Ian Murphy

About Ian Murphy

Ian Murphy has a long history with technology. Having been a signaller in the Royal Marines for a number of years, he wrote his first freelance article in 1982 on linking an IBM PC to an office printer followed by a series of pieces on Lotus 1-2-3 and database design. Since then, Ian has done most things in IT – programmer, technical support, project management, operations, management and owned a training company. Most of Ian’s time, however, has been split between being a freelance journalist and an industry analyst in the IT industry. His specialist areas are datacentres, storage, software development and communications and Ian has been a guest speaker at a number of vendor conferences. As an analyst Ian has worked for Tech Reports Ltd, Understanding Through Knowledge, Philips Global Media, Ovum, Macehiter Ward Dutton and more recently Creative Intellect Consulting Ltd. The first analyst report Ian wrote was in 1988 called Expert Systems in Action. The report focused on how companies such as British Coal, British Rail and several banks were saving millions of pounds using expert systems to analyse how they worked and in the fields of support. Examples of analyst reports Ian has authored and collaborated on are Digital Set-Top Boxes, Object Orientated Programming, Java in a Mobile World, Rich Internet Applications and Cloud Development. There are numerous others covering areas such as Business Intelligence, databases, development, Cloud and networking.

IBM pays $34 billion for Red Hat

By |2018-10-29T22:07:07+01:0029 October 2018|Acquisition, Analysis, Cloud, Vendor Analysis|

IBM has agreed to pay $34 billion for leading Linux vendor Red Hat. The sum is 70% above the current market cap for Red Hat which, as of Sunday, was just $20.53bn. This is also the biggest acquisition in the history of IBM by a significant margin. The previous record was $5bn for Cognos in 2008. Last [...]

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Storage revamp: IBM responds to multi-cloud users

By |2018-09-25T00:03:44+01:0025 September 2018|Analysis, Cloud, Storage, Vendor Analysis|

Organisations are increasingly moving their computing and storage needs to the cloud. The latter is a challenge. Regulators are adding new controls around privacy and data sovereignty. This is one of the reasons why some companies have kept their storage onsite rather than take advantage of the lower prices and greater availability that cloud offers. [...]

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Blockchain and crypto currencies – what world problems do they actually solve?

By |2018-07-20T08:53:07+01:0020 July 2018|Analysis, Blockchain|

There is a seemingly endless round of global conferences focused on blockchain as the solution to everything. Many of these conferences seem to be little more than a thinly disguised attempt to peddle crypto currencies. At MoneyConf Dublin there was, for once, some balance in the discussion. This was the first year the MoneyConf had [...]

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New markets for two new IBM z14 and LinuxONE mainframes: What’s the appeal?

By |2018-04-16T22:36:21+01:0016 April 2018|Analysis, Mainframe, Vendor Analysis|

Not quite halfway through the two-year IBM z14 lifecycle, the company has announced two new models. These are designed to appeal not just to existing customers but also to new customers as the company targets its biggest year for mainframe sales in over a decade. Yes, that does say over a decade. In reality, CIC [...]

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IBM announces its annual 5 in 5 predictions: But how viable are its bets?

By |2018-03-21T13:51:54+01:0021 March 2018|Analysis, Vendor Analysis|

At IBM THINK 2018 in Las Vegas on 19th March, IBM has highlighted five future technologies it is working on. All of these technologies started life in IBM research labs. It is likely that IBM will seek to commercialise some of these itself and with the help of specialist partners. What is interesting about this [...]

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Why cores, memory and GPUs matter in an Artificial Intelligence (AI) world

By |2017-12-14T13:12:18+01:008 December 2017|Analysis, Cloud, POWER, Vendor Analysis|

IBM delivered the first of its POWER9 units to the Oak Ridge National Laboratories back in July 2017. This is a deployment that will take several months to complete. It also began deploying units to the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory at the end of October 2017. These two announcements mean that customers and that includes [...]

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Clash of the heavyweights: battle lines drawn between IBM and Intel processors

By |2017-08-29T08:21:07+01:0029 August 2017|Analysis, IT operations and system management, POWER|

Building high performance computer systems is all about finding and removing bottlenecks. Unfortunately, this is a never ending game. As fast as you identify and deal with one bottleneck, another appears. For a while, the problem was the raw performance of the four key elements in a computer system; processor, memory, network and storage. Over [...]

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CIC Insights: IBM z14 plays the trust card, but does it hold a winning hand?

By |2017-07-18T07:48:38+01:0018 July 2017|Analysis, Mainframe, Security, Vendor Analysis|

It's that time again, the time that most observers in the industry say will never happen. IBM is releasing the next generation of its z Systems mainframe products called the z14. IBM has seen an acceleration of sales across its z Systems business unit helped, in part, by the LinuxONE models. With z14, IBM will [...]

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CIC Insights: Will IBM reinvent software licensing through Containers?

By |2017-07-17T10:46:19+01:0017 July 2017|Analysis, Cloud, Licensing, Mainframe, Vendor Analysis|

Two months ago at DockerCon 17, IBM announced it was to make Docker Enterprise Edition (EE) available for Linux on IBM z Systems. This was an announcement that IBM had widely trailed having talking about multiple container technologies and the mainframe for some time. What was different this time was the detail around the announcement. [...]

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The real winners as VMware sells its vCloud AIR business

By |2017-04-21T16:53:11+01:006 April 2017|Analysis, Cloud|

When VMware launched its vCloud Initiative at the 2008 VMworld conference it looked like it was going to move into and dominate the nascent cloud market as it had done the virtualisation space. It took five years, however for VMware to move from announcement to production. In that time, VMware had missed the boat and [...]

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