Timothy Prickett Morgan
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IBM Tweaks Some Power Systems Prices Down, Others Up
March 27, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Back in September and November of last year, with inflation running a bit crazy, IBM raised prices on selected Power Systems hardware and software with the price changes taking effect on January 1 this year. We went into the details back then, of course, but we are being proactive in looking for any price hikes that might come out of Big Blue relating to its Power Systems machines, systems software, and related storage and networking. And, as it turns out, there have been some more pricing actions that you need to be aware of.
As we have pointed out …
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Superior Support: One Of The Reasons You Pay The Power Systems Premium
March 27, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
When you are advocating for the Power Systems platform, and the IBM i operating system on top of it, within your organization, you need every bit of evidence you can find that demonstrates the return on investment for that premium price.
Which is why we are pointing out an IDC MarketScape study that Big Blue just posted as a reprint on its download site covering worldwide support services for the global leaders in enterprise IT. You know, companies like IBM as well as Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Cisco Systems, Dell Technologies, Lenovo, Pure Storage, NetApp, Hitachi Vantara, Oracle, Juniper Networks, and …
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You Ought To Be Committed
March 13, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
There is a phrase that we learn as teenagers, concomitant with the kinds of peer pressure that close friends can bring to bear early in our lives to nudge us, that applies in an inverse way to a portion of the IBM i customer base, or probably more precisely, to the upper management at a portion of the company that thinks – erroneously – that getting off the IBM i platform is somehow going to magically fix their particular IT problems.
All talk and no action.
Don’t get us wrong. We are not trying to get people to move off …
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Situation Wanted
March 13, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
There have been a tremendous number of layoffs in the tech sector in the past several months, and we are grateful that the IBM i market is part of the economy but also somewhat set apart from the go-go tech sector that sometimes engages in irrational exuberance. But we also know there is a talent shortage and a skills gap in this IBM i market. The question is, what can we do about it?
Well, The Four Hundred can do one simple and easy thing: We can start a Situation Wanted column, which are doing today to help get people …
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The IBM i OS Base Is Older Than We Think, But Moving Ahead
March 6, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Hardware upgrades are costly in terms of money and while it is always exciting to get a new system with that “new computer smell” – and you know what we are talking about – at least IBM i operating system and systems software upgrades don’t carry such a high price – provided you are on Software Maintenance and you do proper testing on your software before you make a jump to a new release.
The other great thing about IBM i systems software is that any given release not only runs on the current new Power Systems hardware at the …
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We Know Security Is A Concern, But What Is Actually Going On?
March 6, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
It is an uncomfortable truth that security is a very high concern among IBM i shops – and consistently has polled as the most important concern for the past several years – but that concern does not always translate into dedicating more resources to security tools or the expertise of others with managed services who can help.
It is one thing to know that security is top of mind, but it is another thing entirely to have a sense of the relative prevalence of different kinds of attacks and the actions of hackers in the wake of a successful attack. …
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The Power Systems Base Is A Little Less Rusty
February 27, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Another three years, and another upgrade cycle that can bring about the modernizing of the Power Systems iron that supports the IBM i customer base. Or, more precisely, another four distinct upgrade cycles that customers are on as they move off legacy iron to something more current than what they have.
What we mean by this is that some customers are stuck on older releases because they are cheapskates by necessity or they have applications that can only run on older releases like OS/400 V5R3, i5/OS 5.4, or IBM i 6.1. Others are stuck on IBM i 7.1. Or IBM …
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IT Spending Growth Will Not Be As Robust In 2023
February 27, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
If you are like other companies in the world, your IT budget as 2023 is getting caught in the pinchers between inflation making IT hardware, software, and services more expensive and the jitteriness of the economy, both locally and globally, that is making company owners and managers a little less hesitant to spend in the first place.
The good news, as we are fond of saying, is that an economy cannot go to zero unless there is a zombie apocalypse, a nuclear war, an electromagnetic pulse event, or an invasion by aliens. The funny thing about February 2023 is that …
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IBM i Subscription Pricing Comes To All Power9 And Power10 Iron
February 20, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Big Blue has been gradually “cloudifying” the packaging and pricing of its Power Systems hardware and IBM i software stack as an alternative to buying hardware outright and acquiring perpetual licenses to the operating system and pay Software Maintenance. Subscription-based pricing came to hardware and software for the Power10-based Power S1014 server running IBM i 7.5 last year, and now IBM i subscription pricing is more widely available.
As outlined in announcement letter 223-030 on Valentine’s Day last week, IBM i subscription pricing is now available on all Power9 and Power10 servers, top to bottom, and on the four current …
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A Hodge Podge Of Power Systems Stuff
February 20, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Sometimes Valentine’s Day falls on a Tuesday and ends up being a kind of lightweight Power Systems announcement day. That happened last week as IBM’s top brass in the Power Systems division discussed the priorities for the Power Systems line in 2023, which we covered in the top story in last Wednesday’s issue, and the subscription-based pricing for IBM i on all Power9 and Power10 machines, which we covered in this week’s top story.
There is always some other stuff that IBM does on Power Systems announcement day, and February 14, 2023, is no exception.
Announcement letter 120-017 has …
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