• Power Systems Still Climbing Despite This Weird Economy

  October 30, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Back in the old days, IBM used to talk about System z, Power Systems, and storage as separate things because they are, largely, separate things. Even if customers of the mainframe and Power platforms sometimes buy IBM storage for their machines, and even if some of that storage is actually based on Power platforms themselves.

  But to be able to brag about the System z business every quarter and to make the rest of its Infrastructure group look like a bigger thing, Big Blue merged its Power Systems and Storage divisions into something it has called Distributed Systems for the …

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• What IBM i Shops Are Thinking About Right Now

  October 30, 2023 Ron Venzin

  If you listen to the national and global media, it is hard to figure out what is really going on in the world at the strategic and tactical levels of individual companies. The global happenings are like climate trends, but each company generates its own weather and reacts to the weather generated by the customers and competitors in its own market. Or markets, as the case may be.

  Because we all live in the weather as we are trying to keep an eye on the climate – people really do talk about the economic climate but no one talks about …

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• The Plus Things Change, The Plus Things Stay The Same

  October 23, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Like nearly all of you, I have never read the autobiographical romance novels of Jean-Baptise Alphonse Karr, or read back issues of the satirical Le Figaro newspaper that were nearly two centuries old when Karr was editor of that paper, which is today aimed at the upper middle class and which is still one of the papers of record for France.

  But like nearly all of you, I am very familiar with one of the witticisms that came out of Karr’s pen: “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.” Which translates into American as something akin to: …

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• Why Big Blue Is Simplifying The IBM i LPP Stack

  October 23, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If only the paranoid survive, as legendary Intel co-founder Andy Grove once quipped, then we all would pretty much have to be paranoid pretty much all the time. And this, obviously, would not be healthy. But as legendary founder of The Four Hundred, the irreplaceable and irascible Hesh Wiener, once quipped, sometimes they really are out to get you.

  And so, we come to IBM’s recent “come to Bezos” moment starting late last year that it was going to be providing subscription pricing for hardware and systems software for the IBM i platform running on Power Systems. We fully …

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• So You Wanna Take Another IBM i Survey, Right?

  October 23, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It is hard to believe that it has been a decade since the IBM i Marketplace Survey was conceived of by the late Dan Burger of IT Jungle and Tom Huntington of HelpSystems, now known as Fortra.

  As you might imagine, we miss Dan every day, and we are committed to the mission that he had to better understand what is going on in the IBM i base. Time is running out for you to participate and have your voice heard and your IBM i shop is counted. Please take a moment and take the survey, which you can do …

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• Everybody Needs Monitoring On The IBM i

  October 18, 2023 Chris Hird

  If you are running a software business, you can never go wrong by listening to the customer and then providing what they want.

  Our journey into being an adjunct for the open source Nagios system monitoring tool began when we had a client that wanted to monitor multiple LPAR instances being backed up by our high availability software, HA4i, from a single pane of glass. At the time, we had a PHP interface for our HA4i tool, and we really did not want to rewrite all of that just to be able to give this customer that single pane …

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• The Science Of Lifting And Shifting To The Cloud

  October 11, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Companies in Japan have a long and deep history with IBM computing systems, both its mainframe and its midrange platforms. And in some cases, they have moved from one to the other to maintain the IBM style of integrated systems while attaining the benefits of what many customers still consider the more integrated, less expensive, and easier to use platform that Big Blue offers: Namely, the AS/400 launched in 1988 and its progeny up through the current IBM i generation.

  Such is the case with Kosei Securities Co Ltd, which was founded way back in 1961 in Osaka, a …

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• API Dev Tool Delivers For Trucking Outfit

  October 2, 2023 Alex Woodie

  When the IT leaders at Ward Transport & Logistics set out to find a product that would allow them to call outbound APIs from their IBM i server for a new dynamic pricing system, they had an inkling of what they wanted. But when they looked for an API development tool in the IBM i market, they were surprised at what they found.

  From its headquarters in Altoona, Pennsylvania, Ward Transport & Logistics provides less than truckload (LTL) service to customers throughout the region. The company’s 1,600 employees help Ward’s customers move freight with a fleet of 750 power units …

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• It’s Time To Tell Us How It Is And What You’re Doing

  October 2, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The IBM i Marketplace Survey and its accompanying report and the webinar that goes over the results of the survey are an invaluable resource for the IBM i community. This is particularly so since IDC, Gartner, Forrester, and the other IT market researchers and consultancies have long since stopped tracking Power Systems in any kind of detail and certainly don’t spend a lot of time on the IBM i portion of it.

  Big Blue itself may have lots of insight into its customer base, but it certainly shares very little of that information with the IBM i community. (We get …

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• In The IBM i Trenches With: Maxava

  September 20, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The IBM i market is a big animal, even here in 2023 more than three and a half decades after the launch of the AS/400, and that means you have to take a lot of pulses to get a sense of what that animal is doing and how it is doing.

  This week, we are talking with John Dominic, who is global vice president at high availability and system monitoring software maker Maxava. Dominic has spent his life in the greater Philadelphia metropolitan area, and, like many people in the IBM midrange, was cultivated very locally even though he …

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