• The Top Ten IBM i Requests From The IBM Ideas Portal

  April 2, 2025 Alex Woodie

  Big Blue is gearing up for a major new release of the IBM i operating system. We don’t know yet what will be in the release, but we can forge some guesses by checking out what new features the IBM i community is requesting through the IBM Ideas portal, and how IBM reacts to them.

  IBM prides itself on being a customer-focused organization, and so it looks to the IBM i community for direction on what sort of features, capabilities, and fixes the IBM i community currently is looking for. That community outreach takes various forms, including the COMMON Americas …

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• What’s New With IBM PowerVS In 2025?

  April 2, 2025 Alex Woodie

  It has been six years since IBM launched IBM Power Virtual Server, its public cloud offering for IBM i workloads. Adoption started slowly but has picked up in recent years as IBM fleshed out the offering and expanded it to more datacenters. As we enter the second quarter, IBM is banking on several new features to help it attract more IBM i customers to PowerVS.

  Last October, IBM offered PowerVS in 21 IBM Cloud datacenters around the world, including 650 Power Systems customers. Doris Conti, the vice president of Power Systems product management, told The Four Hundred that IBM had …

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• Maybe It Was April Fools In Some Cases: Price Cuts For Selected Power Systems

  April 2, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  What goes up sometimes comes back down again. We have been chronicling the successive price increases that IBM has been levying on Power Systems, storage, and various software and services products throughput 2024 and into early 2025 to help you keep track of it all. And now, we have an actual price decrease in selected areas.

  Don’t get too excited. It probably does not apply to you, and the four cumulative and multiplicative broad price increases we have seen in the past year almost certainly still do.

  To recap: IBM raised prices in April 2024, then in September 2024 …

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• Picking Apart An Ebullient GenAI Spending Forecast

  April 2, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In one of the big ironies of our time, companies are embedding AI acceleration functions into PCs that most consumers do not actively want while at the same time datacenter operators (be they captive or independent) are actively trying to get AI compute engines (mostly Nvidia and sometimes AMD GPUs) so they can train their GenAI and other machine learning models – and they can’t get enough of these accelerated servers.

  Because a lot of PCs are already enhanced with AI functions, more and more PCs are falling under the label of an “AI PC,” and therefore the market for …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 27, Number 13

  April 2, 2025 Doug Bidwell

  Good day, good people of IBM i Land. This week we start out with two security vulnerabilities and a known issue to beware of the BLOB!

  Let’s start with the security vulnerabilities.

  First we have Security Bulletin: IBM WebSphere Application Server Liberty is vulnerable to a denial of service due to Netty (CVE-2025-25193), which you can find out more about at this link. IBM WebSphere Application Server Liberty versions 21.0.0.2 through 25.0.0.3 are affected.

  Second, we have Security Bulletin: IBM WebSphere Application Server Liberty is vulnerable to a denial of service due to Apache CXF (CVE-2025-23184), and here is …

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• Is IBM i Ready for the Agentic AI Revolution?

  March 24, 2025 Alex Woodie

  The AI world moves fast. Just when you get your head around large language models (LLMs) and the chatbots and coding co-pilots they enable, the AI world has moved onto something new. In 2025, that something new is the reasoning model, which is enabling autonomous AI agents and the world of agentic AI.

  Is IBM i ready for the revolution that’s about to unfold?

  By now you have undoubtedly read about LLMs such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, and Meta’s Llama. These LLMs are popular ways to power text-based generative AI applications, such as chatbots, coding co-pilots, and question-and-answer …

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• More Not April Fools: Even More Price Hikes For Power Systems

  March 24, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  OK, this is getting crazy. On March 3, IBM announced price increases for various parts of the Power Systems stack and related hardware and software technologies often used with the platform. IBM also announced additional price increases to rebalance its pricing with respect to the US dollar for eighteen foreign currencies around the world in the same announcement. These price increases will take effect on April 1.

