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Bob More Than Just A Code Assistant, IBM i Chief Architect Will Says

December 1, 2025 Alex Woodie

When IBM i professionals finally get their hands on Bob, the new AI-powered tool currently in development in Big Blue’s labs, they will find that it is much more than just a code assistant, IBM i chief Architect Steve Will said recently. “It has a lot of knowledge,” he said. “It knows things about IBM i.”

While precise details about the timing of the release of Bob are slim, IBM is widely expected to release a public preview of the new AI-powered plug-in for VS Code in early 2026. The new software, which was unveiled in early October around the …
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Stacking Up Entry IBM i-Power11 Systems Against Windows X86 Platforms

December 1, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Having spent the past several weeks going over the hardware and software costs and performance of systems in the IBM i P10 and P20 software tiers. We had an admittedly small sample, but one that we could get Big Blue’s pricing information for, which is hard to come by. This week we wanted to see how those entry P10-class and P20-class machines stack up against modern X86 servers based on Intel’s latest Xeon 6 systems running a Windows Server stack that was functionally equivalent to the IBM i stack.

So we did a little spreadsheet work on your behalf.

Our …
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IBM Brings AI-Enhanced OpenShift Container Platform To Power Systems

December 1, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Given that Big Blue owns Red Hat, any Red Hat software that runs on X86 or Arm machinery should eventually make its way onto IBM’s own Power processors and their Power Systems servers. But, it takes time to do this, of course, and some Red Hat software is more important to the Power Systems based than other systems software.

In announcement letter AD25-1628, dated November 25 when IT Jungle was, like many of you, getting ready for the Thanksgiving holiday, IBM said that it had Red Hat OpenShift Platform Plus ready to go on its Power Systems iron. The …
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As I See It: Artificial Integrity

December 1, 2025 Victor Rozek

I don’t remember it being taught in school. Through high school and college I cannot recall a single instance where the concept of integrity was discussed or even mentioned. Occasionally I heard words like “honest” and “honorable” applied to virtuous historical figures. But those concepts describe behavior. Integrity, on the other hand, is based on character, on a commitment to consistently practice those virtues. Integrity drives behavior but it denotes more than action; it denotes essence, a state of being whole, and ethically unabridged.

Honor is about what you do; integrity is about who you are. Which is why a …
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IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 27, Number 47

December 1, 2025 Doug Bidwell

We start this week with performance anxiety. Well, more like performance degradation. As you will see at this link, if you have installed IBM i 7.4 TR12 or IBM i 7.5 TR7, SQL query plans might be spending more time waiting for I/O pending faults and therefore are performing poorly. There are actually two different but related issues and two different fixes that resolve this issue.

This week, there is also a security vulnerability. See Security Bulletin: IBM i is affected by obtaining information without proper authority [CVE-2025-36371], with more information available here. The fixes for this vulnerability, …
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Stacking Up Power10 And Power11 Systems Price/Performance

November 17, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

We have been on the hunt to get you pricing on entry Power11 machines in the P10 and P20 IBM i software tiers to give you a sense of the relative price/performance of the Power11 machines compared to their Power10 predecessors. There are dozens of possible configurations of entry, midrange, and enterprise machines in these two families, and without an official and public price list, as Big Blue provided for many years, it is very difficult for even business partners to get pricing.

In fact, they need to use IBM’s official configurator, and they need to have a Power System …
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Where Infor Is Headed With Its ERPs For IBM i

November 17, 2025 Alex Woodie

As the largest provider of IBM i-based ERP systems that isn’t named Oracle or SAP, Infor wields a significant amount of influence over the midrange marketplace. Companies that run XA, LX, and System 21 rely on Infor to keep their ERP systems up-to-date and viable with changing business and technology requirements. To that end, Infor shared some of its roadmap items with the user community during the recent inPOWER 2025 event.

