Summary

The General Manager of IBM Power, Paul Forte, discusses the strategic progress in IBM Power and the company’s plans in four critical areas – innovation in core business workloads, growth with SAP HANA, supporting industry modernization, and providing greater flexibility with subscription services and Power as a Service.

IBM Power continues to innovate and invest in operating environments on IBM Power to ensure business continuity, reliability, availability, serviceability, and security for clients.

The company is also driving growth with SAP HANA on Power, supporting industry modernization, and providing greater flexibility with subscription services and Power as a Service.

Down to the core

The latest IBM i Technology Refresh — IBM i 7.5 TR3 and 7.4 TR9 — announced in October, introduced advancements in ease of use, productivity, and automation. A new release of AIX — AIX 7.3 TL2 — is designed to enhance high availability leadership with performance and scale enhancements to Live Kernel Update.

Furthermore, IBM is expanding IBM Db2 Warehouse on Power with a new Base Rack Express and expects Oracle to release Oracle Database 23c on Power. In 2024, clients can look forward to continued enhancements to the AIX, IBM i, and Linux roadmaps.

Accelerating business transformation with SAP HANA on Power

As 2027 marks the end of mainstream maintenance for SAP’s legacy ERP, SAP is accelerating this journey by offering the current ERP, S/4HANA, as a managed service offering with SAP RISE. IBM Power is supporting customers in their business transformation journey by offering customer infrastructure solutions designed to meet customers where they are.

In addition, IBM is offering a hybrid cloud consumption model that will allow flexibility for both on-premises and cloud expenditures.

Driving industry modernization

Power10’s powerful core can help embed AI-driven insights into business processes and safeguard AI workflows.

For instance, a Thai hospital chain was able to increase sensitivity in detecting lesions to prioritize higher probability cases using AI inference solutions on Power10.

Clients can take advantage of expanded data science services with the release of IBM Cloud Pak for Data V4.8.

Power as a service

IBM Power is focusing on transforming the Proof of Concept (PoC) experience for IBM Power Virtual Server and moving away from a “Do It Yourself” (DIY) model for High Availability/Disaster Recovery (HA/DR) solutions to a more prescriptive and automated approach.

IBM Power backed by IBM Expert Care

IBM Power10 can be sold together with IBM Power Expert Care, and all IBM Power support contracts come with access to IBM Support Insights.

What’s next for IBM Power

IBM’s upcoming goals include making it easier for clients to run AI workloads closer to their data, improving total cost of ownership and performance, increasing availability, enhancing security, and sustainability features.

For more information, reach out to your IBM Power representative or Business Partner to discuss progress together.

FAQs

What are IBM’s plans for SAP HANA on Power?

IBM is supporting customers in their business transformation journey by offering customer infrastructure solutions designed to meet customers where they are. This includes offering a hybrid cloud consumption model that allows flexibility for both on-premises and cloud expenditures.

What is the latest release of AIX?

The latest release of AIX is AIX 7.3 TL2, which is designed to enhance high availability leadership with performance and scale enhancements to Live Kernel Update, optimized file system performance, and enhancements to improve AIX encryption performance and audit event checking.

What support offerings are available for IBM Power?

IBM Power10 can be sold together with IBM Power Expert Care, a tiered support model that makes it easier for clients to choose the right level of support for their needs and budget at the time of sale. Additionally, all IBM Power support contracts come with access to IBM Support Insights, providing actionable insights for multivendor IT infrastructures to proactively assess and remediate IT risks.

How can clients leverage cloud capacity credits for IBM Power Private Cloud?

IBM is offering a hybrid cloud consumption model that allows clients to leverage the investment of on-premises hardware and, with a commitment to IBM Power Virtual Server, receive cloud capacity credits for IBM Power Private Cloud.