• Taking At Stab At Modeling The Power Systems Business

  January 28, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It is incredibly difficult to try to get a handle on how IBM’s overall systems business and then its Power Systems portion of that business is doing, something that I voiced frustration about last summer when talking about Big Blue’s financial results for the second quarter of 2018. At the time, I told you I would take a whack at trying to build a model of Power Systems sales to give us a sense of how the hardware platform is doing, and I took the first stab at this in the wake of IBM announcing its financial results for the …

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• Power Systems Keep Growing To Finish Off 2018

  January 28, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The Power Systems line, buoyed by the deliver of high-end Power E980 systems for big AIX and IBM i jobs, a steady stream of IBM i system upgrades, and some traction in Power-based Linux clusters for HPC and data analytics workloads, turned in a pretty good final quarter for 2018, and capped three prior quarters of growth during 2018 to turn in a full year of growth.

  You can’t tell how much growth, of course, but in the lead story of this issue of The Four Hundred, I took my best stab at modeling the quarterly revenue stream of …

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• Public Cloud Dreaming For IBM i

  January 23, 2019 Alex Woodie

  Is the IBM i community suffering from a bad case of cloud envy? While we profess to love our servers, it’s difficult to sit by and watch as our Windows and Linux colleagues tap into unlimited storage and compute resources offered by public cloud vendors. Maybe that will all change in 2019, but it’s not looking likely.

  Public cloud vendors have invested hundreds of billions of dollars to build massive data centers around to world to house scads of cheap X86 servers and storage resources. Tens of thousands of companies have moved some or all of their computing stacks into …

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• IBM’s Plan For Etching Power10 And Later Chips

  January 7, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Last summer, GlobalFoundries, the chip making conglomerate comprised of the foundry businesses of AMD and IBM plus Chartered Semiconductor Manufacturing, put the kibosh on its planned aggressive ramp of 7 nanometer chip making technologies. AMD and IBM, who both depended on GlobalFoundries for their server chip manufacturing, obviously knew well before this announcement that GlobalFoundries was going to be halting development and production ramp for 7 nanometers, so they were not left in as much of a lurch as it might seem.

  Lucky for both companies, there is more than one foundry that was trying to stay on the bleeding …

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• Open Source Is the Future, So Where Does IBM i Fit In?

  December 12, 2018 Alex Woodie

  The IBM i server reached a milestone this year when it turned 30 years old, an amazing feat for a remarkable system that continues to provide computational value to tens of thousands of organizations around the world. But another birthday was celebrated this year that the IBM i community should take note of: The 20th anniversary of the beginning of the open source movement.

  Now, this birthday is a little bit questionable because open source software existed before 1998, of course. But the time is worth marking because an important meeting took place in Palo Alto, California, where the phrase …

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• Syncsort Snags EView for Log Data Hooks

  November 28, 2018 Alex Woodie

  Syncsort bolstered its capability to harvest log data originating on IBM i and mainframes yesterday with the acquisition of EView Technology, a Raleigh, North Carolina-based company that builds big iron connectors for mainstream systems management tools.

  EView Technology didn’t occupy a prominent seat in the IBM i auditorium, but it did carve out its own little niche as a purveyor of connectivity tools used by systems administrators at some of the biggest IBM i and mainframe shops in the country, such a Ford, Kraft, TD Bank, Discount Tire, Waste Management, HSBC, FedEx, and REI.

  The company’s claim to fame was …

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• The Impact On IBM i Of Big Blue’s Acquisition Of Red Hat

  October 31, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Well, we can honestly say that we did not see that coming when IBM and Red Hat announced late last Sunday afternoon that Big Blue would be shelling out $34 billion to acquire the world’s most successful business that peddles support for open source infrastructure software.

  Ironically, at the time I happened to be writing about how IBM and Red Hat had just announced that they had brought the OpenShift Container Platform, a mashup of Docker and Kubernetes, to Power Systems machines running Linux, and I was lamenting that it was not trivial to figure out how to integrate …

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• Kubernetes Container Control Comes To Power Systems

  October 29, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The moment that Google created a clone of parts of its internal Borg cluster and container management system and open sourced it as the Kubernetes project, the jig was pretty much up.

  Google had done a lot of the fundamental work to bring containers to the Linux platform starting way back in 2005, and had shared its techniques with the open source community, leading directly to the Docker container format and the engine that runs it atop the Linux kernel. While Docker, the company, got a jump start with its Docker Swarm container orchestrator and then its fuller Docker Enterprise …

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• Systems A Bright Spot In Mixed Results For IBM

  October 22, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It is hard to describe a company that raked in $18.76 billion in revenues and brought $2.69 billion of that to the bottom as limping along. But watching IBM, as revenues declined by 2.1 percent, after many years of gentle declines, and profits off by 1.3 percent, it sure does feel that way sometimes.

  In past years, as Big Blue crested above $100 billion in sales, its growth was limited by its total addressable market among large enterprises that can only get so large, too, as well as by the limits of its imagination for peddling wares to small and …

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• Bain Buys Rocket for $2 Billion

  October 10, 2018 Alex Woodie

  Rocket Software announced yesterday that Bain Capital Private Equity has agreed to acquire a majority stake in the company for $2 billion. The company’s management team will remain intact following the transaction, which is expected to be completed this quarter.

  Rumors have been swirling in recent months that Rocket had put itself on the market and was looking to sell itself or its products. The investment by Bain Capital should put an end to the speculation, as Rocket CEO and president Andy Youniss says the company is embarking upon its fourth decade of growth.

  “This new relationship will allow us …

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