Earlier quoted context omitted.
IBM has more revenue than Oracle even if we hear way less about it. 5 times smaller than Apple, thou. It also has more employees than Microsoft or Alphabet. But it has tighter profit margins than other tech companies. IBM is not in consumer products nor services so we do not hear about it.
Oracle/TSMC/SpaceX isn’t in consumer products/services, but they are heard about. IBM was declining for 10 years while the rest of the tech related businesses were blowing up, plus IBM does not pay well, so other than it being a business in decline, there wasn’t much to talk about. No one expects anything new from IBM. Also, they had quite a few big boondoggles where they were the bad guys helping swindle taxpayers d…
IBM Announces Strategic Collaboration with Arm
51–60 of 204 posts
Re: IBM Announces Strategic Collaboration with Arm
#52Re: IBM Announces Strategic Collaboration with Arm
#53This is a serious question. What does IBM, in fact, do? I'm surprised they are still around and apparently relevant. Are they more or less a services and consulting company now?
Beneath the countless layers of VMs and copious weird purpose built gear like Tandem and Base24 for the ATMs was a whole bunch of true blue z/OS powered IBM mainframes chugging through thousands and thousands of interlocking COBOL programs that do everything from moving files between partner banks all over the world, moving money between accounts, compounding interest, and extracting a metric shitton of every type of fee imaginable.
If you know z/OS there's work available until your retirement. Miserable, pointless, banal, and archaic legacy as fuck mainframe work.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tandem_Computers
Re: IBM Announces Strategic Collaboration with Arm
#54This is a serious question. What does IBM, in fact, do? I'm surprised they are still around and apparently relevant. Are they more or less a services and consulting company now?
Putting consumer grade (aka "commodity") hardware in a datacenter and running your infra on it is a bit of a meme, in the sense that it's not the only way of doing things. It was probably pioneered/popularized by Google but that's because writing great software was their "hammer", ie they framed every computing problem as a software problem. It was probably easier for them (= Jeff Dean) to take mediocre hardware and…
Eh, they can but even a couple of decades ago there was a shift to open platforms. 90s and early 00s, sure, it was mainframe and exotic x86 species like Stratus machines. But even then the power of “throw a ton of cheaper Unix at it” was winning.
Banks’ central systems maybe, I have less experience there. IBM did also try for a while to ride the Linux virtualisation wave as well, saying “hey, you can run thousands of Linux instances on a single mainframe”, and I did some work porting IBM software to s390 Linux around 2007.
Re: IBM Announces Strategic Collaboration with Arm
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
Marketingwise I think it is difficult for IBM to sell x86 systems as it is too easy for customers to compare performance to a standard Wintel server. Sun had the same problem after 2001 dotcom when standard PC servers became reliable enough to run web servers on. It's easier to sell "our special sauce" when building using a custom ARM platform. Then you have no easy comparison with standard servers.
Yep i think thats why even POWER isnt sold standalone but as part of the Z/i series packages as a unit. They will probably market the ARM inclusion similarly - as something that the package provides. As far as POWER i think only Raptor[1] does direct marketingof the power(hehe) and capabilities [1] https://www.raptorcs.com/
https://www.ibm.com/products/power
The i systems are just POWER machines with different firmware.
Re: IBM Announces Strategic Collaboration with Arm
#56This is a serious question. What does IBM, in fact, do? I'm surprised they are still around and apparently relevant. Are they more or less a services and consulting company now?
IBM (imho) is in the absolute frontline in quantum computers. One could argue if the number of startups in QC means that there is an actual market or not. Companies that lives on VC or the valuation of their stock.
But IBM is not showy, not on the front pages, does not live on VC or stock valuation. IBM makes tons of money decade after decade from customers that are also not showy but makes tons of money. Banks, financial institutions, energy, logistics, health care etc etc. If IBM thinks these companies will benefit from using QC from IBM (and pay tons of money for it), there is quite probably some truth in QC becoming useful in the near future. Years rather than decades.
IBM have run the numbers and have decided that spending the money for engineering, research required is outweighs the money possible to earn on QC services. QCs powerful enough to run the QC-supported algorithms these companies need to make more tons of money. And it's probably not breaking RSA or ECC.
Re: IBM Announces Strategic Collaboration with Arm
#57This is a serious question. What does IBM, in fact, do? I'm surprised they are still around and apparently relevant. Are they more or less a services and consulting company now?
Early in my career I spent some years working at the biggest bank in Canada, they were (and still are) an enormous IBM customer. Hardware, software, consulting, and probably lots of other things I had no visibility into. Beneath the countless layers of VMs and copious weird purpose built gear like Tandem and Base24 for the ATMs was a whole bunch of true blue z/OS powered IBM mainframes chugging through thousands and…
Re: IBM Announces Strategic Collaboration with Arm
#58> dual‑architecture hardware that helps enterprises run future AI and data intensive workloads with greater flexibility, reliability, and security I think we can ignore the "AI" word here as its presence is only because everything currently has to be AI. So why would IBM add ARM? > As enterprises scale AI and modernize their infrastructure, the breadth of the Arm software ecosystem is enabling these workloads to run…
AI= Arm Ibm in that case
Re: IBM Announces Strategic Collaboration with Arm
#59This is a serious question. What does IBM, in fact, do? I'm surprised they are still around and apparently relevant. Are they more or less a services and consulting company now?
I think the later a company started using centralized electronic record keeping, the higher the likelyhood they are not paying IBM anymore: commercial banks, governments and insurance started digitizing in the 60s (with custom software) and if the companies are old (or in US-friendly petrostates) they are all IBM customers. Corps using ERP or PLM offerings (so manufacturing and retail chains which are younger than banks) used to start digitizing a little later (Walmart only was founded in the 60s and electronic CAD started in the 80s) and while they likely used IBM in the past (SAP was big on DB2) they might not use it anymore (also it helps they usually bought the ERP or PLM from someone else). New Companies whose sole business was to run a digital-platform started on Unix (see Amazon who successfully fought to ditch Oracle even) or just built their whole platform (Google). If those companies predate Unix they usually fought hard to get rid of IBM (Microsoft, Amadeus)
Consulting/outsourcing services have been spun out to Kyndryl, so nowadays IBM only sells hardware, support for their products and ostensibly has some people left to develop their products... The days when that was a big thing and IBM produced all the stuff they sell support for now, have been long gone. A fun link to see how their "product development" operates nowadays is this discussion to bring gitlab-runners to z/OS: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-runner/-/work_items/275... - tl;dr "hey you opensource company, we are IBM and managed to pay someone to port a go compiler to z/OS. Now we have a customer who wants to use gitlab with z/OS. Would you like to make your software part of our product offering?". A fun fact is that - even within IBM - access to the real mainframe seems to be very limited which shows a bit in the discussion linked above and also with an ex-Kyndryl-person saying: "oh, I once had a contract where we replaced the mainframe and we ran that on Linux-boxes inside IBM, because it was just cheaper that way. Just the big reporting was a bit slow, but the reliability was just fine"
Re: IBM Announces Strategic Collaboration with Arm
#60This is a serious question. What does IBM, in fact, do? I'm surprised they are still around and apparently relevant. Are they more or less a services and consulting company now?
Putting consumer grade (aka "commodity") hardware in a datacenter and running your infra on it is a bit of a meme, in the sense that it's not the only way of doing things. It was probably pioneered/popularized by Google but that's because writing great software was their "hammer", ie they framed every computing problem as a software problem. It was probably easier for them (= Jeff Dean) to take mediocre hardware and…
TSYS is super expensive and is dying out. The current generation of banking software is very much shifting to distributed software across commodity data centers.