More than 450 people attended the inPOWER 2025 conference, which took place in late September in Pewaukee, Wisconsin. The event was sponsored by the XA, LX, System 21, and …
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Rocket Delivers More DevOps Capabilities For IBM i

November 17, 2025 Alex Woodie

Rocket Software recently put the finishing touches on a range of updates for Rocket DevOps, its suite of automation, change management, and testing solutions for IBM i. The top enhancements customers will find are two-way Git integration, AI-powered anomaly detection, unit testing enhancements, and support for IBM i DevOps workflows in Microsoft Azure Pipelines.

It’s been a 2.5 years now that Rocket Software completed the rebrand from the old Aldon change management products, which it obtained with its 2011 acquisition, to Rocket DevOps. That Rocket DevOps rebrand involved taking the old Aldon Lifecycle Manager products – which helped automate …
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A Few More Power Systems Announcements Before Year End

November 17, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

We don’t expect a lot of announcements from IBM at this point in the year relating to the Power Systems platform, and in fact, we don’t expect a lot of announcements from Big Blue at all. Except maybe for the usual end-of-year “workload rebalancing,” the 2025 edition of that we saw recently being reported in the Wall Street Journal with very little details.

Here is a weird one. In announcement letter AD25-1276, IBM is reselling an AMD W6499 graphics card, which is based on its RDNA 2 architecture and which has 4 GB of GDDR6 frame buffer memory, …
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IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 27, Number 46

November 17, 2025 Doug Bidwell

Last week, we told you about two security vulnerabilities with Java on the IBM i platform, and this week we have another one that you need to cope with.

This vulnerability is Security Bulletin: IBM i is affected by Remote Code Execution, Deserialization of Untrusted Data, and Improper Access Controls vulnerabilities in IBM Java SDK and IBM Java Runtime [CVE-2025-50106, CVE-2025-30749, CVE-2025-30761, CVE-2025-30754], and more information about it can be found here. Here are the remediation and fixes for this latest Java issue by IBM i release:
```
IBM i Release	5770-JV1 PTF Number(s)			
7.6	7.5		7.4		7.3
SJ06886	SJ06885	
```
… Read more
Bang For The Buck On Entry Power10 And Power11 Machines

November 10, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Back in early October, after IBM released detailed performance specifications for Power11 machines running IBM i, we put together a detailed matrix of processor configurations from Power8 through Power11 machines, marking every different processor combination for all machines. There are dozens of possible server form factor and processor configurations across those four generations of machines, and it would be very difficult to get pricing information out of Big Blue for all of them.

We poked around the IBM site for Power10 many months ago ahead of the Power11 announcements in July and then did it again after the Power11 …
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A Hardware Refresh Is The Perfect Time To Re-Evaluate Your HA/DR Strategy

November 10, 2025 Ash Giddings

For most IBM i shops, hardware refresh cycles arrive with a mix of excitement and apprehension. New generations of IBM Power Systems like the recently announced Power11 machines offer the chance to increase power, improve efficiency, and take advantage of the latest features.

But along with the upside, upgrades also trigger some tough decisions, particularly around software licensing. High availability and disaster recovery (HA/DR) solutions are often near the top of that list. These tools are critical for helping businesses to maintain resilience and continuity, yet many customers find themselves paying significantly more for their HA/DR software after a hardware …
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Fresche Taps AI For New RPG-To-Java Conversion Tool

November 10, 2025 Alex Woodie

Fresche Solutions has launched X-Modernize AI, a new offering that uses generative AI technology to convert legacy RPG and Synon code to modern Java. The software, which is based on large language models and its X-Analysis cross-reference and code understanding tool, will speed up code conversion projects by a significant amount, the company claims.

Fresche Solutions is no stranger to legacy modernization projects and tools that convert RPG code into languages like Java, PHP, and .NET. In fact, the company’s very first announcement after it changed its name from Speedware to Fresche Legacy way back in 2012 was the acquisition …
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Gartner Raises 2025 IT Spending Forecast, Puts Out 2026 Prediction

November 10, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

If you have your boss pegging your pay increases to the growth in the IT market, you are going to outpace the inflation that is helping to buoy IT spending worldwide. The spreadsheet wizards and economists at Gartner have just raised their forecast for IT spending for the third time this year for 2025, and have also recently put out an initial forecast for what IT spending will look like in 2026.

