• Big Blue Ships Bob 2.0 And Premium Package For IBM i

  July 13, 2026 Alex Woodie

  IBM’s push into the world of agentic coding continues, as Big Blue officially started selling and supporting major updates to its Bob agentic AI software. There are two separate but related pieces of news to cover, including the release of IBM Bob Premium Package for i and the release of Bob 2.0.

  As it is wont to do, IBM generated some confusion with its Bob launches, as both Bob 2.0 and the Bob premium packages became available on the same day, June 24. However, Bob 2.0 and the Bob premium packages are not the same thing, and their announcements were …

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• Your IBM i Jobs Don’t Live On An Island Anymore

  July 13, 2026 Rob Newman

  When I am on a call with a prospective customer, one of the first questions I ask is: Are you looking to schedule and automate IBM i jobs specifically, or do you need to incorporate all of your cross-platform dependencies? That question tends to land with a thud. Not because people don’t understand it, but because often they have never really thought about it that way.

  They have been running their IBM i jobs the way they always have, and somewhere else in the building, someone else is running Windows jobs a different way, and maybe a Linux process a …

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• FalconStor Creates Cloud Clean Room To Prove Backup Recoveries Work

  July 13, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It is a bit sad to say this, but a lot of IBM i shops are still relying on tapes to backup their system software as well as their application software and the databases that drive them. There is nothing wrong with tape, and it makes sense to do offsite backups to tape and park them in Iron Mountain or some other facility. But the problem is that recovering from tape is a nightmare and no one knows if the recovery is going to work until the bad day when something goes wrong – through human error or hacking or …

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• Talking Git On IBM i With A Bunch Of IBM i Gits

  July 13, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If there is someone on planet Earth who is most definitely not a git, it is Linux operating system kernel and Git version control system creator Linus Torvalds. The term git was absolutely meant to be pejorative, but it has softened over the years in part because Torvalds chose the name for his version control system precisely to mock himself. The meaning of git is shifting from incompetent senile fool toward curmudgeon and is heading toward old fart.

  Torvalds manages one of the largest software projects in the world, and in the early 2000s chose BitKeeper, a proprietary source …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 28, Number 22

  July 13, 2026 Doug Bidwell

  We have been catching up and are almost caught up after the big move to Pennsylvania. This week, we have a slew of software vulnerabilities to tell you about, and also a bunch of HIPER fixes for NVM-Express flash drives on Power Systems running IBM i. Let’s start with the flash issue, since this is the one that is going to affect a lot of people.

  IBM says that during unit testing an issue was found “where a NAND management that could result in command timeouts as well as several power cycling related hangs.” This issue affects the following devices: …

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• More Power Systems Price Hikes, This Time They Are “Directional”

  June 22, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As you well know by now, prices for CPUs, GPUs, main memory, and flash storage have gone completely bonkers thanks to the GenAI system buildout, with systems specially designated for AI workloads now comprising 70.2 percent of the $122.6 billion in system revenues during the first quarter. AI sales would be even larger, and so would sales of traditional systems, had it not been for component shortages that have been consequently driving prices higher. But if there was no shortages to begin with, maybe revenues would also not be so crazy, too, and shipments would be maybe 30 percent to …

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• AI Is Not Just For Developers, It Is For Everyone At Your Company

  June 22, 2026 Alan Ashley

  I’m not a developer. Let me say that upfront, because it matters when I say the things I’m about to say. I’ve always had ideas that I could put forth to somebody who can code. But now, because of AI, I can ask it to do things that I can verbally explain, and it can create what I am asking for. That’s one of the reasons I’m so excited about GenAI.

  Before the GenAI boom started a few years ago, at ARCAD we had already gone down this road with a product called Discover. We had already tied chat into …

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• Guru: Finding Data In The Forest – Exploring Three-Part Naming In SQL

  June 22, 2026 Gregory Simmons

  Anyone who has spent time foraging for mushrooms knows that location matters. A chanterelle found in the Pacific Northwest is not the same as one discovered in the hardwood forests of the Midwest. Experienced foragers do not simply note what they found. They record exactly where they found it: the region, the forest, and the specific location. Context matters.

  The same is true in SQL. Most IBM i developers are comfortable with two-part naming. A reference like MUSHLIB.FORAGE_LOG identifies both the schema and the object. It tells SQL where to look within a single system, much like noting the forest …

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• Former IBMer’s New Book Puts The Midrange In The Spotlight

  June 22, 2026 Alex Woodie

  Over the years, there have been an untold number of books written about IBM and its computing legacy. (Our founding editor, TPM, has most of them in his library.) But very few, if any, of them focus much time on the line of midrange servers that came out of Rochester, Minnesota, including the AS/400, which turned 38 years young yesterday. That void is what drove former IBMer Bill Shaffer, who spent his entire career in the midrange, to write the book IBM & Computing.

  Shaffer spent 40 years at IBM, beginning as a programmer working out of the Miami, …

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• Have You Tried To Buy A Server Lately?

  June 22, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If you are trying to get new servers for you company, you better brace yourself for some very serious sticker shock. It’s crazy town out there. The GenAI boom has gone from chemical explosions to nuclear ones, and the hyperscalers, cloud builders, and now the AI model builders are ponying up huge sums for AI systems, driving the total market to an expected $330 billion this year. And all that AI server buying puts these tech titans at the front of the line for DRAM main memory, flash storage, CPUs, and GPUs.

  The radical price increases for these components is …

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• GenAI Is The Death Of Deterministic Project Budgeting

  June 15, 2026 Dan Darnell and Eric Whitcomb

  Like many of you in the IBM i community, we have been treading the AI waters for a couple of years now, starting with small proof-of-concept applications such as chatbots but progressing to far more advanced and complex code-to-AI interfaces.

