Timothy Prickett Morgan
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It’s Time To Tell Us How It Is And What You’re Doing
October 2, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
The IBM i Marketplace Survey and its accompanying report and the webinar that goes over the results of the survey are an invaluable resource for the IBM i community. This is particularly so since IDC, Gartner, Forrester, and the other IT market researchers and consultancies have long since stopped tracking Power Systems in any kind of detail and certainly don’t spend a lot of time on the IBM i portion of it.
Big Blue itself may have lots of insight into its customer base, but it certainly shares very little of that information with the IBM i community. (We get …
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The IBM i Marketplace Survey Needs Your Input
September 27, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
It is hard to believe it, but this is the tenth year that Fortra, formerly known as HelpSystems, is taking a survey of the IBM i customers base so it can put together a report to tell us all how we are doing.
The IBM i Marketplace Survey and its accompanying report and the webinar that goes over the results of the survey, which are both presented each February, are an invaluable resource for the IBM i community. This is particularly so since IDC, Gartner, Forrester, and the other IT market researchers and consultancies have long since stopped tracking Power …
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In The IBM i Trenches With: Maxava
September 20, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
The IBM i market is a big animal, even here in 2023 more than three and a half decades after the launch of the AS/400, and that means you have to take a lot of pulses to get a sense of what that animal is doing and how it is doing.
This week, we are talking with John Dominic, who is global vice president at high availability and system monitoring software maker Maxava. Dominic has spent his life in the greater Philadelphia metropolitan area, and, like many people in the IBM midrange, was cultivated very locally even though he …
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The Subscription Pricing For The IBM i Stack So Far
September 18, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
We have been following the transformation of the pricing and packaging of the IBM i operating system, its integrated database, and the suite of Licensed Program Products, or LPPs, that are commonly installed alongside of the operating system to create a mostly complete system software suite. Last week, we talked about how the machines in the P05 and P10 software tiers would be moving to all-subscription pricing, and this week we are following up with the pricing information we have been able to gather to date as well as talking to Big Blue about the changes.
IBM has been clear …
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New IBM i User Group For The US Midwest Formed
September 13, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Here is something that we don’t see every day in IBM i Land: The formation of a new user group. But that is what Briteskies, an IBM i consultancy and application development and modernization firm based in Cleveland, Ohio, has done by launching the IBM i Mid-West User Group, or iMWUG for short.
“We founded this group to help fill a gap that we noticed in the geographical locations of IBM i user groups,” Leah Avner, IBM i coordinator at Briteskies, tells The Four Hundred. “While Ohio seems to have once had a user group, it doesn’t seem to …
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Low-End IBM i P05 And P10 Tiers Go Subscription-Only Pricing First
September 11, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
We were away for our annual summer hiatus relating to the Labor Day holiday in America when Big Blue decided, as we anticipated in mid-August, that it would begin the shift to all-subscription pricing for the IBM i operating system, the integrated Db2 for i relational database, and the related IBM i Licensed Program Products (LPPs) that have been commonly used by Power Systems customers all through the OS/400, i5/OS, and IBM i generations.
Back in February, subscription pricing for the IBM i operating system and its integrated Db2 for i relational database was made available under subscription …
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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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Software Price Inflation Helps Boost IT Spending In 2023
August 21, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Datacenter and client device sales are slumping and are expected to be down from spending levels in 2022, according to the latest prognostications for worldwide IT spending from market researcher Gartner. But thanks to exploding budgets for software and services, the market for IT spending across all categories is anticipated to grow at a fairly healthy rate this year – and will do better in 2024, if Gartner is right.
That is a big “if” of course. The only way to accurately predict the future is to live it – and even that is looking dubious sometimes. (Wink.) …
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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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