Timothy Prickett Morgan
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Various Power Systems Updates And Tweaks
October 25, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
While many IBM i shops have a lot of their core applications on that platform, there are lots of shops that deploy Windows Server for adjacent databases and applications and in other cases some shops have AIX or Linux as well. Windows Server doesn’t run on Power iron, of course, which we have always thought was a shame and still is almost two decades since Windows had a brief showing on Power before Microsoft and IBM pulled the plug.
But the important thing, here in 2021, is that customers have alternatives if they need certain applications and they want to …
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We Have The Whole World Of Cloud In Our Hands
October 18, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Cloud is a consumption model more than anything else, but it is also an architecture. What that really means is that for a lot of customers, on premises cloud is a bit different from what are called “public” clouds, which we all know are as proprietary as any System/3X or AS/400 or IBM i on Power Systems ever was. There ain’t nothing at all public about it, and we are trying to break the habit of calling them that. The point is, the big clouds outside of your datacenter look like power utilities, with pricing based on both time and …
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The Shape Of The IBM To Come
October 11, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Big Blue is getting ready to spin off its managed services businesses, which represents about a third of its revenue stream and a big chunk of its employee base, into the separate company called Kyndryl and hopes to have this task done by the end of the year. Last week, IBM’s top brass had a virtual meeting with Wall Street to host its Investor Day, and IBM’s chief executive officer, Arvind Krishna, and the rest of the team unveiled a new segment and financial reporting structure that will be put into effect once the Kyndryl spinout is done.
At that …
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Thoroughly Modern: Talking IBM i System Management With Abacus
October 11, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
If you want the members of your IT department to focus on the core applications that define, run, and improve your business, and they also have to manage your systems, and you have limited budgets to do it all, you have to learn to let go of something. There are only so many hours in a day, only so many days in a year, and only so many people to do the work. Something has to give, and you have to keep what brings the real value.
Having an IBM i platform provides plenty of value to start, as IBM …
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We Need You To Take The 2022 IBM i Marketplace Survey
October 11, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
It is hard to believe that it is actually 2021, and it is even harder to believe that we are in the final weeks of the 2022 IBM i Marketplace Survey. This is the eighth annual survey, which takes the pulse of the IBM i community and gives us some insight into what you all are up to.
As you well know, the community has to express its needs if it ever hopes to steer IBM’s behavior as well as that of big third-party hardware, software, and services providers. Believe it or not, Big Blue is more open about receiving …
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Early Bird Special For Common Europe Congress Ends October 14
October 11, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Copenhagen, which is known as “the happiest city in the world,” has its coronavirus situation under control and will be hosting the Common Europe Congress user group meeting from October 31 through November 3. Unlike the COMMON POWERUp 2021 event, which was supposed to be hosted in person in Virginia Beach, Virginia, as well as online, but has now been switched to a totally virtual event.
Denmark has had its borders open since September 9, and vaccination rates are high and cases are very low. The reason, in part, has to do with high trust in the Danish government and …
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Fresche Buys Abacus To Integrate From IBM i To Cloud To Code
October 4, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Last week, Fresche Solutions, arguably the largest provider of application development and modernization tools for the IBM i platform and its predecessors, acquired Abacus Solutions, a long-time provider of cloud and managed services for the same market, giving a new meaning to the word integration in the IBM i brand. Now, with the combination of Fresche and Abacus, we can add an adverb to the intransitive form of the verb: vertically integrated.
Vertical integration is all the rage these days, at least among the hyperscalers and cloud builders that consume half of the IT gear in the world and …
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For The Prices They Are A-Changin’
October 4, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Back in the day, when IBM made any price changes to products, we would see these things in the weekly summary reports that its announcement system had compiled and sent out to us on a weekly basis for several decades. Somewhere along the way, either our profile changed without our knowledge or IBM changed something about this email blast system behind the scenes and we stopped seeing all of these Price Change announcements.
Just for the heck of it on Friday, which was a quiet news day in IBM i Land, I logged into the Web front end of the …
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What IBM i Shops Want From Cloud, And How To Do It Right
September 27, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
It is no secret to readers of The Four Hundred that we are big proponents of so-called cloud computing, which doesn’t just include access to slices of servers but also storage to keep their data and networking to link them to the world and, if multiple slices share work, to link them to storage and to each other.
We never liked the term “cloud,” because it connotes a fuzzy kind of infrastructure when quite the opposite is true. We still don’t like calling it cloud computing, but language is created by consensus, not by fiat, so sometimes we have to …
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Fresche Takes On New RPG Development And Modernization With X-Elevate
September 27, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Over the years, Fresche Solutions, the IBM i conglomerate that is focused on development of new applications as well as modernization of existing applications, their interfaces, and their databases, has acquired and built tools that help programmers create Java and PHP programs, or convert RPG applications to Java and PHP. But by its own admission, Fresche did not focus on new RPG application development or the kind of incremental programming that a lot of IBM i shops are doing to gradually modernize their applications, usually through the shift from fixed format RPG to the free form RPG that is similar …
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