Timothy Prickett Morgan
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IBM Raises The Curtain A Little On Future Power Processors
November 13, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan
We commented back in August when the Hot Chips 2024 conference was underway at Stanford University that it was odd that IBM did reveal some of the speeds and feeds of the Power11 processor that we all know is coming in 2025. And when the TechXchange 2024 partner event was held in Las Vegas a few weeks ago, we were pretty sure that IBM was working on some sort of accelerated system for GenAI applications and a week later we remembered that the obvious pairing was a Power System host with scads of IBM’s own “Spyre” AI accelerators running …
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Power Systems Distributor Ingram Micro Goes Public (Again)
November 11, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan
We admit it. It has been a long, long time since we paid much attention to the master distributors that IBM and other IT equipment makers use as a channel between themselves and their systems customers. We used to follow Arrow Electronics and Avnet like a hawk. But we got sidetracked and stopped thinking about them, in part because the late and great Dan Burger used to be our go-to guy for keeping in touch with the Power Systems channel distributors.
The recent initial public offering of Ingram Micro, which is really the second time the company has gone public …
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Gartner Raises IT Spending Forecast For 2024 Again
November 11, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan
The boom of GenAI just keeps getting louder, and the increasing spending by the hyperscalers and clouds are giving air cover to IT shops all over the world who want to weave GenAI technologies into the applications and processes of their companies and who therefore want to get more IT budget.
IT spending forecasts are useful because they tell us where we think we are going and they also tell us how our IT shop measures up against the average of all of the IT shops in the world. The typical enterprise is definitely not spending anywhere near as much …
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IBM Hikes Hardware, Software, And Services Prices
November 4, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Inflation might be somewhat tamed in the major economies of the world, but the price increases keep coming from Big Blue as it tries to balance out its costs and its need to profit to drive the stock that provides the real compensation for top executives against customers who are getting pretty sick of price increases in every aspect of their business and personal lives.
We saw a price increase hit our emails, as did other IBM i shops, on October 29 last week, but if you look at announcement letter AD24-2249, it was dated September 3, 2024. Go …
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Power10 Keeps Plugging Along As Power11 Looms For 2025
November 4, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Considering how late we are in the Power10 and System z16 product cycles, things went pretty well for IBM in the respective Power Systems and System z businesses in the third quarter of 2024. While customers always look forward to future price/performance enhancements that come with a product refresh, there doesn’t seem to be anything out of the ordinary when it comes to a slowdown in sales ahead of next year’s Power11 and “Telum-II” System z17 launches.
Business seems to be going pretty well for Big Blue, all things considered, although it had to pump $2.73 billion into its pension …
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RPG Code Assist Is The Killer App For AI-Enhanced Power Systems
October 23, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan
“I love it when a plan comes together.” – Colonel John “Hannibal” Smith, The A Team.
Look, we take our wisdom and our joy where we can find it here at The Four Hundred, and it does indeed look like Big Blue has a plan that is coming together with regards to generative AI and the Power Systems hardware platform as it relates to the IBM i software platform.
We told you in Monday’s issue that IBM was up to something with regard to the Power Systems line, which was revealed to partners and presumably key …
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IBM Previews New Power Tech At TechXchange Event
October 21, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan
I wish we could tell you what was up, but we don’t know what it is. But we do know that all of the top tech brass at Big Blue related to the Power Systems platform are going to be participating in the keynote address at IBM’s TechXchange 2024 event in Las Vegas – what we used to call PartnerWorld – on Tuesday.
Like a bad AI model with not enough parameters and not enough data broken down into tokens, we have to try to infer from first principles what IBM might be announcing and therefore what we might see …
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IBM Working On Making Enterprise Java Easier
October 21, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Java is important in the enterprise, and getting more important, and IBM wants to help make managing and using Java easier.
At this time last year, there were 26.3 million application developers in the world, and according to CodeNinja, about 20 million of them were reasonably fluent in JavaScript, nearly double the number six years ago. (We are not sure if CodeNinja is counting Node.js as a variant of JavaScript, as it probably should.)
Java, a much older cross-platform language and the lingua franca of business logic in the enterprise, is not as large but is seeing a bit …
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Sundry Hardware Announcements Accompany IBM i TR Updates
October 14, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan
With high-end Power10 machines coming out in September 2021 and most of the Power10 lineup coming in July 2022, we don’t expect much in the way of substantial Power10 system announcement at this point in that processor’s lifecycle. The “Bonnell” entry Power S1012 machine from this year May is, in fact, probably the last Power10 machine to come out the door until Power11 systems come out next year some time.
But IBM is always tweaking things here and there when it comes to hardware features and bundles, and so it is with the October IBM i platform updates. We saw …
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Power Systems Management Stack Updated Alongside TR Updates
October 14, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan
If there are Technology Refreshes for the IBM i stack and new Technology Levels for AIX, then that means IBM has also updated a slew of systems software and middleware that runs atop these stacks. This being the fall, then we knew that TRs were coming for IBM and we therefore knew that updates were coming for PowerVM, VIOS, PowerVC, Cloud Management Console, and the Hardware Management Console.
The enhancements for these collections of software were part of the October 8 announcements, were detailed in announcement letter AD24-0630, and will be available for electronic download on December 12 this …
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