• Watson Puts On A Show At COMMON

  May 8, 2017 Dan Burger

  Watson, the anthropomorphic face of IBM cognitive computing, is used to being on the big stage. Fame came quickly and easily with the TV quiz show Jeopardy! Then there was recognition for work in cancer research and fighting cybercrime. IBM has invited Watson to all its major conferences and even changed the name, and some of the focus, of its Power Systems group into the Cognitive Systems business unit.

  Yesterday, Watson showed up at the COMMON Annual Meeting and Exposition, the world’s largest gathering of IBM i professionals. The first impression was a good one. It emphasized easy integration …

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• The Power Systems Decline Did Not Have To Be This Bad

  April 24, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Thirteen weeks ago, when IBM reported its financial results for its final quarter of 2016, we said that the Power Systems business would decline in every quarter ahead of the Power9 launch, and while this is not a hard thing to predict, it has certainly turned out to be true in the first quarter of 2017. Both IBM’s Power Systems and Systems z machines and their related operating systems were hit by gut-wrenching declines.

  The good news, as we have pointed out time and again, is that IBM’s true systems business is distinct from and is a superset that …

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• Taking A New Look At Used IBM i Gear

  April 17, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In some ways, we miss the days when OS/400 and IBM i gear was more expensive than it is today. Thanks to considerably larger customer and reseller bases and because hardware was so expensive and, costing something on the order of a few mansions per month to rent or lease or finance, there was a vibrant market in second-hand AS/400 and iSeries equipment.

  But as the base got smaller and systems got cheaper thanks to Moore’s Law improvements on all hardware components except the tin wrapping around them, the market for used equipment became thinner and less orderly. And, perhaps …

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• Why Is IBM Giving AIX Shops Better Deals Than IBM i Shops?

  April 10, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It looks like AIX shops got a better Valentine’s Day card than IBM i customers did.

  One of the things that was supposed to happen when the iSeries and pSeries product lines were merged back in 2000 was that a unified Power Systems organization was going to run both the OS/400 (now IBM i) and AIX software platforms on a single, unified hardware platform with a single and equal hardware price. This was something we had been demanding from IBM so long that we were blue in the face, so to speak, and to its credit, IBM stuck to the …

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• The Bang For The Buck Of Entry IBM i Servers

  March 27, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In last Monday’s issue of The Four Hundred, I rounded up the feeds, speeds, and pricing of the new Power S812 Mini system that Big Blue started selling in the middle of March to IBM i shops with modest computing needs. We are talking one core running at just over 3 GHz and providing an aggregate of 9,880 units of performance on the Commercial Processing Workload (CPW) online transaction processing benchmark test used to gauge the oomph of Power Systems and their predecessors.

  This ain’t a lot of computing in 2017, people. Just pointing that out. And I will …

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• IBM Jacks Up Hardware Maintenance Fees

  March 27, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It happens every couple of years or so, and in fact, it has not happened in a couple of years so it looks like we were about due. We are talking about maintenance price hikes on a slew of IBM hardware, price hikes that are aimed mostly at stemming the gradual decline in maintenance revenues that IBM’s Global Services unit is seeing as its base of hardware contracts. In theory, such a price increase boosts the profits of its services arm, but it also helps cover some of the inflationary costs associated with providing hardware support and housing parts of …

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• IBM i License Transfer Deal Comes To The Power S812 Mini

  March 6, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Back in the early days of the AS/400 midrange system, the processor, memory, networking, and disk and tape storage hardware embodied in the system was by far the most costly part of that system, far outweighing the cost of the systems software that ran atop it. We don’t have the precise numbers at hand, but it was something like 85 percent hardware cost and 15 percent software cost.

  Fast-forward a few decades, and the Moore’s Law improvements in every component in the hardware means that hardware is far less costly. But software doesn’t have a Moore’s Law scaling; in fact, …

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• Servers Hit The Skids Last Year, This Year Might be No Better

  March 6, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As the first building block of any system is the server, and watching how these are acquired, managed, and disposed of tells you a lot about what is going on with applications in the datacenter and who is making money off of them. It has been a long time since the Power Systems division at IBM has been an economic powerhouse in the server space, but now even the X86 platform, long dominated by Intel, is starting to show some signs of losing its luster.

  It stands to reason. In the final quarter of this year, X86-based machines accounted for …

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• IBM i Community To Get Closer Look At Watson

  February 27, 2017 Dan Burger

  The cogs in cognitive are turning. And there are indications that IBM is ready to go beyond the story of how it works to stories about it is working. The messengers remain somewhat tight lipped, but we can expect cognitive to be a celebrated technology at the COMMON conference in early May.

  Watson, the face of IBM cognitive computing, is highly recognizable. Bluemix, IBM’s cloud platform for building, running, and managing apps and services, including Watson, is getting more attention. And the number of APIs that pull this together with integration points for all platforms, including IBM i, …

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• What’s Wrong With Modern RPG?

  February 27, 2017 Dan Burger

  IBM continues to enhance RPG. If it wasn’t being improved on a regular basis, there would be cause for concern, but some people find cause for concern in everything. Satisfaction is on the other side of the fence, even after they’ve crossed the fence. That’s not an endorsement for “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.” There’s always room for constructive criticism and honest assessments of the circumstances.

  That brings us to the RPG enhancements in the recently announced Technology Refresh identified as IBM i 7.2 TR 6 and IBM i 7.3 TR …

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