Timothy Prickett Morgan
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IBM’s Power Systems Battle Plan To Take On 2023
February 15, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Human beings treat every year as if they are distinct, and that means businesses have to do the same. Strategies evolve over time and deal with discontinuities like recessions, but tactics are ever-changing as companies cope with the conditions on the ground, not the view from the headquarters. And thus, the Power Systems segment within IBM’s Systems division within its Infrastructure group is no different, but this year is a bit different as the top brass in Power Systems are actually giving us some insight into the battle plan for the year.
Ken King, general manager of the Power Systems …
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AIX: The Last Standing Commercial Unix
February 13, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Nearly six decades ago, a bunch of researchers at AT&T Bell Labs, MIT, and General Electric started work on a new multi-user operating system for General Electric mainframes called Multiplexed Information and Computing Service, or MULTICS. After four years of work, the project was mothballed, but was reborning when Ken Thompson, a researcher at Bell Labs, created a single-user operating system based on the ideas behind MULTICS to run on a PDP-7 that Ma Bell had laying around.
And thus UNICS – and what would eventually become Unix and the whole open systems revolution – was born. With Unix came …
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Cutting IT Costs Is Not A Priority, And That’s Good News
February 13, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
For the past nine years that Fortra (formerly HelpSystems) has been putting together the IBM i Marketplace Survey, one of the first things we always look at is the Top IT Concerns part of the survey results. It is a barometer that tells you what IBM i shops are thinking might happen in the future even if it is not an actual prediction about what will happen in our economy and the IBM i community.
It’s sentiment informed by the budgetary processes that were at work as 2022 came to a close.
The most important thing I look at every …
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The IBM i Power10 Upgrade Cycle Forecast Looks Favorable
February 6, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
As we talked about last week in going over IBM’s financial results for the fourth quarter, the Power Systems business increased its revenues by 6.5 percent in 2022 thanks to a Power10 upgrade cycle that started in the fall of 2021 with high-end machines and built momentum in the summer of 2022 as the entry and midrange Power10 machines were delivered in the market.
In general, IBM tells Wall Street to expect that its overall Infrastructure business group will have flat revenues, with some quarters up during the beginning of an upgrade cycle and down at the end of it. …
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Cloud Software To Drive Enterprise Application Growth
February 6, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Even with something on the order of 242,100 layoffs at the top 40 tech companies in 2022 and another 106,950 layoffs in January alone, according to the analysts at Jefferies, it is still very difficult to find talent to update and extend application software. And that is one reason why the market researchers at IDC think that enterprise software sales will continue to grow in the coming years.
To be specific, IDC reckons that worldwide revenue for enterprise applications – meaning real applications, not systems software that underpins applications – accounted for $279.6 billion in sales in 2022, and will …
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How Do You Stay In Touch With The IBM i Community?
February 6, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
The IBM i community is global and diverse. There is a lot of things going on in our part of the IT industry, and it can be tough to keep up with everything that is going on with the IBM i platform.
But it is nonetheless important for us all to understand how people are keeping up to date on new technologies and other cultural and corporate things that are happening in our community. Which is why Tom Huntington, executive vice president of technical solutions at Fortra (formerly known as HelpSystems), did a quick poll during the 2023 IBM i …
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2023 IBM i Predictions, Part 4
February 1, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
We are still getting predictions coming in from the IBM i community, and so we have extended this to 2023 IBM i Predictions, Part 4, even though we are now into February and technically the Prediction Season is unofficially over. You can’t really say “Happy New Year!” starting today, either, not with Punxsutawney Phil coming out of the ground to prognosticate about the short term winter/spring weather tomorrow.
Several people from modernization tool maker and cloud provider Fresche Solutions piped up with their predictions. Marcel Sarrasin, newly appointed as chief services officer and general manager of the transformation business at …
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Power Systems Did Indeed Grow Revenues Last Year
January 30, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Back in September, when Blue Blue took a huge write-off to offload some of its pension and retirement burdens to an independent third party, it posted a pretty hefty $3.21 billion net loss. But IBM’s underlying business was functioning about as well as it could under the circumstances and it was reasonably profitable and looking ahead to pretty good Power10 and System z16 upgrade cycles. We forecast that IBM would actually grow revenues for Power Systems for 2022, and according to our model, IBM indeed has done it.
And by a much larger margin than the company has grown overall, …
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Join The 2023 IBM i Marketplace Survey Webinar Tomorrow
January 25, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Last fall, many of you took part in the 9th annual IBM i Marketplace Survey that is done by Fortra, formerly known as HelpSystems. And on Thursday, January 26, Fortra will host the webinar covering its results at 10 a.m. Eastern. A whole bunch of us will be on hand to present historical trends and analysis on those results.
You can sign up for the webinar at this link, which is free and which will last for an hour.
Among the many topics that will be covered are:
- Power10 adoption and future plans
- How organizations continue to
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It Is Time To Have A Group Chat About AI
January 23, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
The first rule of any technology is that is can be used for good or evil, but generally it is used for something vaguely in between. The second rule, rarely used, is that some technologies need to be tightly controlled because of the global-scale damage they can cause. Nuclear fission and nuclear fusion come immediately to mind. And so does the special branch of machine learning called deep learning, which most people call AI training these days.
I can’t remember precisely when I first started writing about AI training and the neural networks and frameworks underneath them, but I wrote …
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