Timothy Prickett Morgan
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Machine Customers Are Not Customers Who Buy Machines
April 3, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
The world is getting truly strange. I can appreciate that in a world where hundreds of millions to billions of users all make use of humongous applications that have hundreds to thousands of calls to microservices application snippets and service. But somehow, I just cannot make the leap to something that Gartner is now calling “machine customers.”
The term came to light, for us at least, two weeks ago when two market researchers at Gartner – Don Scheibenreif, distinguished vice president analyst and leader of Gartner’s research on customer experience, and Mark Raskino, also a distinguished vice president analyst as …
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Blazing The Trail For VTL In The Cloud
March 29, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Making the decision to move IBM i applications to the cloud is a relatively easy endeavor. But covering all of the bases, particularly when it comes to disaster recovery and business continuity, takes some thought because even though the cloud is an ideal place to do HA and DR, not every cloud does it right. And doing it right often means using a mix of technologies and service providers.
IT managers are thinking of moving their IBM i workloads to the cloud for good reasons. They do the math, they weigh the risks and rewards. They take into account all …
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The Big Spending On IT Security Is Only Going To Get Bigger
March 29, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Sometimes, numbers seem so big that they are almost meaningless. Depending on how you cut it, there is more than $3.4 trillion to more than $4.5 trillion in global spending on IT hardware, software, and services – not counting the payrolls for the for all of the combine IT departments of the corporate world plus all of those programmers and site recovery engineers who work at the hyperscalers and cloud builders. These are very big numbers indeed, even without those tens of millions of people on the payroll, who by our very rough estimation might account for somewhere around the …
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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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