowing, but IBM has been clear that it would in the fullness of time move from perpetual software licensing to subscription pricing on all of its software, and that IBM i would not be an exception.

  To cushion the blow – and there is one because customers keep machines …

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• Looks Like IBM Is Building A Linux-Like PASE For IBM i After All

  June 16, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It is pleasing, indeed, whenever you think of something that would be useful for a particular platform and then you find out that the company is working on it. This is indeed what I thought of when we reviewed the IBM i – A Strategic Preview For 2025 And Beyond session hosted by IBM i chief technology officer Steve Will at the recent POWERUp 2025 conference in Anaheim, California. I was not able to attend the event, but my co-editor, Alex Woodie, was able to, and hence we were quite pleased to see that Big Blue is apparently working on …

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• Big Blue Raises IBM i License Transfer Fees, Other Prices

  June 9, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The price increases that may or may not be happening to cover increasing costs at IBM continue apace. Some of the price increases we have seen over the past several months might be driven by increasing costs or the expectation of increasing costs, and others might be initiated to drive services and software revenues higher to push the profit level of the overall Power Systems business.

  It is hard to say for sure.

  But what we can say for certain is that last week, in announcement letter AD25-1142 dated June 2, Big Blue once again increased prices on various Power …

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• i-Rays Brings Observability To IBM i Performance Problems

  May 5, 2025 Alex Woodie

  One of the new IBM i products that POWERUp 2025 attendees will get to check out later this month is i-Rays. Developed by the Polish software company Omnilogy, i-Rays is an observability tool that helps customers to detect performance issues with their IBM i server, investigate the causes, and then get a machine learning-based recommendation on how to fix it.

  Performance issues are rare on the IBM i, which is generally a tireless transactional workhorse, but they can happen. When legitimate performance problems do crop up, it can be difficult to track down the source of the problem unless you …

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• Plotting Out Power Systems And IBM i To 2040 And Beyond

  April 8, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It may be hard to believe, but with the launch of IBM i 7.6 today, it has been 13,440 days since OS/400 V1R1 was announced on June 21, 1988, and Big Blue has delivered 27 distinct releases of the OS/400 and IBM i platform with dozens of Technology Refresh interim updates between releases in the IBM i 7.X series.

  It took nearly three years to go from OS/400 V1R1 to OS/400 V2R1, and there were no interim releases and Technology Refreshes were not going to be invented for a long time. With the V2 series, hardware and software releases in …

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