Timothy Prickett Morgan
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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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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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