Timothy Prickett Morgan
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Some Clarity – Well Actually Less – On IBM i Subscriptions
March 4, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan
As we pointed out a few weeks ago, it looks like at least some aspects of Big Blue’s subscription model for pricing hardware and systems software is a work in progress. We accidentally saw an IBM document dated February 15 that had updated some aspects of the subscription pricing for machines in the IBM i P05 and P10 software tiers and said that others would be updated on May 7.
In the time that it took us to write that story, which wasn’t long, IBM took the PDF down and said that it needed to make edits to that …
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The Cloud Is Part Of The IBM i Present, And A Bigger Part Of Its Future
February 26, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan
As obvious as this might sound in hindsight, if you want to get the right answers, you have to ask the right questions in the first place. And as inquisitive communicators, we will be the first ones to admit that this is not always as easy as it sounds.
It is hard to draw the line in the timeline sands for when the first true cloudy instance of a Power Systems machine running a rentable license to the IBM i operating system was announced, but it is safe to say that various hosting providers have been renting out parts of …
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Lots Of Unanswered Questions On IBM i Subscriptions
February 19, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Like all of you, we have been watching with great interest as Big Blue transitions the IBM i software stack and Power10 hardware to cloud-like, utility-style subscription pricing. We have watched how each part of the IBM i stack has been transformed from the perpetual (and sometimes user) license pricing scheme with Software Maintenance to a subscription.
As far as we know, and as we reported back in September 2023 when the subscription pricing for the IBM i P05 and P10 software tiers was revealed, March 26, 2024, is supposed to be the last day you will be able to …
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IBM: A Brand Is Not Everything, But It Is Important To Have A Good One
February 19, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan
If you want to trace the roots of Big Blue back to the beginning, you start with Herman Hollerith at Columbia University and the punch card tabulating machines he created and that were ultimately used in their first big commercial application to do the calculating for the US Census in 1890.
Back then, mainframes were made of wood, copper, and paper, and in 1911, Hollerith’s punch card machine business, known as the Tabulating Machine Co, were united with the Dayton Counter Scales, Dayton Industrial Scales, and International Time Recorder machines that were part and parcel of the Industrial Revolution. The …
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Server And Storage Spending To Recover In The Years Ahead
February 14, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan
A decade and a half ago, there was a very formal definition of what cloud infrastructure was, and the distinction between what most IT departments acquired or leased and what was rentable in the nascent clouds was obvious. Over the years, the lines have gotten fuzzier, with you being able to acquire systems with utility-style cloud pricing even though they are in your datacenter – just to give one example. Another is something called a bare metal cloud – what you and I might have called hosting in days gone by.
That fuzziness is why we always take any prognostications …
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The State Of The Power Systems Base 2024: The Operating Systems
February 12, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan
What stays in the field longer? The hardware or the software? Well, if you are talking about the IBM i installed base, or indeed that of any legacy systems out there like z/OS or Windows Server, the hardware can often be upgraded easier than the software and so it tends to not stay in the field as long. On average, of course.
In the real world, it all comes down to specifics. And you have to analyze and interpret the trend lines very carefully so as to not jump to the wrong conclusions.
So it is with the decade long …
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Hey, Where Did All Of The IBM i Redbooks Go?
February 7, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Have you read any good IBM i Redbooks lately? Probably not, and we want to know why.
Our intrepid colleague, Doug Bidwell, of IBM i PTF Guide fame among many other things, pointed out to us this week that it has been a long, long time since we have seen a Redbook or even a Redpaper concerning the IBM i platform. This seems peculiar to us, considering all of the new features and functions that have gone into IBM i 7.4 and IBM i 7.5. And even IBM i 7.3, which is going the way of all flesh.
If you …
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The State Of The Power Systems Base 2024: The Systems
February 5, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan
The foundation of any system is its processor. It is the central processing unit, or CPU, which used to be part of what we called the main frame in a multi-frame system, that ultimately does the calculations that make computing useful. There have always been many things that wrap around this CPU that turn it into a complete system – memory, networking, other kinds of I/O, various levels of storage, all in their own hierarchies. But if you ask someone what kind of system they have, beyond the vendor and the brand, the next bit of data they will …
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IBM i Shops Are Still Getting Their Generative AI Acts Together
February 5, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan
One of the great things about participating in the annual IBM i Marketplace Survey put together by Fortra – and one of the reasons why our beloved colleague Dan Burger helped HelpSystems create the survey a decade ago – was that we get to have input into how the survey is created and how it evolves over time.
During the survey, our host Tom Huntington, executive vice president of technical solutions at Fortra, does an instant poll for attendees, and rather than ask the same question as last year, which was about where people get their information about the IBM …
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Power Systems Grows For The Second Year In A Row
January 29, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Here at The Four Hundred, we take good news very seriously, and so we will just cut to the chase scene and tell you that IBM’s Power Systems business has grown for the second year in a row.
Take that in for a second. Savor it.
Think about the dozen years of dramatic decline we saw in the RISC/Unix and IBM i parts of the Power Systems business in the wake of the Great Recession in 2009, when the X86 platform from Intel finally got enough features – as did Windows Server and Linux – to compete effectively against …
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