• 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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• Power Systems Grows For The Second Year In A Row

  January 29, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Here at The Four Hundred, we take good news very seriously, and so we will just cut to the chase scene and tell you that IBM’s Power Systems business has grown for the second year in a row.

  Take that in for a second. Savor it.

  Think about the dozen years of dramatic decline we saw in the RISC/Unix and IBM i parts of the Power Systems business in the wake of the Great Recession in 2009, when the X86 platform from Intel finally got enough features – as did Windows Server and Linux – to compete effectively against …

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• Power Systems Still Climbing Despite This Weird Economy

  October 30, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Back in the old days, IBM used to talk about System z, Power Systems, and storage as separate things because they are, largely, separate things. Even if customers of the mainframe and Power platforms sometimes buy IBM storage for their machines, and even if some of that storage is actually based on Power platforms themselves.

  But to be able to brag about the System z business every quarter and to make the rest of its Infrastructure group look like a bigger thing, Big Blue merged its Power Systems and Storage divisions into something it has called Distributed Systems for the …

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• Is The Cloud On Your IBM i Horizon?

  September 20, 2023 Alex Woodie

  It’s almost impossible to ignore the enormous pull that the cloud is exerting on the software industry today. Companies that run the IBM i server are also subject to that gravity, although it has different ramifications for their technological future, as well as the decisions they’ll make if they want to run their operations in the cloud.

  IBM i shops, almost by definition, are not running on the cloud today, at least not in the public cloud the way it is normally defined. While there are a handful of managed service providers (MSPs) offering private cloud IBM i runtimes, and …

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• Rocket Buys Data Integration Provider B.O.S.

  September 18, 2023 Alex Woodie

  Rocket Software has announced the acquisition of B.O.S., a German provider of data integration software. While the software company targets primarily the mainframe with its data integration solutions, Rocket says it’s considering broadening support to IBM i.

  B.O.S. was founded more than 30 years ago to develop data integration solutions that connect the IBM mainframe to other systems. It boasts more than 1,200 installations in 25 countries, including Fortune 50 firms as well as government organizations.

  The company’s flagship product, called tcVision, helps customers move data from their mainframe sources, such as Db2, IMS, VSAM files, ADABAS, and CA DATACOM, …

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