As a refresher, here is how Gartner pegged IT spending by the major categories back in its July forecast for both 2024, which had ended, and for 2025, …
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IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 27, Number 45

November 10, 2025 Doug Bidwell

It has been a while since we saw new security vulnerabilities, and when you thought that, you jinxed the enter IBM i community. So thanks for that, and specifically, for the three new vulnerabilities we will tell you about now.

First, we have Security Bulletin: Multiple Vulnerabilities in IBM Java SDK affect IBM WebSphere Application Server and WebSphere Application Server Liberty due to the October 2025 CPU, which you can read more about here. The affected products are:
```
Affected Product(s)			   Version(s)
IBM WebSphere Application Server	   9.0
IBM WebSphere Application Server	   8.5
WebSphere Application Server - Liberty	   Continuous delivery
```
Second, …
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EvolveWare Makes Progress With RPG Code Modernization Using AI

November 3, 2025 Alex Woodie

IBM i shops that are looking for a partner to help them modernize RPG using AI have a number of companies to choose from, including IBM, which unveiled Project Bob last month. Another company to keep in mind is EvolveWare, which recently released its RPG code understanding tool and has plans to release a code generation product for RPG based on large language models (LLMs) in 2026.

EvolveWare has been treading the code modernization waters since it was founded by chief executive officer Miten Marfatia in Santa Clara, California, back in 2001. The company has primarily been involved in COBOL …
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Why The IBM i Market Needed Another VTL Option

November 3, 2025 Greg Tevis

Over many decades now, the IBM i community of software vendors has done a great job coming up with new ways to extend and improve the systems that IBM has built for midrange customers. But every once in a while, a new idea comes into the IBM i community from the outside.

So it is with Compass Tape Gateway from Cobalt Iron, which modernizes IBM i backup by replacing traditional VTL complexity with an automated, software‑defined experience. It treats IBM i as a first‑class part of enterprise data protection – not a silo – so teams get simpler operations, …
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What Price Power?

November 3, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

One of the things that is great about the cloud is that the cost of a configured server instance with a given compute, memory, storage, and network capacity has a published list price, including volume discounts for reserving instances over relatively long periods of time. Similarly, sellers of X86 servers – mainly Dell and Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and mainly for entry and midrange X86 machines – still have online configurators that allow customers to see all of the pricing on components and to actually configure the machines they want to order, making tradeoffs for overall price and feature function and …
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Cloud Revenues Saved By The GenAI Boom

November 3, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Growth in spending by end users on the clouds was slowing and slowing even more as time went by as we expect in a mature and competitive market from the end of 2021 through the end of 2022. And based on the trends that were happening at that time, about this time growth would have probably slowed to maybe 2X to 3X of the growth in global gross domestic product, which is how you know (in my opinion) how a subset of the IT market is mature.

IT markets tend to always grow faster than GDP, unless something weird is …
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IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 27, Number 44

November 3, 2025 Doug Bidwell

Welcome to the IBM i PTF Guide, we start out this week with a security vulnerability. Specifically, we have Security Bulletin: IBM i is affected by a privilege escalation in IBM i SQL services [CVE-2025-36367], about which you can find out more at this link. IBM strongly recommends addressing the vulnerability now, with the following patches:
```
IBM i Release	5770-SS1	PTF Number(s)
7.6			        SJ07552
			        SJ07650
			        SJ07651
			        SJ07652	
7.5			        SJ07553
			        SJ07653
			        SJ07654
			        SJ07655	
7.4			        SJ07554
			        SJ07656
			        SJ07657
			        SJ07658	
7.3			        SJ07555
			        SJ07659
			        SJ07660
			        SJ07661	
7.2			        SJ07556
			        SJ07662
			        SJ07663
			        SJ07664 
```
And now, for downloads and drivers: Upcoming Migration of Secure File Transfer …
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