Timothy Prickett Morgan
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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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With Fresche’s New CEO, There Are No Problems, Just Solutions
August 16, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Joe Zarrehparvar was just finishing up his first 100 days as president and chief executive officer at Fresche Solutions when the company has begun its transition to a new subscription licensing model and when he finally had enough time in the job to sit down and talk with us about where IBM i customers, and therefore Fresche Solutions, would be going under his stewardship.
Zarrehparvar has a long and varied career in the IT industry, which started with a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering and electronics from the Manchester College in England and a master’s degree in engineering management from …
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Don’t Have A Conniption If Big Blue Goes All Subscription
August 14, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Big Blue has been pretty clear that it is not only going to put Power Systems machinery in its own cloud as well as those run by its business partners, but that it going to offer hardware and systems software alike under a cloud consumption model with as much of a unified pricing scheme, based on subscriptions, for on premises, IBM Cloud, and partner cloud deployments.
As we have already reported back in February, the IBM i operating system and its integrated Db2 for i relational database is already available under subscription pricing, which includes the license to use the …
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AWS: A Temperate Zone Among A Global Climate Of Other Clouds
August 14, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
It might feel like Amazon Web Services has a monopoly on the cloud, but it does not. As it turns out, AWS does not even come close to having a monopoly, which means having somewhere north of 80 percent of the revenue and probably damned near all of the profits in any given market according to our definition.
Synergy Research has just put out its latest quarterly report on cloud revenues by vendor, and AWS is amazingly consistent over the past six years with about a third of revenues across the hundreds of suppliers of infrastructure services, platform services, and …
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IBM Takes PowerVM And PowerVC Upscale
August 9, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
There is a tension between integration and generalization that Big Blue has always managed when it comes to its Power Systems and System z platforms. IBM has to support the popular open source system tools and their interfaces if it wants to keep in lockstep with the IT industry, but at the same time it has to tightly integrate that open source software with its existing stacks. Sometimes, it needs to simplify the offerings it has created itself just to make it easier on its sales force and its customers, who do not want to have to keep track of …
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Sticking To The Backroads On This Journey
August 7, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Things are getting progressively weird in the computer business, and with lots of travel over the past two weeks up and down the East coast for vacation and for visiting family, I have had a lot of time to think about things. It’s so weird that I really don’t want to play the radio. I just want to keep us safe on the highways and have my thoughts. Parse a few things, suss them out, see how they might fit together and in what particular configuration.
Because time is of the essence, I have been largely on the interstates, but …
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You Guessed It: AI Will Drive Cloud Adoption
July 31, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
What do you think will be the quickest way to try out AI extensions to applications? Will it be trying to get your hand on models, tweaking them with your data, and then integrating the AI extensions with your own applications? Or will it be trying out a SaaS-style AI tool where all of the work is done? Or better still, moving to a SaaS application that has AI in it from the get-go?
It will be no doubt the latter two options. And this, as much as any other force, is going to hasten the shift for certain workloads …
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IBM i Work Problem Feature Unemployed For Software Faults
July 31, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
One of the true differentiations of the AS/400 platform launched 35 years ago was Electronic Customer Support, which at the time involved remote diagnostics and the ability of the machine to reach out over a modem – remember, there was no commercial Internet yet – to connect directly to IBM and report problems as they were happening.
After three and a half decades, there are a lot of different components and features of the IBM i-Power Systems Electronic Customer Support (ECS) and Electronic Service Agent (ESA) customer care services, way beyond what was available in the original ECS. But recently, …
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