Thread regarding IBM layoffs

90% of what's keeping Power alive is SAP. S4/HANA has massive memory requirements. Without this niche, Power would have been dead years ago.

IBM power has been in “sustain” mode for at least 10 years. No effort to grow the business and the results are palatable (8 billion in sales per year dropping to 2 billion a year). The ISV’s that were the bread and butter of Power long ago went to Intel as IBM failed to provide support or a path forward for the emerging LINUX SW stack. Intel saw that opening and invested big time. The results speak for themselves. SO how does a “sustain” mode business make money? You got it CUT COSTS. IBM has been cutting away at costs to the point that power is now a “NICHE” marketplace. (Offshore support to India, give up on P12, offshore SW stacks to India, offshore manufacturing to Mexico, offload marketing and sales to the channel). Is there anything else IBM can do to squeeze costs out of power? Yep it’s to offload low end to the cloud, and allow mainframe to absorb the high end customers. We are almost there, and then Power will be just like DEC or VSE. GONE

@ca ibm failed miserably in switching to intel before.

Power, just like mainframe, is 100% renewal business. Zero new customer - no one wants it, IBM doesn't even try to expand. It is a classic cash cow - no innovation and miked til it dies. Rumor abound that IBM might start using AMD chips on Power.

Bob runs on power.

@a2 This makes me hot.

Power brand has already decided where Power is heading

Scaleout power boxes will be encouraged to adopt Power cloud. Even with all of its warts, Power cloud makes money where power scale out barely breaks even.

Enterprise Power boxes will slowly be absorbed by mainframe. Any mainframe announcement has been quickly adopted by “enterprise power”. It’s just a matter of time before mainframe just swallows Power lock stock and barrel. P12 is where it most likely happens.

Power received the Kiss of the Death when Doug Bellog (GM of Power 10 years ago) promoted that Linux on Power is the way to go, stop development on AIX/IBM i.
AIX was sent to its grave in India. IBM i is on its way there too.

@A6 has hit the nail on the head. Power is farming the install base which is shrinking 10-15% per year. Answer the questions below, and you can see where power is heading

1. Did mainframe involve Power in their go forward strategy? NOPE AMD won that honor
2. Did LINUX ISV’s adopt LINUX on Power? Nope Intel won that honor
3. Is IBM investing in Power 12? Nope Telum and Spyre won that Honor
4. Has Power been at the forefront of cloud? Nope Intel and Nvidia won the honor
5. Is IBM investing at all in Power? Nope quantum won that race
6. Is SW investing in Power? Nope Mainframe won that race
7. Can Consulting spell Power? Nope. Their answer is “power who”.
   NET NET Power has seen its day and has shrunk from an 8 billion a year growing/ISV supported business to a 1.5 billion a year replacement only business

@a6 you are right they are long gone. Around that time a power and demographic shift started to occur that forced most of them out. Sad really

I remember a time in the 1990s when IBM would take out ads in fairly mainstream publications when RS/6K or successors topped SPEC benchmarks. This was in the era of 386/486 and, if you needed horsepower, you would spend the extra money for the IBM system. Both systems had rapid performance gains over the years but, slowly but surely, Intel/AMD closed the performance gap. IBM never closed the price/performance gap.

The problem on the AIX/Linux side (but not the IBM i side) is that the barrier to exit is very low. At one time, IBM was the standard system that everyone knew about. But, in today's cloud environment, IBM is a bit of an off brand and not the one you automatically think about.

Despite the fact that it is a non-entity on Top500, I think that IBM can still get US National Labs to help pay for new generations of the part. But am not sure.

It would be a horrible fate for a great processor to end its life as the IBM i processor with no UNIX market. But I could see that happening.

IBM POWER (Performance Optimized With Enhanced RISC) was designed and built by BRILLIANT people when it came out in 1990 as the RT/PC (horrible product) but then quickly recovered with RS/6000 in 1990. Those great IBM people like most others are LONG GONE.

Through many years IBM has F'd up all facets of the POWER line as it became to be known as they kind of merged AS/400 and RS/6000 in "Power". Whoever renamed OS/400 OS to IBM i (despise the lower case i) should have worked at Ringling Brothers Circus. And of course customers were confused on the horrible merger of AS/400 and RS/6000 into Power even today.

So today, somewhat surprisingly I would estimate 70+ of IBM Power sales are to IBM i customers (no net new customers all refresh) and 20% or less to Power AIX customers. While you can run LPARs on Power systems to run IBM i, AIX and Linux on Power servers VERY FEW do it.

At launch AS/400 and RS/6000 had quite good software ecosystem support. But now it is on hospice care.

I sold Power systems for 4 years recently after many years in x86 and was struck how far removed IBM people are from customer projects and relationships. Many new IBM "sales people" 6 months ago were selling cosmetics at Ulta or working at the Verizon phone store.

All things IBM Power like all things at IBM are run by incompetent people who were promoted based on s-x, race, gender, skin color etc.

Power actually has 2 of the Top 10 Top500 supercomputers with Summit and Sierra about 8 years ago but of course some genius at IBM decided it cost too much to work with Nvidia anymore to support Nvidia GPUs after Power9 so P10 and P11 have no GPU support and that was that and now IBM is a nothing burger with Power for AI and HPC.

The latest "big push" by IBM for Power is PVS PowerVS Power Virtual Server which is essentially IBM no longer wanting to sell on premises systems as that is a spike of sales every 5-6 years but running IBM Power systems in 10 IBM data cts around the world in a cloud/SaaS like manner for Arvinds cash flow executive pay addiction. Of course it is buggy, expensive, horribly supported etc.

I think Power will be sold to a Dell or Lenovo or Oracle or Indian company or flame out like Intel Itanium and HP PA-RISC etc etc.

IBM's pipe dream for hardware is very muddled. Quantum "is coming fast" we have heard for 10 years. IBM thinks mainframes will actually grow and is addicted to the z mainframe revenue stream as Nokia was before iPhones. Power just sits in the corner.