• Inside Avatier’s Goals to Modernize Identity Management

  September 25, 2024 Alex Woodie

  When Nelson Cicchitto founded Avatier back in 1997, the company focused on providing identity management and access for a single platform: Windows NT. Nearly three decades later, the company’s core goals around enabling identity management and access haven’t changed, but the its platform reach and technical capabilities certainly have grown, as Cicchitto said in an exclusive IT Jungle interview.

  You may not have heard much about Avatier, the small Pleasanton, California-based developer of identity and access management solutions that’s been quietly building a base of 500 customers around the world. As far as IBM i vendors goes, the company …

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• Making Basic IT Services Great Again

  September 23, 2024 Alex Woodie

  The focus of the tech world has been squarely on generative AI since ChatGPT descended the golden staircase and entered our hearts and minds in late 2022. Since then, building GenAI apps and services has become the number one priority for businesses around the globe. Unfortunately, the GenAI fixation has come at the detriment of basic IT services, a recent IBM study suggests.

  The level of hype for generative AI the past two years has been off the chart. Not since the initial dot-com boom of the late 1990s has a new technology triggered such a tsunami of interest, some …

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• GenAI Interest ‘Exploding’ for Modernization on IBM i and Z, Kyndryl Says

  September 18, 2024 Alex Woodie

  There’s been an explosion of interest in using generative AI on IBM i and System Z servers, according to Kyndryl’s latest report on mainframe modernization. Hybrid IT, security, the skills gap, and observability round out the top five trends impacting the IBM midrange and mainframe platforms.

  Last year, Kyndryl contracted with Coleman Parkes Research to survey about 500 senior IT leaders at IBM i and System Z mainframe shops around the world. That effort turned into the 2023 State of Mainframe Modernization Survey Report, which we covered here.

  Many of the same modernization trends that the former IBM Global …

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• IBM Shutters Systems Research And Development Labs In China

  September 9, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  What a change four decades makes, and what a bigger change even a decade has made, when it comes to the relationship between the United States and China.

  Four decades ago, when Big Blue started to do business for real in China, the only reason to believe that the Middle Kingdom might one day rival the United States economically and militarily was the vastness of its population, the breadth and depth of its natural resources, and the patience and tenacity of its command economy. China was the anchor economy of the so-called BRICS – Brazil, Russia, India, and China – …

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• Some Thoughts On Big Blue’s GenAI Strategy For IBM i

  August 12, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In a world that has gone half mad with generative AI, it is refreshing to see the people who control the IBM i platform being skeptical, hopeful, and practical about how the technology might be used to help the companies who choose Power Systems running IBM i as the platform for their mission critical applications.

  IBM Rochester has always been practical and often innovative when it comes to adopting hardware and software technologies, so the strategy that IBM i chief technology officer Steve Will laid out in a recent IBM i & AI – Strategy & Update as part of …

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• Power Systems Continues Its Slight Upward Trend

  August 5, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  There is an old saying: No news is good news, and with a slew of medical issues in our family right now, we get that. But what is also true is that good news is good news, and when it comes to the Power Systems business this is – happily surprisingly ­– precisely what is happening.

  The overall IBM business is doing alright as well, which is also good for Big Blue and for the customers that depend upon its systems to do their mission critical computing.

  In the quarter ended in June, Big Blue’s sales were up a smidgen, …

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• IBM Begins the Purge of Old Greenscreen Utilities

  July 10, 2024 Alex Woodie

  IBM is prepping the IBM i community to prepare to adapt to some substantial changes that are coming with the next release of IBM i, including the end of support for a large swath of the Application Development ToolSet (ADTS) that ships with Rational Development Studio (RDS). Source Entry Utility (SEU) and Programming Development Manager (PDM) are not among the ADTS tools getting the boot, but that’s not stopping midrange professionals from speculating that their time in IBM i is limited, too.

  As part of its May 7 Technology Refresh for IBM i 7.4 and 7.5, IBM issued a “software …

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• Power Systems Poised To Embiggen This Year?

  May 6, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We were away on a hiatus and not publishing last week, and therefore we are now going to go through Big Blue’s financial results for the first quarter of 2024, and take a deep dive into its systems business and Power Systems in particular. Once again, the news is generally good, and that is comforting when this is the final third of the Power10 and System z16 product lines from IBM, with follow-on Power11 and System z17 processors expected sometime next year.

  In the March quarter, IBM reported overall revenues of $14.46 billion, up 4.1 percent year on year, with …

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• If It Ain’t Broke, Don’t Fix It

  March 13, 2024 Alex Woodie

  The information technology industry has a “newness” bias. It always has, and probably always will. But when it comes to the systems for processing business transactions, decision makers need to think carefully about what they’re doing, as ditching “legacy technology” for a shiny new one doesn’t always deliver the promised upgrade.

  The cloud is currently the hot new thing in IT. Even though it’s not necessarily “new,” and not necessarily “a technology” (it is a collection of technologies and a platform and a business model…), business owners are under tremendous pressure to “get to the cloud” by whatever means necessary. …

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• Server And Storage Spending To Recover In The Years Ahead

  February 14, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  A decade and a half ago, there was a very formal definition of what cloud infrastructure was, and the distinction between what most IT departments acquired or leased and what was rentable in the nascent clouds was obvious. Over the years, the lines have gotten fuzzier, with you being able to acquire systems with utility-style cloud pricing even though they are in your datacenter – just to give one example. Another is something called a bare metal cloud – what you and I might have called hosting in days gone by.

  That fuzziness is why we always take any prognostications …

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