Timothy Prickett Morgan
-
Power Systems Hit By The Pandemic In Q1 2020
April 27, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Thirteen weeks ago, when IBM reported its financial results for the fourth quarter of 2019, we told you that the Power9 platform was entering the long tail, that part of the cycle of the this generation of Power Systems machines where the revenue would dwindle off between that time and when the Power10 servers launch sometime in 2021. That tail perhaps just got a little longer and skinnier thanks to the coronavirus pandemic.
IBM doesn’t talk very much about the specifics of revenues and profits for the Power Systems line any more, just like it stopped talking about the iSeries …
Read more -
IBM Grants Amnesty On Software Maintenance After License Charges
April 20, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Ask and ye shall receive. Last week, we were asking for Big Blue to wake up and provide a stimulus package for its Power Systems business in general and its IBM i business in particular. And one of the things we asked for – an amnesty canceling so-called after license charges for Software Maintenance for IBM i and AIX platforms was actually quietly announced to business partners – unexpectedly at that – on April 13, the same day our essay ran and three days after we wrote it.
We think this is a coincidence, not causation. And it’s a …
Read more -
COVID-19 Response: Manta Cuts Training Prices, Offers Freebies
April 20, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Everybody is doing their part to try to cushion the blow of the coronavirus outbreak and also to stay in business themselves. It’s a delicate balance, and one that we are all trying to manage.
Manta Technologies, which has been providing IBM i training for nearly the past three decades and online training for other platforms for more than four decades now, is doing its part. For nearly 20 years now, Manta’s library of more than 130 IBM i courses has been available online, and people all over the world use it to brush up on existing skills and …
Read more -
Thoroughly Modern: Digital Transformation Is More Important Than Ever
April 15, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
There are very few things in life that don’t have some kind of distribution across behavior patterns. Some phenomena are driven by bell curves or inverted bell curves or some other kind of distribution – including random. And as such, we all know that the companies that comprise the IBM i base fall on different parts of the spectrum of behavior with regard to how up to date their systems and their applications are.
In normal markets, where some of the pressures are not so intense, it might not matter as much to have a modern system, software, and application …
Read more -
Where Is The Power Systems-IBM i Stimulus Package?
April 13, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
The governments of the world are spending to try to compensate for the economic slowdown in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, which is the right thing to do. We wonder why IBM has not done more to help its Power Systems business.
Just before the coronavirus pandemic really started to kick in throughout Europe and the United States, and as the Power9 family of Power Systems machines was entering the long tail part of its sales cycle, IBM announced a deal in Europe that gave customers buying its so-called scale out (what we would call entry) one-socket and two-socket …
Read more -
The X Factor: Home Base
April 13, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
As you might imagine, New York City is on my mind a lot these days. And I have some advice for you as you are transitioning to tighter quarters and working from home – something I have been doing for 25 years now.
Way back in the dawn of time, back in the wake of the launch of the AS/400 when I graduated from college and moved to New York City because it was the biggest, scariest thing that I could do, my brain sort of melted from the enormity of it all. At that time, a recession was underway …
Read more -
IT Starts To Feel The Impact Of The Great Infection
April 13, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
You know the difference between an economy and an ecosystem? Me neither.
We stand by our conviction – and that backed up by the economists and market watchers at IDC – that the IT sector is going to fare better than other sectors in the wake of the global coronavirus pandemic and the jarring effects of the lockdown most of us are under. But we are also not surprised that IDC had to revise its estimates of IT spending projections for 2020 and beyond only a few days after putting out its initial thoughts. It’s a fluid situation, with …
Read more -
The IT Sector Could Weather The Pandemic Storm
April 6, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
It has been a rough couple of weeks for absorbing exponential data. It is astounding has fast the Great Infection, my term for the combination of the coronavirus outbreak and the reprise of the Great Recession that it looks like it is causing, is upon us. Nearly 10 million people have lost their jobs in two weeks, and my guess is that will more than double again next week and keep building from there, perhaps quadruple until we go from 3.5 percent unemployment in the United States to maybe 15 percent or so.
The hope is that this is temporary, …
Read more -
Final IBM i Software Maintenance Price Increases Released
April 6, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Back in early March, we told you that Big Blue was getting set to raise the prices it charges for Software Maintenance, short-handed down to SWMA and pronounced “swamma.” We had some estimated pricing, and on March 30, in an updated announcement letter 320-089, IBM released the updated price increases.
They are a bit different from the pricing that we saw in IBM’s initial presentations warning customers about the price increase, and the updated announcement has a spreadsheet that shows all of the different SKUs for SWMA for the P05, P10, P20, P30, P40, P50, and P60 software tiers. …
Read more -
Sending Your IT Department To The Teledoctor For A Checkup
March 30, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Quite a few of us in the world are going to have experience with telemedicine in the coming weeks, if we have not had it already, and so barriers to providing medical service are going to come down. The same kind of remote health experience is available for IT departments from a relatively new company called Chordia Consulting, which has created a remote IT healthcheck that now has a variant tuned specifically for IBM i shops and their special characteristics.
And in the wake of the coronavirus outbreak, Chordia’s co-founders, both ex-IBMer’s with experience in the IBM midrange, are …
Read more