Timothy Prickett Morgan
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How Many Programmers Does The US Economy Need?
October 9, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Throughout history, we strongly suspect that people always thought they lived in peculiar times. The difference is, we say with tongue firmly in cheek but also with a raised eyebrow and a pensive look, that we really do live in peculiar times. The others before us just thought they did.
Take the IT job market, for instance. Or leave it. Never before has information technology been so instrumental to the conduct of business as well as our lives outside of work. And never before has there been a force like generative AI that can put downward pressure on wages and …
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This Is Your IBM i Market, And Therefore Your Annual Survey
October 4, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
It has been a decade since the IBM i Marketplace Survey was conceived of by the late Dan Burger of IT Jungle and Tom Huntington of HelpSystems, now known as Fortra. We miss Dan a lot, and you don’t want to miss a chance to help the community better understand itself, which is what all of us at IT Jungle and at Fortra really are after as we ask you, once again, to take the survey.
We are coming into the home stretch of the 10th annual IBM i Marketplace Survey. That means time is running out for you …
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40 Years Of DB2, But Even More For That No-Name Database Embedded In The System/38
October 2, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Last week, Big Blue celebrated the 40th anniversary of the launch of its Database 2 relational database management system for its venerable System/370, System 308X, and System/390 mainframes. It is now called Db2, because marketing people can’t leave anything alone, and even though we now have this thing called Db2 for i, IBM didn’t mention this red-headed stepchild of a relational database as part of its celebration.
Not even once. And that’s just fine by us because the integrated relational database management system that has been the heart of our venerable System/38 and its progeny was never DB2/400 or …
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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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