  These price increases from March 3 were in addition to ones that it made in April 2024, then in September 2024, and then again in December 2024 for parts of the …

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• Fresche Makes Moves In The Cloud

  March 24, 2025 Alex Woodie

  Fresche Solutions is well known for IBM i application modernization, a line of business in which it has been successful for many decades. Thanks to its acquisition of OmniData Insights and a new partnership with IBM, the company is launching new ventures in the cloud.

  In early March, Fresche Solutions announced a partnership with IBM that will see Fresche managing IBM Power Virtual Server (PowerVS) customers. PowerVS is IBM’s cloud offering, and gives customers the capability to run IBM i, AIX, or Linux operating systems either in IBM datacenters or its partners’ datacenters. The deal with IBM means that Fresche …

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• As I See It: From Disk, To Cloud, To Coal Mine

  March 24, 2025 Victor Rozek

  Back in the 1970s, my first IT job was working swing shift in computer operations. In those days disk packs were removable, and my primary task after running nightly reports was doing backups – copying the day’s updates and transactions from the live pack to the backup pack.

  Nightly backups were an article of faith. They were akin to unquestioned IT doctrine. The smooth functioning of companies depended on them because they mitigated the consequences of hardware failures. Head crashes were rare but not uncommon. And when they occurred, they made a grim screeching sound that signaled data being scraped …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 27, Number 12

  March 24, 2025 Doug Bidwell

  In this week’s IBM i PTF Guide, we contemplate the SF99741 patch and the following note from IBM:

  Recent change to contents – IBM Db2 Mirror for i (SF99668 Group PTF) has been removed from the order.

  Description:  This PTF group includes all PTF groups for the current IBM i release except the Cumulative PTF Package PTF group and WebSphere MQ PTF group. The PTF groups are included by listing them as related PTF groups. Use option 9 (Display related PTF groups) on the Work with PTF Groups (WRKPTFGRP) command to display the included PTF groups. Each time you order …

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• Government Mainframes Versus DOGE: Showdown At The COBOL Corral

  March 17, 2025 Alex Woodie

  Elon Musk is a force of nature, slashing the federal payroll through the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). But the government’s IBM mainframes are immovable objects in their own rights, lasting the test of time. If Musk and DOGE are serious about reforming how the government does business, the government’s legacy systems will pose a serious challenge.

  As the head of DOGE, Musk has ruffled plenty of feathers with his comments and his actions, including firing federal employees en masse and wielding a large “chainsaw for bureaucracy” given to him by Argentine President Javier Milei, an ally of President Donald …

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• RISE For SAP Could Be A Boon For IBM’s PowerVS Cloud

  March 17, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  German application giant System Analyse Programmentwicklung, better known as SAP, has spent more than five decades to deliver five major versions of application software to help companies run themselves. They are R/1 in 1977, R/2 in 1981, R/3 in 1992, mySAP.com (which became Business Suite) in 1999, SAP HANA in 2011 with its S/4HANA application suite in 2015. And today, the company has over 400,000 customers.

  As is well known, SAP wants to create an application system, which is a phrase that resonates with the OS/400 and IBM i faithful. SAP was founded by five ex-IBMers from Germany and started …

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• Guru: Creating An RPG Stored Procedure That Returns A Result Set

  March 17, 2025 Mike Larsen

  In the previous article, I showed how to create an RPG stored procedure that uses parameters. In this article, I’m going to show how to create an RPG stored procedure that returns a result set, as we would likely encounter this scenario more frequently. The data used in this example comes from the Department table from IBM’s Sample database.

  I created an RPG program (Figure 1) that selects all rows from the Departments table. I didn’t add any selection criteria as I know there aren’t many rows in the table, but you may want to limit the number of rows …

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• Shield Adds Task Automation To Message Monitoring Tool

  March 17, 2025 Alex Woodie

  Automating the monitoring of IBM i messages was just the start for Shield Advanced Solutions and its AAG offering. This month, the company announced that the Nagios-based tool has been bolstered with support for Ansible, which gives it the capability to automatically respond and take actions based on certain IBM i messages.

