• Is The Cloud On Your IBM i Horizon?

  September 20, 2023 Alex Woodie

  It’s almost impossible to ignore the enormous pull that the cloud is exerting on the software industry today. Companies that run the IBM i server are also subject to that gravity, although it has different ramifications for their technological future, as well as the decisions they’ll make if they want to run their operations in the cloud.

  IBM i shops, almost by definition, are not running on the cloud today, at least not in the public cloud the way it is normally defined. While there are a handful of managed service providers (MSPs) offering private cloud IBM i runtimes, and …

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• AWS: A Temperate Zone Among A Global Climate Of Other Clouds

  August 14, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It might feel like Amazon Web Services has a monopoly on the cloud, but it does not. As it turns out, AWS does not even come close to having a monopoly, which means having somewhere north of 80 percent of the revenue and probably damned near all of the profits in any given market according to our definition.

  Synergy Research has just put out its latest quarterly report on cloud revenues by vendor, and AWS is amazingly consistent over the past six years with about a third of revenues across the hundreds of suppliers of infrastructure services, platform services, and …

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• The Rich Parfait That Is Cloud Spending

  November 9, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Most IBM i shops are so used to having an integrated system that runs their mission critical systems of record and some of their systems of engagement and Web infrastructure workloads, too, that they may forget that the rest of the world does not always experience their IT in this relatively monolithic way.

  The top 50,000 or so organizations in the world tend to take a best-of-breed approach to every application and its underlying layers of infrastructure, so they have a hodge-podge of stuff. The next million or so organizations have to be more conservative and keep the infrastructure diversity …

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• The Scoop On The Full Subscription Power S1014 With IBM i

  September 12, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Even before the Power10 entry and midrange servers were announced by Big Blue on July 12, we did a thought experiment at the end of June about a rumored hardware-software-maintenance bundle on the single-socket Power S1014 server aimed at IBM i customers with a single monthly subscription price. And for fun, that thought experiment compared the monthly cost of a high-end iPhone smartphone with cell service and a data plan – somewhere between $75 and $80 – to what we expected such a full subscription-based, on premises Power S1014 would cost. We figured it would be around $50 per IBM …

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• The Shape Of The IBM To Come

  October 11, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Big Blue is getting ready to spin off its managed services businesses, which represents about a third of its revenue stream and a big chunk of its employee base, into the separate company called Kyndryl and hopes to have this task done by the end of the year. Last week, IBM’s top brass had a virtual meeting with Wall Street to host its Investor Day, and IBM’s chief executive officer, Arvind Krishna, and the rest of the team unveiled a new segment and financial reporting structure that will be put into effect once the Kyndryl spinout is done.

  At that …

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• Comarch’s PowerCloud Gives IBM, Microsoft, And Google A Run For The Money

  July 14, 2021 Tomasz Wachnicki

  If you are looking for a cloud provider that has expertise in Power-based systems and that has datacenters in the United States, Europe, and Asia – so they are local to those geographies – and yet available on a truly global basis, and backed by deep experience in managed services for IBM i and AIX platforms, you have an option that you might not be aware of. The company is called Comarch, and it is taking on IBM, Google, and Microsoft/Skytap for IBM i and AIX business in the cloud.

  For those of you who are unaware of Comarch, it …

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• The Smearing Of Infrastructure And Platform Clouds

  October 5, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The largest public clouds on the planet are also among the most secretive and influential companies in the IT sector, and therefore despite events that go one for days or, now in the time of coronavirus, for weeks on end, we get very little actual information out of them about specifically what is going on in the cloud market with any amount of specificity.

  Yes, everybody and anybody who is an incumbent in the IT sector talks about how their “cloud” business is doing, and at least one of the big IT market researchers is sort of throwing up its …

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• ERP Deployments Shift Cloudward, Even On IBM i

  July 20, 2020 Alex Woodie

  Applications of all sorts are moving to the cloud, including the critical ERP systems that businesses rely on to automate processes. That’s been the trend for some time in the industry as a whole, but it’s also having an impact on the IBM i community, which is becoming cloudier by the month.

  While on-prem deployments of IBM i still dominate, the cloud portion is growing. Nearly one-quarter of IBM i shops have IBM i resources running in the cloud, according to HelpSystems’ 2020 IBM i Marketplace Study, including 6 percent who are cloud-only and 17 percent who run …

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• Revenge Of The Zombie Green Screen

  October 30, 2019 Alex Woodie

  Don’t look now, but command line interfaces – which were supposed to have been killed off years ago at the hands of superior graphical user interfaces (GUIs) – are making a comeback in the general IT scene. And the command line love appears to be spilling over into the IBM i.

  Command line interfaces, or CLIs, never completely disappeared from the scene. Even Windows 10 users can summon the dark magic of the DOS prompt with a few tactical clicks of the keyboard, mouse, or (God forbid) touchscreen. But like crazy uncles and credit card debt, the CLI has largely …

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• BMC Touches Clouds with Job Scheduler

  March 20, 2019 Alex Woodie

  Clouds are growing quickly as IT executives look to find more flexibility and cut costs by adopting cloud and software as a service (SaaS) applications. But most enterprises aren’t getting rid of all their on-premise systems, which means somebody needs to connect those cloud and on-premise systems. One of those “somebodies” is BMC Software.

  You might not remember it, but BMC Software still actively supports the IBM i environment with enterprise job scheduler, called CONTROL-M. The Houston, Texas, company has supported the IBM midrange server for years, and continues to do so with the 19th version of CONTROL-M, which the …

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