• 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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• How Long Before Big Blue Brings Code Assist To IBM i?

  August 23, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  IBM Research and Big Blue’s Software group have been collaborating to bring generative AI capabilities to market through the Watsonx stack of large language models and related tools. Watsonx is a basis for customers to create customized LLMs based on data from their own businesses and to integrate the quasi-cognitive capabilities of LLMs into their applications.

  Watsonx is also being used by IBM to augment some tools of its own, and the most recent one that will be in tech preview in September and generally available sometime in the fourth quarter is called Watsonx Code Assistant for Z, which as …

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• Say Sayonara To The IBM i Integrated Server

  August 21, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  One of the neat things about the AS/400 platform and its progeny is that it takes integration seriously, even to the extent of wrapping the OS/400 and IBM i platform around competitive platforms to bring them into the fold. The File Serving I/O Processor (FSIOP), which became the Integrated Netfinity Server, which became the Integrated xSeries Server, which became the IBM i Integrated Server is a good example of this.

  This integrated server approach brought a real, discrete, physical X86 server running Windows Server, OS/2, Novell NetWare, or SCO Unix under the skins of the AS/400 and IBM i Server. …

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• Generative AI Is Part Of Application Modernization Now

  August 21, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Generative AI is funny in that it is both an application in its own right when equipped with a chatbot interface and some intelligent prompting with guardrails to keep it from hallucinating and it can also be used as a tool to either generate chunks of applications based on large language models tweaked with a library of code.

  This is the first time that we can think of where the application is the tool or the tool is the application, and it presents a kind of chicken and egg conundrum for IT departments all over the world. Mainly: Where do …

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• Don’t Have A Conniption If Big Blue Goes All Subscription

  August 14, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Big Blue has been pretty clear that it is not only going to put Power Systems machinery in its own cloud as well as those run by its business partners, but that it going to offer hardware and systems software alike under a cloud consumption model with as much of a unified pricing scheme, based on subscriptions, for on premises, IBM Cloud, and partner cloud deployments.

  As we have already reported back in February, the IBM i operating system and its integrated Db2 for i relational database is already available under subscription pricing, which includes the license to use the …

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• IBM Takes PowerVM And PowerVC Upscale

  August 9, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  There is a tension between integration and generalization that Big Blue has always managed when it comes to its Power Systems and System z platforms. IBM has to support the popular open source system tools and their interfaces if it wants to keep in lockstep with the IT industry, but at the same time it has to tightly integrate that open source software with its existing stacks. Sometimes, it needs to simplify the offerings it has created itself just to make it easier on its sales force and its customers, who do not want to have to keep track of …

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• Power Systems Down A Bit, But Holding Steady In Q2

  July 24, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Considering that we are over a year into the Power10 entry and midrange server upgrade cycle, and almost two years into the Power10 high-end cycle, the fact that the Power Systems server business is only down a few points in the second quarter is, well, normal. As in the old normal where things have a natural ebb and flow and the business is not just in a kind of 45 degree decline like we saw a decade ago.

  This is what happens when Big Blue sticks to its enterprise computing knitting and is not distracted by the money-losing proposition of …

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