Timothy Prickett Morgan
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More Not April Fools: Even More Price Hikes For Power Systems
March 24, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan
OK, this is getting crazy. On March 3, IBM announced price increases for various parts of the Power Systems stack and related hardware and software technologies often used with the platform. IBM also announced additional price increases to rebalance its pricing with respect to the US dollar for eighteen foreign currencies around the world in the same announcement. These price increases will take effect on April 1.
These price increases from March 3 were in addition to ones that it made in April 2024, then in September 2024, and then again in December 2024 for parts of the …
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RISE For SAP Could Be A Boon For IBM’s PowerVS Cloud
March 17, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan
German application giant System Analyse Programmentwicklung, better known as SAP, has spent more than five decades to deliver five major versions of application software to help companies run themselves. They are R/1 in 1977, R/2 in 1981, R/3 in 1992, mySAP.com (which became Business Suite) in 1999, SAP HANA in 2011 with its S/4HANA application suite in 2015. And today, the company has over 400,000 customers.
As is well known, SAP wants to create an application system, which is a phrase that resonates with the OS/400 and IBM i faithful. SAP was founded by five ex-IBMers from Germany and started …
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Not April Fools: More Price Increases For Power Systems Coming
March 10, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan
IBM is at it again, raising prices for parts of the Power Systems stack and related hardware and software technologies often used with the platform.
In announcement letter AD25-0860, which came out on March 3, Big Blue raised prices on various Power Systems and storage products and across various geographic regions.
Another part of the price change was to rebalance against the U.S. dollar foreign exchange rate. IBM did a similar price harmonization across geographies in November 2011, and then did it again on September 3. In the latest announcement, eighteen different currencies in the Asia/Pacific and EMEA regions …
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IBM Pushes FlashSystem Costs Down To Nearline Disk Storage
March 3, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan
If flash storage is ever going to replace disk storage, and there are good reasons to believe that at some point it will, this will happen because flash becomes normal and offers a mix of technical and economic reasons why it is worth a small premium – not a huge one, mind you – compared to buy dirt cheap spinning rust.
IBM’s new FlashSystem C200, which debuted last week in announcement letter AD25-0017, might be just the thing that small and medium Power Systems customers have been waiting for.
It has been a dozen years since IBM bought flash …
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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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State Of The Power Systems Base 2025: The Systems
February 17, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan
In last week’s issue, we talked about the upgrade cycle for the IBM i operating systems over more than a decade based on the annual IBM i Marketplace Survey done by Fortra and pretty heavily massaged by us to reflect what we think is closer to reality for the IBM i market at large.
No matter if you look at the raw data from the survey or the more elaborate model we have built derived from the past eleven surveys, one thing is clear: There is a regular pattern for Power Systems upgrades among OS/400, i5/OS, and IBM i shops …
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IBM Announcements: Service Price Hikes, HANA Iron As A Service, Rust for AIX And Maybe PASE, And More. . .
February 17, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan
When Big Blue makes big announcements, we break them down and analyze them uniquely. But there are often a lot of little things that happen over the course of a few weeks, and we like to lump these together and give you the rundown. That way you are informed, but you can skim it.
So let’s take a look the things related to Power Systems and IBM i that have happened in the past few weeks since we last did this. Let’s start with a few price changes.
In announcement letter AD25-0140, dated February 3 and effective on March …
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State Of The Power Systems Base 2025: The Operating Systems
February 10, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan
What is more important: Keeping a server platform current or keeping its operating system current?
That is a trick question, and it is tricky in two ways. First, you should keep both hardware and software current, or more precisely, keep both as current as the applications, the budget, and good sense permits. A server older than five years is going to start having component failure (usually with the disk drives and fans), and one that is 10years old has the chance of a much more catastrophic failure. However, with a machine that is five to ten years old, you can …
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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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Does Your IT Budget Reflect The World At Large?
February 3, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Sometimes, numbers are so large they become almost meaningless. If I say $1 trillion or $5 trillion to you, do you really have a sense of it except relatively to some other number in the same order of magnitude? You can feel the change, but you can’t feel the actual magnitude of the actual number?
It is with this in mind that we turn to the latest forecasts for IT spending from Gartner, which shows a slight acceleration in the rate of spending increase from 2024 to 2025, but ironically, shows the absolute figures for IT spending in those two …
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