Timothy Prickett Morgan
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Talking IBM i Shop With New Power Systems GM Ken King
February 7, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Every new general manager of the AS/400 division and its successors all the way up to the current Power Systems division – which hopefully is no longer called Cognitive Systems in the financials but nowhere else – inherits a unique configuration of that business in time and space and after one, two, or three years leaves it in another configuration.
In all of our years of writing The Four Hundred, we have made an effort to get to know each and every one of them. Last July, ahead of the spinout of the Kyndryl managed services business in November, …
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Former Power Systems GM Joins FalconStor For IBM i Push
February 7, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Virtual tape library software provider FalconStor, which has been in the market for more than two decades, has tapped a former manager of IBM’s Power Systems division – namely Doug Balog, who ran Power Systems from 2013 through 2017 – as a strategic advisor as it begins a more aggressive push into the IBM i market.
Balog is a familiar to long-time readers of The Four Hundred, of course. He ran System x server development at IBM from June 2004 through December 2009, significantly the BladeCenter converged blade server platform, then did a few years running IBM’s storage business, …
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The Real IBM i Legacy Is The People
February 7, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
I will never for the life of me understand why the word “legacy” has such a bad connotation in the IT business when in all other aspects of life it means something good. We talk about legacy systems, usually systems of record, a lot here at The Four Hundred, because we are focused on the AS/400 platform and its successors over the past three and a half decades. But the applications – and the people who extend and support them – that run on modern IBM i iron and some vintage predecessor systems have a heritage that extends back …
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The IBM i Cloud Just Got More Frictionless With Virtual Serial Numbers
January 31, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
If the cloud is to be successful, it has to do more than provide a new deployment and pricing model for IT organizations. It has to also maintain and retain some of the important practices in use by the IT department. One of the big disconnections between on premises IBM equipment and capacity sold in the cloud has been the serial number that identifies a machine, which is a kind of birth certificate and Social Security number for each box that comes off the IBM factory lines.
That serial number is used to identify the machine for technical support purposes …
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Focal Point Buys UCG Technologies, On The Hunt For More IBM i Deals
January 31, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
There is a wave of acquisitions underway in the managed service provider (MSP) and technical support services businesses of the IBM i market, with companies trying to amass the skillsets to provide a more complete stack of services to IBM midrange shops. The acquisitions are also being fueled by a business model of cross-selling across merged company portfolios and getting the size necessary to expand into new geographies and to find new customers as IBM i shops confront the growing complexity of their infrastructure and looming shortages in skilled IBM i personnel.
That, in a nutshell, is why Focal Point …
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IBM Says Nothing About Power Systems In Q4
January 31, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
In the wake of its spinout of the Kyndryl managed services business, which represented about a third of the company’s revenues and employees, Big Blue has changed the way it organizes its groups and divisions which, generally speaking, more accurately reflects what it sells and the underlying systems business that is International Business Machines.
Which is great. We have been kvetching about this since 2016, the last time IBM reorganized its business and its financials, so hooray. And we did a preview of the new financial reporting segments, and how IBM backcast them into 2020, with our own revenue …
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Listen In To The 8th Annual IBM i Marketplace Survey Webcast
January 26, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
It’s that time of the year again when HelpSystems reveals the results of its annual IBM i Marketplace Survey, which believe it or not has now been done eight years in a row. The survey provides a snapshot into the thinking of IBM i shops all over the world as they contemplate the strategic and tactical issues relating to their mission critical applications and the security, resilience, capacity, economics, and long-term viability of the IBM i platform that supports them.
Personally, I sincerely wish that HelpSystems had been doing this survey since the AS/400 was launched in 1988, because it …
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Building A More Perfect IBM i Cloud On Power10 Iron
January 24, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
As we get closer to the launch of the entry and midrange Power10 machines, we can’t help but think about the innovative uses that these machines might be put to. We think, for instance, that these machines could be the foundation of a new generation – and a new kind – of IBM i cloud based on a mix of entry one-socket Power S1021 and two-socket Power S1022, and Power S1024 machines augmented in a very special way with four-socket Power E1050s.
To one way of thinking, the easiest way to build a big cloud capable of supporting thousands of …
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IT Spending Growth To Slow In The Coming Years
January 24, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
It has been a weird couple of years for IT organizations due to the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic. So many normal patterns have been disrupted that it is sometimes hard to imagine that things can go back to, well, normal. But if the analysts at Gartner are correct, then 2022 will be the year that IT departments start thinking about the future again instead of triaging problems caused by the pandemic, and it will also be a time of more conservative IT spending growth.
Last week, Gartner put out its revised IT spending figures for 2021 and also updated …
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Some Good Advice About Log4j Mitigation Gotchas
January 24, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
The Apache Log4j logging utility written in Java and available since the end of the Dot Com Boom in early 2001, has been installed far and wide into many systems and systems software packages in the more than two decades it has been available. And that is why the zero-day security vulnerability discovered by Chinese computing giant Alibaba on November 24 last year and revealed on December 9 has caused so much concern.
Log4j is everywhere and that means the Log4Shell vulnerability that Alibaba described makes it particularly scary. But before we get into some of the mitigation advice that …
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