• IBM Clarifies Where It’s Going with IBM i Subscriptions, Product Realignment

  September 11, 2024 Alex Woodie

  As an avid IT Jungle reader, you’re probably aware that IBM is moving its IBM i software stack from a traditional licensing scheme to one based on subscriptions. The company is in the middle of the move at the moment, and it’s also in the middle of a product realignment, which has been the source of some confusion. IBM hosted a webinar recently that helped to clarify where it’s at now with the shift to subscriptions and the product realignment, and where it’s going in the future.

  IBM first announced back in May 2022 that it was shifting to subscription-based …

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• IBM Kills Off Entry Power Server Hardware Subscription, Old Features

  August 19, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Big Blue has been talking about offering a complete IBM system, including hardware, software, and support, as a single offering and under a single price, for more than two years now. The company talked about it back in July 2022, and we got the full scoop on pricing on the IBM i System Subscription, the first instantiation on the Power S1024 server, back in September 2022.

  This looked like the wave of the future, with a single per user cost of around $50 per month per user for a machine, which as we pointed out at the time, is …

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• What, And Who, The New Power S1012 Server Is Aimed At

  May 20, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As you know full well by now, we have a new and final entry into the Power10 line of systems from IBM, the Power S1012, also known by its codename “Bonnell.” The Power S1012 entry server was announced two weeks ago and we did an architectural dive into the system last week based on the announcement letter and the Redbook on the system.

  After digging around a bit, this week we are going to do a comparative analysis on the Power S1012 machine compared to its predecessors, particularly the Power8-based Power S812 Mini machine from 2017, which was a similar …

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• IBM Sharpens Its Edge With “Bonnell” Entry Power10 System

  May 8, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Through the many years that we have been following the OS/400 and IBM i platform, we have always been an advocate for powerful entry machines that act as a feeder into the larger machines into which customers might grow. Somewhere between 1988 and 2008, Moore’s Law outpaced the capacity increases that most small IBM i shops needed, and it has been difficult to make a machine that is small enough to be useful and cheap enough to be attractive yet expensive enough to make it all worth IBM’s while.

  Back in February 2017, Big Blue announced what we called the …

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• Drilling Down Into New IBM i Perpetual And Subscription Pricing

  April 15, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As we reported in last week’s issue, Big Blue increased pricing on its pricing for per-core perpetual software licenses, per user licensing fees, Software Maintenace, and subscription prices back on January 1. We missed the change – again, apologies for that – and let you know about the basics of these and other hardware and software price changes. This week we are going to look at the effect of these changes on the cost of the base IBM i systems software stack.

  To review: On September 9 last year, IBM announced the price increases that went into effect as …

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• Details On The IBM i Subscription Conversion Deals For P05 And P10 Tiers

  April 8, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As you are well aware by now, Big Blue is in the middle of changing from perpetual licensing plus Software Maintenance for the IBM i stack to subscription pricing that includes licensing and tech support for the software all in one annual subscription. And this is happening at the same time that IBM has raised software prices and maintenance prices for that software across the board, which we will report on separately, and the company has said that it will withdraw new perpetual software license software sales for IBM i on its Power Systems line on May 27.

  That withdrawal …

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• What Do Secondhand Power9 Machines Cost These Days?

  March 25, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Before IBM consolidated its Global Asset Recovery Services arm in the Systems group in the wake of the spinout of the Kyndryl outsourcing and services business, we could go out to the IBM web site every now and then and get a sense of what secondhand Power Systems machinery cost. But alas, that is no longer the case.

  And so, we went poking around the Internet late on a Friday night and stumbled across our old friends at Data Tech Computer Services in Alpharetta, Georgia, which have been in business nearly three decades peddling AS/400, iSeries, System i, and IBM …

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• The Low Down On Service Extension For IBM i 7.X Releases

  March 25, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In the wake of our discussion two weeks ago of the long-lived releases of IBM i and OS/400 and how they compare in terms of technical support and bug fix coverage to Linux and Windows Server, we got a bunch of questions about just when the service extension – what we call extended support like other operating system vendors – would end.

  We understood the very high price that customers pay for service extension – as brilliantly outlined in a piece by Steve Pitcher back in October 2023, which showed the high price that the cumulative cost stacks up …

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• Yet More Announcements On IBM i Software Subscriptions

  March 18, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In the past two years, Big Blue has done of lot of things to repackage the IBM i software stack, and even its entry Power Systems machinery, to be consistent with the modern world of utility pricing for IT systems. Many are not thrilled by this, of course, and not just because they are resistant to change. While IBM is bundling in many features and add-ons to the stack for free as it shifts to subscriptions, the core IBM i subscriptions are without question more expensive than buying a perpetual license and paying Software Maintenance over a five, six, or …

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• The Long And IBM i Road That Leads To Your Door

  March 11, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It is hard to find a modern platform that has such a long heritage as the machine on which your company’s business runs. Depending on when you want to draw the lines, the IBM i platform running on Power Systems iron dates back to the System/3 in 1969 or the System/38 in 1978 or the System/36 in 1983 or the AS/400 in 1988. No matter which line you want to draw, that is a long time for a continuously upgradable and upgraded operating system and database platform combination and its underlying hardware.

  Not only do the predecessors of the IBM …

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