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IBM in trouble?
Thursday, April 26. 2007
Since the invention of Power4 the story of IBM server business seems to be in a quite good condition. But somehow i have the dim feeling, that the scratches get deeper and more. Itīs only speculative, but:
- IBM tries to position mainframes whereever they can. Do you remember the stories about Mainframes for India. Or the newest, even more ridiclious stuff: Mainframe as a game server. IBM runs with great speed into the nuclear submarine problem with the mainframe class machines.
- In summary AIX is some year behind Solaris and Linux (To anticipate the ever reoccuring evergreen in customer situations: No, booting from tape is no technical advancement, you have networks for that). And the ISV support for AIX isnīt really roaring outside IBMīs own software divisions. Look at the number of support programs for the newest AIX release and compare it with Linux or Solaris.
- In my opinion IBMīs offer for Linux on pSeries is driven exactly by the operating system shortage. But the rumour goes, that more people use Linux on mainframes than on pSeries. ISV support for Linux on Power? Outside of IBM? Not really a factor.
- I assume that the concept of offering an emulation layer to run x86 binaries on Linux for Power comes from this shortage of applications. But: "Supported on Linux x86" doesnīt mean "Supported on Linux x86 emulated on pSeries" (The whole Transitive hype forgets, that this emulation stuff solves only your migration challeges with self-breeded applications and software with deceased companies or developers,) . So this move doesnīt solve the ISV problem of Linux for pSeries.
Posted by Joerg Moellenkamp
in English, The IT Business
at
19:35
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"IBM in trouble?" when Dow and IBM hit new all-time-highs, while Sun loosing 13% stock value being Nasdaq top looser. Donī t you think that Sun is in trouble. Al least this is true for SUNW
Stocks, investors, analysts and technology are not really connected to each other. Especially when you donīt think in 3 or 6 month timeframes but in 3-4 year time frames.
Investors, at least non-institutional tend to do panic. I donīt think that the investor herds responsible for the lose are really able to understand the reason for the reduced revenue and surely they didnīt really analysed the numbers. For example free cash flow up 240 percent.
And, itīs not the technology that keeps IBM floating. IBM got an business consultancy with an affiliated software- and server department the last few years
We should talk again in 5 years. I tend to think that IBM will finalize the transformation to a services company and will use the Thinkpad business modell for itīs server, too
Investors, at least non-institutional tend to do panic. I donīt think that the investor herds responsible for the lose are really able to understand the reason for the reduced revenue and surely they didnīt really analysed the numbers. For example free cash flow up 240 percent.
And, itīs not the technology that keeps IBM floating. IBM got an business consultancy with an affiliated software- and server department the last few years
We should talk again in 5 years. I tend to think that IBM will finalize the transformation to a services company and will use the Thinkpad business modell for itīs server, too
Did you believe, that IBM would give away itīs prospering notebook business, before the did it? IBM is a company in transformation, and they want to earn money. When their own servers are a for their bottom line and has no further advantage for their operations, they will dump it. But at the end, itīs just a speculation from my side.
Well...
I can't say I entirely agree with Joergs speculations. However, to this argument, my answer is a question: can you point me to some examples where the stock market was an early indicator of an IT company in trouble?
If I want to know about how good and solid an IT company is, the absolutely last thing I would look at is the stock value.
Addendum: The speculations in Joergs second post are pretty similar to my own. IBM already is a very different from what it was 10 years ago. One might like that transformation or not - I think both views are reasonable - fact is that it's happening, and has been happening for quite a few years already.
I can't say I entirely agree with Joergs speculations. However, to this argument, my answer is a question: can you point me to some examples where the stock market was an early indicator of an IT company in trouble?
If I want to know about how good and solid an IT company is, the absolutely last thing I would look at is the stock value.
Addendum: The speculations in Joergs second post are pretty similar to my own. IBM already is a very different from what it was 10 years ago. One might like that transformation or not - I think both views are reasonable - fact is that it's happening, and has been happening for quite a few years already.
Sun itself is a good example, right until the burst of the dot com bubble our stock was very healthy but the challenges of the next years were already seeded
The Transitive x86 emulation makes no sense. It makes sense to emulate dead or dying processor architectures. And the host for the emulator should be a processor which has a strong future.
I once saw a PDP-11 emulator for SPARC which was very useful.
HP customers would be well-served by Alpha and PA-RISC emulators.
x86, now that it is multivendor and 64-bit, makes an excellent host platform for an emulator.
A SPARC Solaris emulator for x86 Solaris might be useful for some customers, especially in a consolidated, virtualized environment. It would also be useful for development environments. Come on Sun, let's see a SPARCv9 QEMU environment running on Opteron.
Likewise, it would be more useful to emulate POWER/AIX on x86 than x86/Linux on POWER.
But I can buy a very good, very inexpensive x86 system from multiple sources. Why emulate x86?
Like I said, it makes no sense.
I once saw a PDP-11 emulator for SPARC which was very useful.
HP customers would be well-served by Alpha and PA-RISC emulators.
x86, now that it is multivendor and 64-bit, makes an excellent host platform for an emulator.
A SPARC Solaris emulator for x86 Solaris might be useful for some customers, especially in a consolidated, virtualized environment. It would also be useful for development environments. Come on Sun, let's see a SPARCv9 QEMU environment running on Opteron.
Likewise, it would be more useful to emulate POWER/AIX on x86 than x86/Linux on POWER.
But I can buy a very good, very inexpensive x86 system from multiple sources. Why emulate x86?
Like I said, it makes no sense.
I see some advantages in doing so. High end unix systems have a vastly longer history in protecting data paths and ensuring data integrity while processing it in the system. x86 is a little bit like "best-effort" computing. But somehow nobody cares about the problems of using desktop derived systems in server computing.
Thus at the end emulation of x86 can be quite useful, when you donīt trust x86-class processors but all you have is an x86 binary.
But honestly: Most people donīt care about the problems of x86 in server computing. Their simply donīt think about it, while battleing for the budget next year with the financial guys, nevertheless it will both bite in their backs when they have a data corrupted database, because it was so cheap to use Oracle RAC on x86 with Linux for the central SAP system.
Thus at the end emulation of x86 can be quite useful, when you donīt trust x86-class processors but all you have is an x86 binary.
But honestly: Most people donīt care about the problems of x86 in server computing. Their simply donīt think about it, while battleing for the budget next year with the financial guys, nevertheless it will both bite in their backs when they have a data corrupted database, because it was so cheap to use Oracle RAC on x86 with Linux for the central SAP system.
just thinking off a hp-ux zone with with an emulation or translator for PA-RISC
+1
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