Timothy Prickett Morgan
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IBM i Software And Power Systems Upgrades Keep Rolling Forward
January 18, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
During tough economic times, I am fond of reminding people – and especially myself as I try to remain calm in a recession or whatever the heck this is we are dealing with now during the coronavirus pandemic – that business, in the aggregate, never goes to zero. No matter how bad it gets, thus far in the modern era starting perhaps with the Renaissance and maybe even longer but certainly since the agricultural and industrial revolutions in the 1700s, people still need stuff and they need people to grow or make it.
That doesn’t mean it is easy, however. …
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Park Place Buys Curvature To Become Maintenance Goliath
January 18, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
The big tend to get bigger, and this is certainly happening in the third-party maintenance (TPM) business for IT equipment. We didn’t catch this when it happened, but back in November, Park Place Technologies acquired rival Curvature for an undisclosed sum. Both companies have substantial businesses supporting IBM Power Systems customers, although they are by no means exclusively focused on providing alternative hardware support for these platforms alone.
We did a story about using third party maintenance providers back in April 2019, and followed it up in September 2019 as Power7 and Power7+ iron was coming to the end …
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More Vintage Power Systems Feature Withdrawals
January 11, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
In with the new and out with the old is a common theme around this time of the year. It may not be officially spring yet – in fact, we are 71 days away from the vernal equinox here in the northern hemisphere – but Spring Cleaning can and does happen at any time in the IBM product catalog.
And so it was as 2020 was coming to an end and after we had out the last issue of The Four Hundred for last year to bed.
In announcement letter 920-167, IBM is withdrawing a number of different features …
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Paving The Road Ahead For A Better Ride
January 4, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
We always sit behind the wheel of the present as we drive to the future with our baggage from the past in the trunk.
It is with this in mind that we contemplate 2021 and the uncertainty of regional, national, and global economies as well as how the coronavirus pandemic will be handled around the world in some pretty tricky political climates. These forces will affect all IBM i customers, of course, and we are not so much interested in describing all of these complex turbulences as they intertwine. What we do want to do is provide a few ideas …
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A Chat With Steve Woodard, The New CEO At Fresche Solutions
December 16, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Here is one way you know that the IBM i market is still a good one. Smart people who like to make money, and in fact have to make money for their investors, keep buying up the big players in the software spaces related to the IBM i platform, and they are also successively profiting from those acquisitions and those sales as they create big conglomerates that serve the IBM i community.
So it is American Pacific Group (APG) has become the majority shareholder in Fresche Solutions, which is based in Montreal and which is without question the largest company …
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The Prickly Pear Of Auto ID For IBM i
December 16, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Good companies can batten down the hatches and pilot their enterprise through rough economic waters, but great companies identify opportunities and successfully pursue them whether or not times are good or bad. It takes a bit of pliability to be adaptable enough to not just accept change, but to embrace it, and also to be certain enough of your company and its customers to build a core user base and just serve those customers relentlessly with steady improvements. This is a tough balancing act, but if you look at the case studies, you find this balance is what gives companies …
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Happy Holidays From IT Jungle
December 16, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
During a normal holiday season, family and friends are our refuge from the adversities and tribulations of the world. And this year, we need our people more than ever and we can’t have them.
It’s peculiar, and we all have similar stories of how we cannot see and embrace the people who we are closest to because we have to quarantine. It is hard to say if we are overreacting or not, but for many of us, there is a small margin of error and so we err on the side of caution.
For those of you who have lost …
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Some Confusion Around IBM i 7.1 And IBM i 7.2 Support
December 14, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
In the wake of writing last week’s discussion about how Big Blue would be supporting the IBM i operating system, database, and systems software stack out to 2032 and beyond, I discovered some anomalies in the documentation that IBM has put out regarding extended support for specific IBM i releases.
For many customers, getting beyond IBM i 7.1 is impossible for various reasons, which we have discussed in the past. Some of the reasons are technical – customers have lost their source code and they can’t tweak it to run on more modern releases of hardware and software, or their …
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Chipping Away At X86 Hegemony In the Datacenter
December 14, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Here at The Four Hundred, we have a saying: Anything that makes Power Systems stronger makes IBM i last longer. And part of making IBM i stronger, oddly enough, means just getting behind the idea of diversity of compute in the datacenter and that specifically means countering the notion that the X86 processor (and specifically the Intel Xeon SP implementation of it, but not exclusively because we now have AMD Epyc processors that are viable) is necessarily the only processor in the future of the datacenter.
We have always held this opinion, as you well know, and have …
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To 2032 . . . And Beyond!
December 7, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
As you sit here in 2020, can you even imagine 2032? Can you imagine beyond that? Oddly enough, I can imagine three or four decades out from here a lot more easily than I can do a dozen years, even though I know the error bars get longer and the probabilistic clouds get fuzzier the further into the future you wander with your mind. So what does it mean, really, when Big Blue commits to support the IBM i platform at least until 2032, a mere dozen years away in a platform that, depending on how you want to …
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