Timothy Prickett Morgan
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The State Of The IBM i Base 2022, Part Two: Upgrade Plans
February 23, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
It is always good for the IBM i ecosystem when there are new machines on the horizon with new processors, a lot more performance, and much better bang for the buck. This is, in many ways, what has drive the System/3X, AS/400, and IBM i midrange business forward for more than four decades.
But you have to admit, the kind of excitement that we used to have in the early years of the AS/400, when performance needs often outstripped what Big Blue – and indeed, any system supplier – could afford, is not prevalent in the IBM i base today. …
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The State Of The IBM i Base 2022, Part One: The Operating System
February 14, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
You probably already figured this out, but we love data here at The Four Hundred, and we are always particularly keen on any data that helps us to understand the IBM i ecosystem better. And that is why we always look forward to the annual IBM i Marketplace Survey report that comes out in January each year from HelpSystems, and because we are thankful for the data they gather, we help push the survey every year and also participate in the webinar for it as well as a donation to the IBM i community.
IT Jungle co-editor Alex Woodie …
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Big Blue At Your Power Systems Service
February 14, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
IBM may have spun off its managed services and system hosting businesses into Kyndryl, but it still has a sizable remaining technical support, systems integration, technology consulting, business transformation, and application operations business that represents close to 40 percent of its revenues. And so it is very keen on selling Power Systems shops all kinds of services.
To that end, IBM made two announcements last week regarding the Power Systems hardware platform.
The first, in announcement letter 222-033, is a new plan to offer Software Maintenance – what IBM i shops and resellers and even IBM itself usually call …
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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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