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 Versus GlobalFoundries: A Lawsuit Instead Of The Power Chips Planned
June 14, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Last week, IBM took its former foundry partner, GlobalFoundries, to court in a lawsuit that alleges, in essence, that the company promised to deliver Power9 processors based on 14 nanometer technologies and Power10 processors based on 10 nanometer technologies and had some issues with the former and never delivered on the latter.
Not only that, IBM’s lawsuit says that it never released GlobalFoundries from its from its promise to deliver a 10 nanometer chip, and when the company promised to shift to 7 nanometer technologies, IBM in good faith worked on developing Power10 chips for these processes and spent at …
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Thoroughly Modern: Clearing Up Some Cloud And IBM i Computing Myths
June 14, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
We hear a lot of talk about cloud these days, but who is walking the walk? The coronavirus pandemic made a lot of companies take a hard look at how they were doing business, and hardware wasn’t excluded from this conversation. Businesses are now saying, with so many cloud options available, where and how can they start getting their feet wet?
We certainly all know that the IBM i community is dramatically different from most other platforms in the IT space, and has been since Day One. For household names such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud, …
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Moving To Git Source Control On IBM i
June 14, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
It is one thing when vendors create tools that help users do things, but quite another when users talk about how they use those tools and how well they work.
On June 24, ARCAD Software will be highlighting how BWI Companies, which is based in Nash, Texas, has adopted Git source control on the IBM i platform, bridging the transaction processing systems behind its lawn, garden, animal health, agriculture, landscape, and pest management products distribution business. BWI was founded in 1958 by Bob and Betty Bunch as a seed retailer based in Texarkana, Texas, and in 1972 started wholesale …
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Certified Pre-Owned Storage: More Than Just A Pretty Price
June 9, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
People tend to think first and foremost about servers when they think of IT infrastructure, but a true system, even if it is a monolithic, standalone server with as few as one or as many as 16 sockets, always includes storage. And in distributed systems that can grow beyond the scale up limits of NUMA machines and scale out to add compute capacity, they always include storage (whether converged on the server nodes or run alongside the cluster on the network) and they also always include networking.
No matter what, storage is a big component of every enterprise system, ranging …
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Taking A Centralized Approach To IBM i Security
June 7, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
We are branching out and doing new things here at IT Jungle, and one of them is using video as well as text to get information about the IBM i platform across. Video is certainly not a new thing, and we have done a bit of it as part of consulting engagements, but starting now it is going to be part of what we do on an ongoing basis. We are grateful to IBM i security and high availability software vendor Precisely for initially supporting us in this endeavor.
For our first video interview, we sat down with John Vanderwall, …
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Get Virtually Packed For Common Europe Power Summer Camp
June 7, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
The world is still not in the swing of things when it comes to business travel, trade shows, and conferences, and in many ways that is a good thing because events that were not physically accessible to many of us are now virtually accessible. Provided that you can deal with some time zone changes from time to time.
Such is the case with Common Europe’s Power Summer Camp 2021 Virtual Edition, which is running live on the Internet June 14, 15, and 17. No, that is not a typo, the event is skipping a day on June 16, perhaps to …
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A Million Miles Away From Machine Learning
May 24, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
The spring COMMON NAViGATE conference has not yet started, the IBM Think 2021 conference has just ended and so has Google I/O 2021, and only a month ago we participated in Nvidia’s GPU Technical Conference 2021. A whole lotta things are rattling around in our brains, and we are still thinking about some of the things people have been saying about artificial intelligence, the instantiation of which based on machine learning techniques seems to work quite well but no one really knows, in the same way a COBOL or RPG program is absolutely deterministic, why it works.
This is …
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IBM: The Elder Statesman Of Semiconductors
May 17, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Big Blue may be a lot smaller than it used to be, and it is going to get a lot smaller after its spins off its managed services and hosting business into a new company to be called Kyndryl, which will have about $19 billion in sales, about 4,600 customers, and about 90,000 employees. That will leave the remaining part of IBM, focused on its Power Systems and System z platforms and its whole push into hybrid cloud, artificial intelligence, and quantum computing.
That remaining business will have about $59 billion in sales, about 260,000 employees, and something on the …
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Talking Shop With Power Systems Chief Stephen Leonard
May 10, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Whether or not you were aware of it, the Cognitive Systems division of IBM – what we still colloquially call Power Systems here at IT Jungle and what everyone else still calls it for the most part – has had a new general manager for quite some time and we had not yet had a chance to talk to the new chief. But recently we did hop on the Zoom with Stephen Leonard to get some insight about the Power Systems business and how it fits into the new and evolving IBM and the rapidly changing IT sector.
Leonard dates …
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Thoroughly Modern: IBM i Web Development Trends To Watch In the Second Half
May 10, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
It is hard to believe, but in terms of budgets and thinking, within six weeks we will be entering the second half of 2021, a turning point year if there ever was one, and perhaps an inflection point for 2021 itself and thus for the next decade or so.
The need to modernize is not lost on most IBM i shops, but it seems like there’s a new web technology to learn each week. It’s no surprise that getting started with Web development is a stumbling block in itself. That’s why vendors like Fresche are working to demystify Web development …
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