• Positive News From The Kyndryl Mainframe Modernization Report

  September 15, 2025 Alex Woodie

  After a week of bad news, here’s something good to start your week: The costs of mainframe modernization projects are dropping while the return on investment (ROI) is rising, in large part due to AI. That’s according to Kyndryl’s 2025 State of Mainframe Modernization Survey, which documented “a degree of agility” the company wasn’t expecting in the massive projects.

  As it has for the past two years, Kyndryl commissioned Coleman Parkes Research to conduct a global survey of about 500 senior leaders at mainframe-using enterprises. By mainframe, the former IBM consulting business refers to System Z systems, IBM i …

  Read more

• NAViGATE, inPower 2025 On Tap for September 2025

  September 15, 2025 Alex Woodie

  As the summer turns to fall, IBM i professionals will be turning out to a pair of events being hosted in the Midwest, including Infor’s imPower 2025 conference in Wisconsin, and COMMON’s NAViGATE conference taking place in Pennsylvania. Both shows are expected to draw hundreds of participants.

  NAViGATE 2025 takes place this week in Pittsburgh. COMMON is hosting about 110 sessions on IBM i topics across the three-day event, including sessions on application development, security, high availability, and administering the system.

  Tim Rowe, an IBM architect for application development, and Julia Yan, the lead developer of Navigator for i, will …

  Read more

• Guru: WCA4i And Granite – Because You’ve Got Bigger Things To Build

  September 15, 2025 Gregory Simmons

  They said AI would change everything. Then most of it turned into chatbot demos and marketing decks. But watsonX Code Assistant for i (WCA4i for short), backed by IBM’s own Granite large language model, is doing something IBM i developers might actually care about: Helping you understand, transform, and evolve legacy code without tossing decades of business logic into the fire.

  WCA4i isn’t trying to slap a web UI over your green screens or auto-generate JavaScript for the sake of buzzwords. It’s aimed at something deeper – leveraging an AI foundation model that’s actually trained on IBM i code and …

  Read more

• As I See It: Digital Coup

  September 15, 2025 Victor Rozek

  “If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.” Those dire words were spoken in the 17th century by Cardinal Richelieu, the perfect deadly blend of Church and State, who served as chief minister to King Louis XIII of France.

  To maintain power, Richelieu employed eerily familiar methods notably censorship, forbidding discussion of political matters in public places, suppressing dissent and, most important, data collection. Richelieu employed a vast network of spies who gathered information on dissenters and potential enemies. Those who were …

  Read more

• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 27, Number 37

  September 15, 2025 Doug Bidwell

  This week in IBM i Land, we have two security bulletins, and new System Planning Tool adding the Power11 machines, and a bunch of new microcode. Let’s start with the security vulnerabilities as we always do.

  First, we have Security Bulletin: IBM WebSphere Application Server and WebSphere Application Server Liberty are affected by a denial of service due to Apache Commons FileUpload (CVE-2025-48976). The affected products are:

  Affected Product(s)				Version(s)
  IBM WebSphere Application Server		9.0
  IBM WebSphere Application Server		8.5
  IBM WebSphere Application Server Liberty		17.0.0.3 - 25.0.0.8
  

  Second, we have Security Bulletin: IBM WebSphere Application Server Liberty could provide …

  Read more

• AI Is Coming for ERP. How Will IBM i Respond?

  September 8, 2025 Alex Woodie

  A wave of artificial intelligence is beginning to wash over the enterprise resource planning software market, changing the nature of how businesses process automation gets done. IBM i has been a solid platform for running ERP systems for decades. But how will the new generation of AI-enabled enterprise apps get to IBM i?

  When it comes to automating business processes, ERP packages have been the primary means for achieving it for the past four decades. The big monolithic apps from SAP, Oracle, Infor, and dozens of others have driven trillions of dollars in value by providing a …

  Read more

• The Power And Storage Price Wiggling Continues – Again

  September 8, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Here we go again . . . again. The people in charge of setting global prices for Power Systems and Storage products are rejiggering prices. In announcement letter AD25-1477, dated September 1 and effective on October 1, prices are changing in global markets due to changes in the foreign exchange rates between the United States and those countries.

