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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IBM Gives Temporary Reprieve For Power8 Core And Memory Activations
November 14, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Big Blue is pretty generous when it comes to having features for past generations of machines available for purchase, even when they are two generations back from whatever it is currently selling. But sooner or later, IBM wants to sell the new machines and it stops selling the old stuff. Even if it is only processor and memory activations on machines that are already in the field, which is the easiest sale in the world because IBM doesn’t really have to do much.
This may be the most profitable kind of sale that Big Blue does, but sooner or later, …
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The Rich Parfait That Is Cloud Spending
November 9, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Most IBM i shops are so used to having an integrated system that runs their mission critical systems of record and some of their systems of engagement and Web infrastructure workloads, too, that they may forget that the rest of the world does not always experience their IT in this relatively monolithic way.
The top 50,000 or so organizations in the world tend to take a best-of-breed approach to every application and its underlying layers of infrastructure, so they have a hodge-podge of stuff. The next million or so organizations have to be more conservative and keep the infrastructure diversity …
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Readiness Assessment Accelerates Moving IBM i Workloads To The Cloud
November 7, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
There are on the order of 120,000 unique IBM i customers in the world, and the one thing they all have in common is that they are absolutely – each and every one of them – unique. There are no two customers alike because they have lots of homegrown code, or a mix of their own code and that of an ISV, or maybe they have a heavily customized stack from an ISV.
We defy you to find one customer – even one – that is running any software from a third party as it is, out of the shrink …
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The Numbers For Global IT Spending Are Up And To The Right
November 2, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
It is hard to say how much is an increase in investment and how much is inflation, but the numbers for global IT spending are up and to the right, according to the latest forecast from Gartner. For those of you who gauge your spending against that of the rest of the world – and that should be all of you for various reasons – such spending forecasts are as important as they are malleable.
It is hard enough to try to count all of the money changing hands around the world for hardware, software, and services relating to the …
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Power S1022s Tweaked To Do Native IBM i With More I/O
October 31, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Our apologies, but we did not see an important new configuration of the Power S1022s entry server that IBM offered to IBM i customers in announcement letter 122-084 on October 11.
Buried down at the bottom of this announcement, which was mostly about some peripheral enhancements that we did cover in the issue of The Four Hundred following the announcements, was the following statement:
“IBM Power now offers a Power S1022s (MTM 9105-22B) configuration with two sockets populated with 4-core processors (#EPGR) with a maximum of eight cores active. This configuration is available at a P10 IBM i software tier …
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It’s Your IBM i Marketplace, And This Is Also Your Survey
October 26, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
We are coming into the home stretch of the 9th annual IBM i Marketplace Survey. That means time is running out for you to participate and have your voice heard and your IBM i shop to counted. And as we have been doing for the past couple of weeks, we are once – and finally –asking you to take a moment and take the survey.
This survey was conceived of by the late Dan Burger of IT Jungle and Tom Huntington of HelpSystems, and the data that it gathers is invaluable. Like other members in the IBM i community, …
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Power Systems Revenues Look To Grow In 2022
October 24, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
It was a pretty good third quarter for Big Blue on many fronts if you overlook a $5.76 billion writedown as it has transferred some of its pension obligations for retired employees to a third party to get them off its books forever. This is the second straight quarter that, ignoring this massive hit to the books, which was actually offset by some tax benefits IBM cashed in at the same time, the company has shown both revenue and profit growth.
This may not be the IBM of our salad days, but it is a far cry better from the …
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Survey Says: You Need To Take The IBM i Marketplace Survey
October 19, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
The 9th annual IBM i Marketplace Survey that occurs every autumn is open, and time is running out for you to have your voice be heard and your IBM i shop to be counted. And so we are asking you to please take a moment – you can even stop reading The Four Hundred to do it, so long as you come back and finish reading.
This survey, which was conceived of by the late Dan Burger of IT Jungle and Tom Huntington of HelpSystems, was started nine years ago because we were all frustrated by the lack of …
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In The IBM i Trenches With: CloudFirst
October 17, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
There aren’t that many companies that are in the IBM i business and that are publicly traded, but Data Storage Corporation, based in Melville, New York, out on Long Island, is one of them. Just down the road from another big software giant with a legacy history – Computer Associates, which is now part of semiconductor design company Broadcom.
Hal Schwartz, president at CloudFirst, got a bachelor’s degree in business administration from California State University in San Bernardino back in 1988, and worked in sales at CAC Leasing outside of New York City before starting his own leasing company, called …
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Some Power Systems Hardware Tweaks
October 17, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Whenever there is a software update on the Power Systems line, IBM usually has a few hardware announcements to toss into the mix. And last week was no exception, although there were not any new systems announced. Just tweaks to existing ones.
In announcement letter 122-084, we see that IBM is reselling Nvidia’s two port, 100 Gb/sec ConnectX-6 DX network interface card on the Power10 lineup. This is a very popular NIC out there in Server Land, and in fact, it has been in short enough supply in the past year and change to actually have an impact on …
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