  One such project leveraged AI for recurring Jaccard similarity index processing over large sets of business data. The small projects fool a person into thinking that the large projects are just more of the same but, in reality, large projects take you into the world of proprietary AI APIs and can be complex engineering efforts.

  We mostly use ChatGPT because …

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• PTC Adds Support For VS Code With Implementer 12.7

  June 15, 2026 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops that rely on PTC’s Implementer software to manage their RPG development will soon be able to use the tool within the VS Code development environment. The upcoming release of Implementer 12.7 will introduce several other important features as PTC begins the process of modernizing the tool.

  Implementer is a well-established change management system targeting the IBM i environment. The software traces its roots to 1987, when four Pansophic (creators of the PRMS ERP system now owned by Infor) employees founded Silvon Software in Chicago. One of their first products was a tool to manage source code …

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• Guru: Single Threading A Program Execution

  June 15, 2026 Chris Ringer

  A paceline in cycling is a formation where all the cyclists ride in a single file line and the lead bike is pulling the group along as everyone else is drafting behind. Eventually the lead bike will drift to the side and to the back of the line, and the next bike will take the lead for the group.

  If a spirited cyclist leaves the paceline and goes alone, all the aerodynamic benefits of drafting are lost.

  

  Likewise, at my organization, we have a CL job that is submitted hourly throughout the day every day. Normally the submitted job completes …

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• As I See It: Push Back

  June 15, 2026 Victor Rozek

  According to police reports, it happened between 3:30 and 4:00 in the morning. On April 10 of this year, a 20-year-old Houston resident, Daniel Moreno-Gama, made his way to San Francisco’s plush Russian Hill neighborhood, where he located the home of OpenAI chief executive officer Sam Altman. While the Altman family slept, he lit a Molotov cocktail and threw it at the gate in Altman’s driveway setting it ablaze.

  Then he made his way to OpenAI’s San Francisco headquarters, where he allegedly struck the glass doors with a chair and threatened to “burn it down and kill anyone inside”.

  His …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 28, Number 21

  June 15, 2026 Doug Bidwell

  The flow of security vulnerabilities and PTF patches has been kind of spotty for the past several weeks. Which is good, because we were in transit across the United States. We have successfully relocated from California to Pennsylvania, and are settling in. We are almost unpacked, and my Network Operations Center, or NOC, is coming together. Thanks for your patience!

  Here is the rundown of PTF Groups by IBM i release level since we last published:

  PTF Groups 7.6:

  • HIPERs (High Impact/Pervasive)
  • Security
  • WebSphere Application Server V8.5
  • QMGTOOLS
  • Visual Studio Code for IBM i

  PTF Groups 7.5:

  • HIPERs (High Impact/Pervasive)

  … Read more

• Progress And Frustration With IBM i Security, Fortra Finds

  June 8, 2026 Alex Woodie

  Thanks to tougher default configurations by IBM and general awareness, the state of IBM i security has improved somewhat, Fortra says in the 2026 installment of the State of IBM i Security report. But other aspects of security show little to no improvement, leading to frustration among the company’s IBM i security experts.

  For its 23rd annual State of IBM i Security report, Fortra analyzed the security configurations of 163 IBM i server partitions. The anonymous real world data came from Fortra customers and prospects who either agreed to allow the company perform a security scan on their IBM i …

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• In The Trenches With: JAMS Software

  June 8, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In a world where applications and workflows are spread across multiple on premises systems and across the clouds, keeping track of how those applications and workflows are performing, fixing them when they stall or fail, and making sure everything is monitored and governing properly is a big job. And probably one that you don’t want to take on with so many other things going on.

  JAMS Software, which has been selling workload scheduling software for more than four decades, wants to help. JAMS was spun out of systems software conglomerate Forta a year ago last week, and has a …

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• Guru: Where’s The Table?

  June 8, 2026 Ted Holt

  It began with an irritation. I considered it a simple request. “Which file did my SQL query read?” I was using the Run SQL Scripts tool to modify an SQL query with unqualified table names. And yet I knew of no ready way to determine the schema (library) name of any of the files. How was I to know which tables I had just queried?

  Let me back up a bit. My SQL client of choice is the Run SQL Scripts tool, which is part of IBM’s Access Client Solutions (ACS). It is not unusual for me to copy and …

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• Lightedge To Start Selling IBM PowerVS to IBM i Customers

  June 8, 2026 Alex Woodie

  Lightedge, one of the largest private cloud providers serving the IBM i market, recently announced that it is going to begin offering IBM’s public cloud service, Power Virtual Server, to its customer base. The move comes amid solid growth in PowerVS and tough competition in the private cloud business.

  Lightedge (formerly LightEdge Solutions) started out in 1996 as an Internet service provider selling networking solutions from its headquarters in Des Moines, Iowa. As Lightedge chief revenue officer Sean Stenger explained to IT Jungle in a 2023 interview, the company slowly started adding additional services served out of co-location facilities …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 28, Number 20

  June 8, 2026 Doug Bidwell

  Welcome to this week, where we are getting closer and closer to both the beginning of summer and the AS/400’s 38^th birthday. There are a bunch of changes that Big Blue is making to various technical support services that customers and partners need to be aware of. And a bug in Java you need to contemplate.

  First, let’s start with the Java bug, which is Java 21 (64-bit) Applications Fail After Updating IBM i 7.5 Java Group PTF SF99955 to Levels 19 or 20, which you can read about here. The affected IBM i Java Group PTF Levels …

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