Timothy Prickett Morgan
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Inflation Finally Comes To IBM i Platform Prices
April 18, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
With the inflation rates rising around the world, and particularly strongly in the United States, it was bound to happen sooner or later: IBM is raising prices on key software for Power Systems machines as well as on selected Power9 hardware.
With entry and midrange machines based on Power10 iron just around the corner – probably announced in May around the COMMON POWERUp 2022 conference in New Orleans from May 23 through 26 and shipping sometime in June – it might seem like a weird time to be raising Power9 hardware prices. But there could be a logic to it. …
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Systems Of Record On Premises, Systems Of Engagement In The Cloud
April 18, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
It is said that a picture is worth a thousand words. I guess it all depends on the words, and the picture. But sometimes, when you see a bit of market data that displays an industry trend, it nails exactly what the anecdotal evidence suggests is going on in the real world. It saves a lot of words in that regard, particularly if you are looking for some kind of confirmation that your own strategy is one that is prevailing out there in the IT market at large.
So it was with a chart that we came across recently in …
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Reader Feedback On The State Of The IBM i Base 2022: Third Party Software Conundrum
April 13, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Hey, TPM:
I just read your State of the IBM i Base: Third Party Software Conundrum. What you describe is eerily similar to our situation, but with a twist. I’ve been here 25 years as of last week. We installed a third-party ERP shortly after my arrival. Over the years I have made slight modifications, maintained our annual maintenance, and basically built our business around it.
However, in our case the ISV has (for the last 10 years) not held up their end of agreement. Our last version upgrade was 2009, and basically no “modernization” has been done to …
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The State Of The IBM i Base 2022: Third Party Software Conundrum
April 11, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Aside from death, most problems are not intractable. But people surely can be, and sometimes are. But luckily not often, and the thing about people is that, generally speaking, they can be reasonable when they are reasoned with. It is with all of this in mind that we come to the next in the State of IBM i Base stories for 2022, where we want to talk about the software trap that the remaining OS/400, i5/OS, and some IBM i shops have gotten themselves into and how we might help them get out of it to the mutual benefit of …
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Reader Feedback On State Of The IBM i Base, IBM i Salaries
April 11, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Hey, TPM:
I have been enjoying your series on the state of the IBM i environment. Those and other recent IT Jungle articles have helped me better understand some of the things that I am seeing as a training vendor.
As you and I have often discussed, the IBM i market has divided into two groups: the roughly 30,000 active customers and 120,000 others. My company, Manta Technologies, has customers among both groups.
As a former math professor, I tend to think in Venn diagrams. I had to fight the urge to pull out the colored pencils when I read …
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7.1 Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest
April 4, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
We think there is a lot of Power7, Power7+, and Power8 iron out there in the Power Systems running IBM i base, and we think there is a lot of IBM i 6.1 and IBM i 7.1 running on that iron. Our assertion is based on years of anecdotal evidence from the resellers and business partners we talk to, the customers we talk to, and a whole lot of spreadsheet witchcraft that we do based on survey data we see.
The point is not just to come up with this data and then drop it and run, but to face …
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Father, Son, & Co: Kisco Systems Drills Down On Security
April 4, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Rich Loeber was a divisional IT manager for over 16 years before he founded Kisco Information Systems in June 1984, four years before the AS/400 was launched. The System/36 had just launched the year before, and the System/38 had been around and in production for a handful of years at that time. Loeber founded Kisco – presumable named after Mount Kisco, a town in the Hudson Valley in New York State – to offer data processing services to IT shops in the New York metropolitan area.
Two years later, Kisco became an independent software vendor in the IBM midrange, and …
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The State Of The IBM Base 2022, Part Three: The Rusting Iron
March 28, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
In the past several months, we have been drilling into the results of the annual IBM i Marketplace Survey that HelpSystems does every fall and then reports on each January. We have been taking our time going through the results, and in a number of cases we have been doing our own spreadsheet magic on top of the raw data to provide what we think is better information that describes the current state of the IBM i base.
In our first story, we talked about the distribution of operating systems over time, spanning from the 2015 report to the …
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Yet More Trimming In The IBM Power Systems Catalog
March 28, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
It is hard to say what is really happening at this point, but either IBM has simply run out of features for Power8 and Power9 servers, it can’t get anyone to manufacture any more of them, or it simply wants to use every means it can to get the market ready to move to Power10 machines when they come out in May or June.
Perhaps it is a bit of all three, eh?
In announcement letter 922-018 last week, IBM said that effective on March 22 it was no longer selling the RISC-to-RISC data migration feature #0205 for the Power …
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In The IBM i Trenches With: LaserVault
March 21, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
When somebody says they have been doing the same job for three or four decades, that is a big deal in the 21st century because that kind of long-term employment is just not something anyone counts on. In the OS/400 and IBM i market, such constancy and longevity is, well, normal. Unremarkable. Expected. Good.
So it is with Brad Jensen, the founder and chief executive officer of Electronic Storage Corporation, a company that is perhaps best known for its LaserVault virtual tape library software, but since the company was founded in 1989 in Tulsa, Oklahoma, it …
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