  Shield Advanced Solutions launched AAG, which stands for At-A-Glance, back in 2023 as a way to help its customers monitor high availably setups. Shield President Chris Hird was aghast that some IBM i shops were leaving mirrored pairs under monitored, which reduced the odds the systems would be …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 27, Number 11

  March 17, 2025 Doug Bidwell

  Last week was a busy week for PTF patches, but not for security vulnerabilities. And this week is even quieter, but there are new defective PTF reports this week that you need to keep an eye on, as is usually the case in most weeks.

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

  PTF Groups 7.5:

  • None

  PTF Groups 7.4:

  • MQ for IBM i – v9.0.0/v9.1.0/v9.2.0/v9.3.0

  PTF Groups 7.3:

  • None

  Tip O’ The Week: We are thinking.

  New (or Updated) links added to the ‘Links’ tab in The Guide this week:

  • None

  … Read more

• Not April Fools: More Price Increases For Power Systems Coming

  March 10, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  IBM is at it again, raising prices for parts of the Power Systems stack and related hardware and software technologies often used with the platform.

  In announcement letter AD25-0860, which came out on March 3, Big Blue raised prices on various Power Systems and storage products and across various geographic regions.

  Another part of the price change was to rebalance against the U.S. dollar foreign exchange rate. IBM did a similar price harmonization across geographies in November 2011, and then did it again on September 3. In the latest announcement, eighteen different currencies in the Asia/Pacific and EMEA regions …

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• What The Marketplace Study Says About IBM i Migrations And Outlook

  March 10, 2025 Alex Woodie

  One of the values that Fortra’s annual IBM i Marketplace Survey brings to the table is to function as a forward-looking indicator. If something is stirring in the IBM i installed base – say, that a large chunk is looking to mosey off the platform – then it likely will appear in the data. So when we analyze the data from the 2025 report, that’s something worth looking for.

  The good news from the 2025 IBM i Marketplace Survey results is that there’s nothing to indicate any mass migrations are under way. Companies will always come and go on IBM …

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• Guru: AI Pair Programming In RPG With Continue

  March 10, 2025 Gregory Simmons

  In my last article, I shared a brief introduction to the GitHub Copilot extensions. These extensions provide an easy way to get up and running with an AI coding assistant to aid you in your RPG development. Being cloud based, it’s lightweight in terms of system resources, but it does cost a little money per month, per user.

  For this article, I would like to share with you what I have learned about a newer extension for VS Code named Continue. Continue runs locally on your PC, is 100 percent free, and as of this writing, is the leading …

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• Rocket CDC Tool Pushes Data Out Of IBM i

  March 10, 2025 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops that need a change data capture (CDC) tool to push Db2 data off the box onto a target system, such as an Apache Kafka stream, may want to check out the new DataEdge product that Rocket Software recently announced.

  In late January, Rocket Software unveiled DataEdge, a new suite that provides a spectrum of data integration, data discovery, and data virtualization capabilities under the specific product names Rocket Data Replicate & Sync, Rocket Data Intelligence, and Rocket Data Virtualization. Some of the components in DataEdge are preexisting, while others – such as the outbound IBM i CDC …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 27, Number 10

  March 10, 2025 Doug Bidwell

  There are new PTF group updates for the current releases of IBM i – that would be 7.3, 7.4, and 7.5 – but not much in the way of the occasional weirdness we see in the software stack or the never-ending stream of security vulnerabilities. Take it while you can get it. . . .

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

  PTF Groups 7.5:

  • HIPERs (High Impact/Pervasive)
  • Security
  • IBM MQ for IBM i – v9.2.0/v9.3.0
  • PowerHA Tools for IBM i – Full System FlashCopy (FSFC)
  • PowerHA Tools for IBM i

  … Read more

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