  To be specific, the following countries are seeing the following price changes:

  • Japan, 3.5 percent
  • India, 2.1 percent
  • Philippines, 1.4 percent
  • Hong Kong, 1.2 percent
  • New Zealand, 0.6 percent

  The interesting bit is that back in early July, IBM had cut prices …

  Read more

• LaserVault Adds Multi-Path Support To ViTL

  September 8, 2025 Alex Woodie

  LaserVault is shipping a new release of its virtual tape library software that is likely to find a warm reception among customers who need different retention periods for their IBM i backups. By enabling ViTL 4.0 to support multiple storage paths to backend storage appliances, it’s allowing customers to reduce the amount of data they store and giving them an overall more efficient backup environment.

  ViTL is the name of LaserVault’s flagship virtual tape library (VLT) for IBM i, which the company (also known as known as Electronic Storage Corp) launched back in 2018. The product, which emulates …

  Read more

• As I See It: Spacing Out

  September 8, 2025 Victor Rozek

  Computer rooms have always been somewhat problematic to build and maintain: Raised floors, 24/7 air conditioning, a reliable power supply, and, for larger installations, a backup power source. These requirements were spendy but manageable at least until the rise of AI. To put it bluntly, AI is a resource hog, addicted to excess. Its drugs of choice are land and energy.

  The future of datacenters is unfolding in Abilene, Texas. There, Project Stargate is under construction, and the mega-scale OpenAI datacenter can hardly be called affordable. Its estimated cost is $500 billion. The facility includes a whopping eight million square …

  Read more

• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 27, Numbers 34, 35, And 36

  September 8, 2025 Doug Bidwell

  We are determined to get back in synch with the publication schedule of The Four Hundred and the IBM i PTF Guide, so this week you get three issues of the latter inside of one issue of the former, a necessity because PTFs never rest even if publications do take a breather every once in a while.

  In Number 34, this was the rundown of PTF Groups by IBM i release level we did on August 23:

  PTF Groups 7.6:

  • HIPERs – High Impact Pervasive
  • Group Security

  PTF Groups 7.5:

  • HIPERs (High Impact/Pervasive)
  • Group Security

  PTF Groups 7.4:

  • HIPERs

  … Read more

• The Power11 Transistor Count Discrepancies Explained – Sort Of

  August 25, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  One of the perplexing things about the Power11 announcement is that we know that the differences in the logic and cache designs of the Power10 and the Power11 server chips are not huge, and yet the transistor count jumped by almost a power of two from the Power10 to the Power11.

  This didn’t make sense to us, and we said as much during the Power11 launch back in early July. (Our observations about transistor count discrepancies were made after our initial story ran and once we got our hands on the drafts for Power11 Redbooks. In those Redbooks, …

  Read more

• Is Your IBM i HA/DR Actually Tested – Or Just Installed?

  August 25, 2025 Ash Giddings

  When it comes to high availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR) on IBM i, one question instantly separates the prepared from the at-risk: When was the last time you tested a full role swap?

  It’s surprising how often IT managers and system administrators mention that HA/DR measures are in place, yet then admit that their solutions haven’t been tested in months, sometimes even years. In some cases, the DR systems were implemented but never validated at all.

  According to Gartner, despite the mission-critical nature of disaster recovery, fewer than half of businesses have tested their DR plans within the past …

  Read more

• Big Blue Delivers IBM i Customer Requests In ACS Update

  August 25, 2025 Alex Woodie

  Christmas is still four months away, but that didn’t stop IBM from giving Access Client Solutions (ACS) customers the new features they requested. The deliveries were made in the mid-summer update, ACS version 1.1.9.9.

  ACS is the must-have tool that lives in every IBM i professional’s toolbox. It contains a slew of facilities for interacting with the system, including RSS, data transfer, IFS file viewing, spool file management, 5250 emulator, 5250 printer emulation, and a virtual console for LAN and HMC management.

  IBM updates ACS several times a year regardless of the Technology Refresh cycle, as is typical with several …

  Read more

• New DbToo SDK Hooks RPG And Db2 For i To External Services

  August 25, 2025 Alex Woodie

  A team of open source developers led by IBM’s Jesse Gorzinski have developed an experimental new software development kit (SDK) designed to integrate RPG applications and Db2 for i data with external services. The SDK, dubbed DbToo, initially targets watsonx, Ollama, OpenAI endpoints, Kafka, Slack, and Twilio, providing another option for integrating IBM i with popular AI models and messaging services.

