• Wanted: Exciting New Publicist For Boring Old Server

  March 18, 2019 Alex Woodie

  You don’t need a marketing guru to tell you the IBM i server has a publicity problem. Outside the cloistered midrange community, nobody knows that it even exists. Even some of the companies that run their businesses on it don’t know it exists. Unicorns and leprechauns, which don’t exist, have a greater mindshare than the IBM i server. And the funny thing is, that’s exactly how it was all designed.

  According to industry analyst Rob Enderle, the IBM i server is a world leader in one computing category: boredom.

  “You put it in, you leave it alone, and it just …

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• Power Systems: Driving More Revenue Than Initially Thought

  February 25, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Any model takes refinement, whether it is something a human spreadsheet jockey puts together or it is a distributed neural network that is trained with machine learning techniques to do some kind of identification and manipulation of data. So it is with the Power Systems revenue model I put together a month ago in the wake of IBM reporting its financial results for the fourth quarter.

  I did not really mean to get into it at the time. I was just going to assemble a short table of the constant currency growth rates of the Power Systems business and …

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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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• 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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• Taking At Stab At Modeling The Power Systems Business

  January 28, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It is incredibly difficult to try to get a handle on how IBM’s overall systems business and then its Power Systems portion of that business is doing, something that I voiced frustration about last summer when talking about Big Blue’s financial results for the second quarter of 2018. At the time, I told you I would take a whack at trying to build a model of Power Systems sales to give us a sense of how the hardware platform is doing, and I took the first stab at this in the wake of IBM announcing its financial results for the …

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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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• The IBM i Base Did Indeed Move On Up

  January 21, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  This time last year, in the wake of the 2018 IBM i Marketplace Survey report put together by HelpSystems and based on survey data gathered in the fall of 2017, we said that the IBM i base was ready to move on up to newer iron. And guess what? Based on the results of the survey done in October 2018 and released in the 2019 IBM i Marketplace Survey unveiled last week, it looks like a pretty healthy portion of the base did in fact get off older iron and move to shiny new Power9 iron. In some cases …

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• IBM Boosts Prices On Lab Services Engagements

  January 14, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Happy New Year, you have a price increase! On January 1, in announcement letter 319-030, IBM announced a pricing action and you might have not even noticed it, since it was not presented to customers in the normal wrap up of product announcements, withdrawals, and price changes that Big Blue puts out every week. We certainly didn’t see it mentioned. At any event, because we don’t trust that IBM puts everything out at once, we often periodically take a look back in the archive to see if “new” old announcements pop up.

  In any event, on January 1, IBM …

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• For Entry IBM Shops, Power9 Is About Performance And Security

  December 10, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Buying new systems costs money, often a lot of money relative to the size of the overall IT budget and the revenue and profit streams of the companies for which they work and, in essence, actually embody what that company really is. So in a sense, systems are always worth the money if they are actually letting people do their work properly.

  That said, there is always an argument to be made for doing an upgrade – often actually a migration because the system itself cannot easily or economically be upgraded – and another set of arguments for waiting a …

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