• The Power Systems And System z Mainframe Cycles Start Anew

  April 25, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If you listen to Big Blue a lot, like we do at The Four Hundred, you know IBM spends a lot of its time yammering about hybrid cloud and artificial intelligence, and how it has domain expertise to help develop applications for very precise problems in very specific businesses and markets. And sometimes in its quarterly financial reports, it can go through the whole hour and not mention Power Systems at all.

  But thanks to the beginning of the Power10 product cycle last September with the high-end “Denali” Power E1080 server and the launch of the “Telum” z16 mainframe …

  Read more

• There Were Actually More Power Systems Price Hikes Than We Thought

  April 25, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Last week, we told you about two price hikes on Power Systems hardware, software, and services that were announced on April 13 and take effect for hardware and software on May 7 and for selected Software Maintenances services on July 1.

  One of the price changes came in our announcement letter roundup and the other came through the business partner network, and on a hunch on Sunday night with another story still needing to be written, I logged into the IBM announcement letter system to see if anything had happened while I was away last week sitting in the sun …

  Read more

• Inflation Finally Comes To IBM i Platform Prices

  April 18, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  With the inflation rates rising around the world, and particularly strongly in the United States, it was bound to happen sooner or later: IBM is raising prices on key software for Power Systems machines as well as on selected Power9 hardware.

  With entry and midrange machines based on Power10 iron just around the corner – probably announced in May around the COMMON POWERUp 2022 conference in New Orleans from May 23 through 26 and shipping sometime in June – it might seem like a weird time to be raising Power9 hardware prices. But there could be a logic to it. …

  Read more

• The State Of The IBM i Base 2022: Third Party Software Conundrum

  April 11, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Aside from death, most problems are not intractable. But people surely can be, and sometimes are. But luckily not often, and the thing about people is that, generally speaking, they can be reasonable when they are reasoned with. It is with all of this in mind that we come to the next in the State of IBM i Base stories for 2022, where we want to talk about the software trap that the remaining OS/400, i5/OS, and some IBM i shops have gotten themselves into and how we might help them get out of it to the mutual benefit of …

  Read more

• Skytap Bullish as Momentum Grows for Cloudy Power LPARs

  April 6, 2022 Alex Woodie

  Since announcing support for IBM i in late 2018, Skytap has seen interest build for its public cloud offering, which leverages Power servers installed Microsoft Azure and IBM Cloud data centers. Now, thanks to an expanded partnership with Microsoft and a new certification with SAP, the company expects migrations of IBM i and AIX customers into the cloud to continue picking up steam.

  Skytap has a unique offering in the cloud hosting business, particularly as it pertains to Power customers, who have a much smaller set of runtime options in an X86-dominated world.

  The Seattle, Washington, company has a deal …

  Read more

• 7.1 Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest

  April 4, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We think there is a lot of Power7, Power7+, and Power8 iron out there in the Power Systems running IBM i base, and we think there is a lot of IBM i 6.1 and IBM i 7.1 running on that iron. Our assertion is based on years of anecdotal evidence from the resellers and business partners we talk to, the customers we talk to, and a whole lot of spreadsheet witchcraft that we do based on survey data we see.

  The point is not just to come up with this data and then drop it and run, but to face …

  Read more

• IBM i RFE Site Moving to New Location

  April 4, 2022 Alex Woodie

  IBM last month announced that it’s moving its Request for Enhancements (RFE) program to a new place. From now on, IBM i users will be asked to submit and vote on RFEs via its new IBM Ideas website, where IBM is centralizing the RFE programs for various products, including IBM i.

  In the summer of 2016, IBM opened a new RFE program on its developerWorks site at www.ibm.com/developerworks/rfe/. That website marked Big Blue’s first formalization of its requirements process, which up until that point was spread across four entities: the COMMON Americas Advisory Council (CAAC), COMMON Europe Advisory …

  Read more

• How Kyndryl’s IBM i Customer Base Benefits from the Big Blue Split

  March 30, 2022 Alex Woodie

  Now that IBM is done with the spin-out of its Global Technology Services (GTS) business, the company that resulted from that spin-out, Kyndryl, is free to pursue its own strategy. For Kyndryl’s considerable IBM i installed base, that freedom will result in a much broader array of technological options and services engagements becoming available to them.

  With 500 employees dedicated to supporting its IBM i customers, Kyndryl has one of the biggest IBM i services practices in the world, says Nicolas Le Van Dé, Kyndryl’s IBM i global offering manager.

  “I think we are the leader in terms of IBM …

  Read more

• The Low-Down On IBM’s Power Systems Sales

  March 7, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Late last year, IBM, under the new regime of Arvind Krishna and in the wake of the acquisition of Red Hat and the spinout of the Kyndryl managed services business, reorganized its businesses and the financial reports it gives to Wall Street investors. Generally speaking, the way Big Blue is talking about itself, from a financial perspective, is more accurate than the reorganization it did after Ginny Rometty had been at the IBM helm for a bit. Which is good. But the one downside is that we lost visibility into the Power Systems platform.

  We lamented this when looking at …

  Read more

• April Fools, Or Not: IBM Raises Power Systems Prices

  February 28, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In an inflationary environment with all kinds of parts shortages, it is no surprise when IT suppliers raise their list prices and/or cut back on the depth of their discounts as they negotiate deals. We are certainly in that kind of environment, and we are also on the cusp of new Power10-based entry and midrange server announcements from IBM as well.

  Given all of this, we expected Big Blue to be announcing some price increases on older Power9 iron, which might be in short supply and therefore might be subject to “opportunistic pricing” as too much demand is chasing too …

  Read more

Previous Articles Next Articles