Timothy Prickett Morgan
Timothy Prickett Morgan is President of Guild Companies Inc and Editor in Chief of The Four Hundred. He has been keeping a keen eye on the midrange system and server markets for three decades, and was one of the founding editors of The Four Hundred, the industry's first subscription-based monthly newsletter devoted exclusively to the IBM AS/400 minicomputer, established in 1989. He is also currently co-editor and founder of The Next Platform, a publication dedicated to systems and facilities used by supercomputing centers, hyperscalers, cloud builders, and large enterprises. Previously, Prickett Morgan was editor in chief of EnterpriseTech, and he was also the midrange industry analyst for Midrange Computing (now defunct), and its editor for Monday Morning iSeries Update, a weekly IBM midrange newsletter, and for Wednesday Windows Update, a weekly Windows enterprise server newsletter. Prickett Morgan has also performed in-depth market and technical studies on behalf of computer hardware and software vendors that helped them bring their products to the AS/400 market or move them beyond the IBM midrange into the computer market at large. Prickett Morgan was also the editor of Unigram.X, published by British publisher Datamonitor, which licenses IT Jungle's editorial for that newsletter as well as for its ComputerWire daily news feed and for its Computer Business Review monthly magazine. He is currently Principal Analyst, Server Platforms & Architectures, for Datamonitor's research unit, and he regularly does consulting work on behalf of Datamonitor's AskComputerWire consulting services unit. Prickett Morgan began working for ComputerWire as a stringer for Computergram International in 1989. Prickett Morgan has been a contributing editor to many industry magazines over the years, including BusinessWeek Newsletter for Information Executives, Infoperspectives, Business Strategy International, Computer Systems News, IBM System User, Midrange Computing, and Midrange Technology Showcase, among others. Prickett Morgan studied aerospace engineering, American literature, and technical writing at the Pennsylvania State University and has a BA in English. He is not always as serious as his picture might lead you to believe.
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Multiple Vulnerabilities Pop Up In Navigator For i
January 23, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Why do we network computers again? Remind me.
A new security bulletin was released for the Navigator for i system management interface for the IBM i platform on January 18, which rolls up four different vulnerabilities for Navigator for i that leave it open to log file access, to obtaining file attributes, and to SQL Injection attacks due to multiple other vulnerabilities.
You can read about this security bulletin at this link. The most severe of the issues is the SQL injection attack, which has a CVSS Base score of 6.3 out of 10. According to the bulletin: “IBM …
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Participate In The 2023 IBM i Marketplace Survey Discussion
January 23, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
It is late January, that means it is time for a discussion about the results of the 9th annual IBM i Marketplace Survey. The survey is performed by Fortra, formerly known as HelpSystems, and the webinar talking about the results of the survey will be held on January 26 at 10 AM Eastern.
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 support remote workforces
- The trend towards
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Is That What You Think Modernization Means?
January 16, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
When most IBM i shops think about “modernization,” what they are talking about is taking legacy applications and in some fashion – and quite possible with many different methods – making those applications work better on newer kinds of clients and/or using newer front-end technologies to make them function better or look better. The researchers at IDC have a more expansive definition of modernization, at least according to a whitepaper that the market researcher recently did on behalf of the Power Systems line at IBM.
That whitepaper, entitled The Key Requirements of Modernization and the Role of IBM Power10, …
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Tune In To The 2023 IBM i Marketplace Survey Webinar
January 16, 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 January 26, Fortra will host the webinar at 10 a.m. Eastern time that will unveil the results of the survey and present historical trends and analysis by a collection of experts.
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 support remote
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IBM To Chase Oracle Accounts With 24-Core Power S1014
December 19, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
If you are selling enterprise-grade servers that are explicitly designed to be data threshers running relational databases, then you have to deal with Oracle. Of course, Oracle does not have much of a server business of its own these days, not like it dreamed of having when it bought Sun Microsystems nearly a decade and a half ago.
Oracle still sells its Oracle X9-2 and X9-2L two-socket servers based on Intel “Ice Lake” Xeon SPs as well as its ancient Sparc T8 and M8 servers from nearly a decade ago. And it still says its Exadata database clusters, which compete …
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OK, This Really Is The Last Of Power Systems Announcements For 2022
December 19, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
We are winding down for 2022, and you are very likely doing the same. There are a few more things we need to go over to close out the year.
In announcement 122-127, from December 13, IBM has announced that its IBM i subscription offering, which is paired with the subscription-priced Power S1014 that was hinted at during the July announcements and fully fleshed out in September.
With the changes, IBM is delivering three year and five year terms for initial subscription contracts, complementing the one year and four year contracts that were initially available. These three-year and five-year …
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Happy Holidays To All Of You From All Of Us
December 19, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
After two years in pandemic-induced isolation, things got back to something close to normal in 2022. Which was a relief as well as a bit exasperating. It is hard to know what to trust as any trend anymore.
For my family, which got whacked by “Delta” SAR-CoV-2 back in December 2019 after I took the three older kids to Chinatown in New York City for the holidays, we managed to avoid it since lock down in March 2020. But just before traveling to see family on Thanksgiving, where we have several immunocompromised relatives, we got the “Omicron” variant and had …
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The Steady Growth Of The Low Code Movement
December 14, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
With IT talent in short supply and expensive as too much demand chases too little supply – a hard concept to get your brains around with over 42 million software developers working around the world creating and maintaining software that has an economic value in excess of $1 trillion a year – it is no surprise that some are looking to low code tools to help automate some aspects of their business.
Low code is not just happening in the datacenters of small and medium businesses writing new applications to take on new problems and add new functionality to systems. …
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A Smattering Of Power Systems Announcements
December 12, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
We keep saying that IBM is winding down its announcement stream as 2022 comes to a close, but there is still a trickle of things being announced by Big Blue, both new products and withdrawals, that relate to the Power Systems platform and its adjacent external storage.
First of all, in announcement letter 122-134, IBM is allowing customers – as promised back at the COMMON POWERUp event in October – to run the AIX and Linux operating systems on that special configuration of the Power 1022s machine that has two four-core Power10 dual chip modules (DCMs) in the box …
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Surprise! There’s a Tech Refresh 13 For IBM i 7.3
December 5, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Well, we bet you were not expecting that. Or, based on past history, maybe you were. But when IBM put out the two Technology Refresh updates for IBM i 7.4 and IBM i 7.5 last Friday on December 2 as planned – that would be TR1 for the latter and TR7 for the former – the company also sneaked out an unofficial TR13 update to IBM i 7.3. With this Tech Refresh, IBM i 7.3 has many of the same updates that came to the two more current releases of IBM i.
If you look at the IBM i Technology …
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