• Now, IBM Is Jacking Up Hardware Maintenance Prices

  June 16, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The first stirrings of hardware maintenance price increases that will affect IBM Power Systems shops have hit, starting in China for Power8 and Power9 machines and for Storage Expert Care support everywhere around the world except in Japan.

  To be quite honest, when we read the hardware maintenance price increase in announcement letter AD25-1195, we did not at first see that it was restricted to the People’s Republic Of China and assumed that it was for the United States and quite possibly for the entire planet. But, alas and good for everyone outside of China, the 10 percent price …

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• Keep The IBM i Youth Movement Going With More Training, Better Tools

  June 9, 2025 Alex Woodie

  Nobody is going to mistake an IBM i conference for a college campus anytime soon. But if the recent POWERUp 2025 conference at Disneyland was any indication, there is a definite trend toward younger professionals working on the platform. While the IBM i youth movement is real, companies will benefit from some simple ways to attract and retain these new IBM i professionals.

  IBM is still working to get IBM i content back into four-year universities through the Power Skills Academy, which has been a struggle. Colleges are reluctant to invest in building a curriculum based on technologies that they …

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• IBM Preserves Memory Investments Across Power10 And Power11

  May 21, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  While the central processing unit inside every server gets all of the glory and much of the budget, these days it is the main memory that stores the data and gives that CPU memory that is perhaps more important and is actually the most costly part of the overall system.

  This is particularly true of back office systems running relational databases, and increasingly these days, in-memory databases to speed up access to that corporate data. If you spend hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars on system memory, wouldn’t it be nice if that investment could be amortized over more …

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• FAX/400 And CICS For i Are Dead. What Will IBM Kill Next?

  May 19, 2025 Alex Woodie

  A number of IBM i products and functions were sunsetted and are no longer supported with IBM i 7.6, including some of the greenscreen Application Development ToolSet (ADTS) tools like Screen Design Aid (SDA) and Report Layout Utility (RLU), and more than two dozen others. This shouldn’t come as news, as IBM previously announced its intent. But what products and functions will IBM kill with the next release of IBM i? A cryptic post by IBM on its website has the community talking.

  As part of the May 2024 Technology Refresh (TR) cycle for IBM i 7.4 and 7.5, Big …

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• Rocket Celebrates 35th Anniversary As Private Equity Owner Ponders Sale

  April 28, 2025 Alex Woodie

  Rocket Software has come a long way since Andy Youniss and Johan Magnusson Gedda founded the company in Youniss’ Boston garage in 1990. Today the company counts more than 12,000 customers, including a large number of IBM i shops, and reportedly has a valuation of around $10 billion. Could the company’s 35th anniversary of its founding be a good time for its current majority owner, Bain Capital, to sell?

  Youniss started building what we now think of as Rocket Software in 2000, when he completed the first of what would become dozens of acquisitions. Over the years, there would be …

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• z17 Mainframes Give IBM Time To Ramp AI-Accelerated Power11 Systems

  April 14, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We had been expecting for the Power11 processors and their new Power Systems servers to be announced sometime around the spring to early summer of this year and to start shipping in volume in the summer, maybe in June or July, with a nice sales bump in the second half of 2025. However, now the Power11 launch will be in the second half of the year, and IBM’s Systems group will be counting on a bump first from the System z17 mainframes that were launched last week.

  This has happened before, and more than once, and it is a good …

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• Rocket CDC Tool Pushes Data Out Of IBM i

  March 10, 2025 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops that need a change data capture (CDC) tool to push Db2 data off the box onto a target system, such as an Apache Kafka stream, may want to check out the new DataEdge product that Rocket Software recently announced.

  In late January, Rocket Software unveiled DataEdge, a new suite that provides a spectrum of data integration, data discovery, and data virtualization capabilities under the specific product names Rocket Data Replicate & Sync, Rocket Data Intelligence, and Rocket Data Virtualization. Some of the components in DataEdge are preexisting, while others – such as the outbound IBM i CDC …

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• IBM Switches To Build To Order For Entry Power Systems

  February 24, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If we trust our memory, for the past several decades both high-end Power systems machines as well as all System z mainframes have been done on a build-to-order basis, and for the past decade at least, these big iron boxes were made at IBM’s factories in Poughkeepsie, New York, for the worldwide market.

  For many years, entry and midrange AS/400 line was manufactured in three plants: the main factory in Rochester, Minnesota for the market in Canada and the United States and for certain high end machines in Europe, as well as Santa Palombo outside of Milan, Italy for entry …

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• Izzi Throws Retiring IBM i Software Company Founders A Lifeline

  February 3, 2025 Alex Woodie

  Founders of smaller IBM i and System z software vendors who are looking to sell their companies before they retire may want to check out a new venture called Izzi Software. In an interview with IT Jungle, the executives heading the startup explain that it has a mandate to spend millions of private equity dollars on acquiring midrange and mainframe ISVs that have solid products and businesses, but may not be big enough to attract M&A attention from bigger firms.

  It’s no secret that the IBM i and System z communities tend toward the older side of the age …

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• IBM Power On Track To Get Above $2 Billion A Year

  February 3, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  IBM’s stock price is kissing $260 a share, and this is a level that, adjusted for stock splits, the company has not seen since before it ran up on the rocks in the early 1990s as its mainframe business and AS/400 business all shrank at the same time that RISC/Unix systems and X86 gear in the datacenter took off. What’s going on?

  Well, here is the deal: IBM has customers using its Power and z servers for mission-critical back office systems, and a lot of the customers using its IBM i, AIX, Linux, and z/OS platforms are going to be …

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