  The mainstream IT world is currently evolving at a tremendous pace, largely driven by open source big data projects as well as large language models (LLMs) that promise to automate a range of functions currently performed by humans. The …

  Read more

• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 27, Number 33

  August 25, 2025 Doug Bidwell

  It might be a good and convenient thing that the WebSphere Application Server, the Web server embedded in the IBM i platform two and a half decades ago and making it part of the Internet, is based on the open source Apache Web server. But it sure does have a lot of patches. The good news is that because it is open source, it is patched regularly and problems do not fester in obscurity.

  In this week’s IBM i PTF Guide, there are a slew of security vulnerabilities related to WebSphere, as there sometimes is. Let’s walk through them all. …

  Read more

• Tool Aims To Streamline Git Integration For Old School IBM i Devs

  August 18, 2025 Alex Woodie

  There’s one school of thought that says IBM i developers should embrace the DevOps revolution and start using mainstream tools like Git and Jira for managing and deploying code. But there’s also a pool of old school programmers who are reluctant to give up their established ways and means. Richard Schoen hopes to bring these worlds together with an update to the iForGit tool from his company MobiGoGo’s that streamlines Git integration for old school IBM i devs who still use PDM and SEU.

  Schoen launched his iForGit tool about seven years ago to provide some degree of Git integration …

  Read more

• IBM To Add Full System Replication And FlashCopy To PowerHA

  August 18, 2025 Alex Woodie

  IBM will be adding a pair of new technologies to PowerHA SystemMirror in the near future, including Full System Replication (FSR) and Full System FlashCopy (FSFC). The technologies are currently offered through the PowerHA Tools group of products via IBM Expert Labs (formerly Lab Services), but will become part of the mainstream PowerHA offering soon.

  FSR and FSFC have been available for years via IBM Expert Labs toolkits, where they have provided IBM i shops with additional forms of data and application protection above and beyond what they get with BRMS and PowerHA, both of which are still required with …

  Read more

• Guru: Decoding Base64 ASCII

  August 18, 2025 Chris Ringer

  A co-worker of mine recently asked me how to decode a base64 ASCII string in RPG, received from an HTTP response. My response was “that’s easy”, simply use the relevant SQL function BASE64_DECODE. I promptly wrote some sample code and after some debugging I realized this function threw me a curveball.

  Let me demonstrate the issue and offer a simple solution.

  01 **Free
  02 ctl-opt DftActGrp(*No) Copyright('(C) Chris Ringer');
  
  03 dcl-s string_UTF8   varchar(1000) ccsid(*UTF8);
  04 dcl-s base64_UTF8   varchar(1350) ccsid(*UTF8);
  05 dcl-s decoded_UTF8  varchar(1000) ccsid(*UTF8);
  06 dcl-s decoded_Hex   varchar(1000) ccsid(*HEX);
  
  07 Exec SQL Set Option Commit=*NONE, Naming=*SYS;
  08 string_UTF8 = 

  … Read more

• The Price Tweaking Continues For Power Systems

  August 18, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  I have said it before and I will say it again: If you think you can keep track of IBM’s pricing for hardware, software, and services given all the ups and downs with pricing, you have a better encyclopedic mind and spreadsheet than we do.

  In recent weeks, Big Blue has been at it again with the red grease pencil, making changes in the Power Systems and Storage hardware product lines. Both of the price changes we report on today actually were announced in early July and took effect immediately. They were buried in our torrent of email and I …

  Read more

• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 27, Numbers 31 And 32

  August 18, 2025 Doug Bidwell

  We are finally getting back to the normal cadence for the IBM i PTF Guide by doubling up editions to get everything current. Our apologies for the asynchronous delays, which were caused by vacations that we actually took here at IT Jungle for once.

  Number 30 of the Guide was put together on August 2. There were two security vulnerabilities to cope with.

  First, we have Security Bulletin: IBM WebSphere Application Server is affected by arbitrary code execution (CVE-2025-36038), with more information at this link. Affected products include IBM WebSphere Application Server 8.5 and 9.0.

  Second, we have Security …

  Read more

Previous Articles