• Gartner Raises IT Spending Forecast For 2024 Again

  November 11, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The boom of GenAI just keeps getting louder, and the increasing spending by the hyperscalers and clouds are giving air cover to IT shops all over the world who want to weave GenAI technologies into the applications and processes of their companies and who therefore want to get more IT budget.

  IT spending forecasts are useful because they tell us where we think we are going and they also tell us how our IT shop measures up against the average of all of the IT shops in the world. The typical enterprise is definitely not spending anywhere near as much …

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• The 13,152 Days Of The AS/400 Platform, And Counting

  June 24, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In the computer market, whether it is for laptops or datacenter iron, it is hard to say if longevity is gauged in human years or dog and cat years or something else like maybe historical or geological time.

  In some ways, 36 years old, which is what has just happened to the AS/400 platform a few days ago, is a long time to do anything, and in others, 36 years is just the beginning of a process. As we have pointed out when celebrating the AS/400’s birthday in prior years, the origins of the platform reach back to 1978 when …

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• An Update On Power From POWERUp 2023

  April 26, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  After so many years of not normal, it is comforting to do something to feel normal, like travel to what used to be the COMMON spring user conference and what is now called POWERUp, and in particular POWERUp 2023. (I am only using the official capitalization there because Jenny will change it during edit if I don’t.) I don’t want to leave the hill I live on, especially after so many years of traveling many times a month, but I must say that I enjoyed myself and had my share of boisterous conversations, beer, and food.

  And work, of course. …

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• It’s A Good Thing For IBM That Samsung Makes Chips And Also Runs A Foundry

  October 10, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Over the decades, Big Blue has invested an enormous sum of money – easily equal to hundreds of billions of dollars in inflation adjusted 2022 dollars – to figure out clever ways to etch transistors on silicon wafers and to package them up into chips that it and other companies used in commercial and consumer products. It was a great business right up to the minute it wasn’t, mostly because IBM’s chip volumes were getting smaller and smaller at the same time the cost of creating successively smaller transistors was getting larger and larger.

  And so, back in 2014, IBM …

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• The Power10 Machines That Will Take IBM i To 2025

  July 12, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  IBM i shops that have been waiting for an upgrade path that will take them to the other half of this decade do not have to wait any longer. Finally, after a change of foundry (to Samsung) and process technology (from 10 nanometers down to 7 nanometers) as well as a new implementation of the Power instruction set packed with all kinds of vector and matrix math goodies that are perfect for embedding AI into commercial applications, Big Blue is ready to start shipping the entry and midrange Power Systems machines based on the Power10 processor.

  We made it, despite …

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• IBM And Samsung Go Vertical To Push Transistor Density On Chips

  January 10, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Big Blue might have sold off its IBM Microelectronics chip fabrication operation to GlobalFoundries many years ago, but that does not mean that the company does not still do a reasonably large amount of fundamental research into chip maker techniques and tricks. Transistor, chip, and packaging research and development is a big portion of the patent portfolio at IBM and continues to be so because Big Blue still has some of the smartest chipheads on the planet working for it because IBM wants to ensure there is a roadmap for future Power and System z processors and because it can …

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• IBM: The Elder Statesman Of Semiconductors

  May 17, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Big Blue may be a lot smaller than it used to be, and it is going to get a lot smaller after its spins off its managed services and hosting business into a new company to be called Kyndryl, which will have about $19 billion in sales, about 4,600 customers, and about 90,000 employees. That will leave the remaining part of IBM, focused on its Power Systems and System z platforms and its whole push into hybrid cloud, artificial intelligence, and quantum computing.

  That remaining business will have about $59 billion in sales, about 260,000 employees, and something on the …

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• IBM i Roadmap Promises A Long Ride, Few Bumps

  June 10, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It would be hard to find a group of enterprise IT shops that are more conservative – meaning averse to risk – than the IBM midrange. Arguably, IBM System z mainframe shops are even more risk averse, but perhaps it is a matter more of scale than degree. In the average IBM i shop, one person – or maybe a handful of people – is keeping risk at bay, while in a mainframe shop there could be dozens or hundreds that are trying to steer the ship without rocking the boat.

  Every now and then, Big Blue publishes an IBM …

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