Timothy Prickett Morgan
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Getting [Stuff] Done Done With Briteskies
December 4, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
The IBM i ecosystem is big enough, and changes enough with the times, that we are still finding companies who are relatively new to the base but who have been around for a bit of time who are doing interesting things and who are not quite on our radar. Part of what we do is seek these companies out so we can tell you about them, what they are doing, what they see in the market, and how they can help you.
Such is the case with Briteskies, a consultancy based in Cleveland, Ohio, that we have written about …
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IBM i Momma Bear Retires
December 4, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Alison Butterill is probably the most famous IBM i visage in the world. For as long as we can remember – which is not necessarily any kind of test we realize – Butterill has been front and center, calming and thoroughly explaining the IBM i platform, being the interface between customers and engineers steering its development, and being its official spokesperson alongside of IBM i chief architect Steve Will.
We are sad to report that Butterill retired as worldwide IBM i offering manager from Big Blue on November 30. And in a manner that is absolutely consistent with her calm …
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IBM i Development Is Getting A Fresche Start With Some Ground-Breaking Subscriptions
November 27, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Cash flows into and out of a business, and capital expenditures are always interrupting those flows. They are yanked out of the revenue streams and depreciated over long periods of time, meant to reflect the value these expenditures deliver. In most cases in the IBM midrange, the machines sit around longer than the depreciation schedule the accountants use, and that is perceived as a kind of free money when it is really a kind of mounting technical debt as machinery and the software that runs upon it fall behind both technically and economically.
Eventually, the technical debt bill always comes …
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AWS Inks Deal With Connectria To Have a Power Play
November 15, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
The long road of history has not been made impassible by the charred marketing tanks and flaming sales assault vehicles of those who have tried to breach Fortress Rochester, but there are a whole lot of rusting machines off on the horizon cluttering the road and more than a few smoking machines nearby as well as some sizable holes in the ramparts out on that cornfield in Minnesota.
While the proprietary minicomputer businesses and the Unix server businesses of the competition of the AS/400 and IBM i platform have all been destroyed and that IBM is indeed the last bastion …
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New GM Wants To Push IBM Power With Hybrid Cloud And AI
November 13, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Three months ago, the Power division within IBM’s Infrastructure group got a new general manager. This changing of the guard happens every couple of years as Big Blue moves executives around so they can get managerial experience across different lines of business, and this time around, it is Tom McPherson who has been tapped for the top job in the division that is the home of the IBM i platform.
McPherson got his bachelor’s degree in electrical and electronics engineering from Rutgers University in 1990 and got his master’s degree in computer engineering from Syracuse University in 1994. We don’t …
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IBM Finally Comments On Db2 Web Query For i Withdrawal
November 13, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
A little more than a month ago, in announcement letter AD23-0691, IBM abruptly announced the end of marketing for all variations of the Db2 Web Query for i data analytics tool.
At the time, neither IBM nor its partner, TIBCO Software – which is part of Cloud Software Group, a conglomerate that owns TIBCO (which bought Information Builders and Spotfire), JasperSoft, and Citrix Systems (which includes products from Citrix, NetScaler, ShareFile, and XenServer) – had anything to say about the partnership between IBM and TIBCO/Information Builders coming undone.
But something has happened between Big Blue on the one hand …
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IDC Boosts IT Spending Forecasts For 2023 And Beyond
November 13, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
If you asked 1,000 IBM i shops why they were paying a premium for their IBM i systems, all of them would tell you two things: The excellence of the database management system that is at the heart of the IBM i platform and the reliability of the underlying Power Systems hardware and the IBM i operating system that has the Db2 for i database embedded within it.
As it turns out, data management, which includes databases as well as file systems and other storage, is the largest component of spending on server and storage infrastructure in 2022, and it …
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In A Parallel Universe, There Is An IBM i Data Warehouse, Too
November 8, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Over the many years that we have been watching the Power Systems business – which is all of them, starting with the original RS/6000 announcement in February 1990, the first announcement we ever attended and at IBM’s original headquarters at 590 Madison in New York City – we have seen time and time again how Big Blue has rolled out parallel cluster data warehouse configurations for its AIX customers.
Somehow, the IBM i platform and predecessor OS/400 platform have never been shown the same respect. Despite the fact that there are midrange and large enterprise customers who would very likely …
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Power Systems Software Gets Its Updates And Tweaks
November 6, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
It would not be a spring or fall IBM i Technology Refresh cycle if there were not some improvements to the auxiliary systems software that is an adjunct to the Power Systems stack. By which we mean the PowerVM server virtualization hypervisor, the PowerVC custom edition of the OpenStack cloud controller, the Hardware Management Console, the Cloud Management Console, and the system firmware for the Power iron itself.
In announcement letter AD23-0498, you will see that all of these have been updated and you will also see how they are all intertwined with each other, cross-supporting their respective updates. …
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Last Chance To Be A Part Of The IBM i Marketplace Survey
November 1, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Soon, Forta will close out its annual IBM i Marketplace Survey, so now is your last chance to participate and help us all better understand what is going on in the IBM i on Power Systems community.
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 Systems in any kind of detail …
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