• Power Systems Has A Great Quarter; System Z, Not So Much

  July 27, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We have been waiting for a long time for Big Blue’s Power Systems business to get a big bump, and it looks like it has finally happened. And a handful of Fortune 100-level companies deferred their System z17 mainframe purchases as they allocated budget to buying servers for AI and generic – generally X86 machines, and certainly not from IBM – as CPU, GPU, DRAM memory, and flash storage prices are all skyrocketing. And last week, when IBM warned about this push out of System z sales, Wall Street predictably freaked all the way out, sending IBM’s stock down 25 …

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• Does AI Mark The End Of The ERP Era?

  July 27, 2026 Alex Woodie

  For decades, enterprise resource planning (ERP) software has been the backbone of corporate computing. Whether running on-prem or in the cloud, millions of businesses have relied on ERP components to automate their business processes and provide a competitive advantage. But the emergence of generative and agentic AI threatens to upend our relationship with ERP software. Where will ERP end up?

  There is no doubt that AI is improving in capabilities and reliability, often by the week. The top frontier models from companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, and DeepSeek feature reasoning capabilities that few people could have plausibly predicted would …

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• Guru: Deterministic Application Development With AI

  July 27, 2026 Dan Darnell and Eric Whitcomb

  Perhaps the key feature of AI is the way answers are obtained by virtue of a conversation with the AI. Contrast this with using a search engine where each “ask” is an independent request with a response.

  An AI conversation has context while search engine interactions do not. More and more, we use AI to create applications through the contextual, iterative, conversational process. As we have ideas we add these to the conversation and our application changes accordingly. Our customers are getting in on the action too. They are providing us with AI generated prototypes for new software or new …

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• What IBM’s Got Cooking In Db2 For i In The Summer TRs

  July 27, 2026 Alex Woodie

  Last week, IBM announced PTFs containing a slew of new Db2 for i features and enhancements as part of the Technology Refresh for IBM i 7.6 and 7.5. While the database is just a part of the story for IBM i 7.6 TR2 and 7.5 TR8, it’s a critical piece of the puzzle. Here’s a preview of the new stuff that you can now play with.

  As part of the summer TRs that we covered last week, IBM delivered five functional enhancements to Db2 for i as part of the Summer TR, shipped one security enhancement, one enhancement for …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 28, Number 25

  July 27, 2026 Doug Bidwell

  Brace yourself, there is a lot of IBM i Technology Refreshes, patches, security vulnerabilities, and other stuff you need to deal with this week.

  Let’s start by pointing you to the Technology Refreshes. You can get more detailed information on the IBM i 7.6 Technology Refresh 2 enhancements at https://www.ibm.com/support/pages/ibm-i-76-tr2-enhancements and on the IBM i 7.5 Technology Refresh 8 enhancements at https://www.ibm.com/support/pages/ibm-i-75-tr8-enhancements.

  There are also cumulative packages for the currently supported IBM i releases, as follows:

  • The latest cumulative package for 7.6 is C6190760
  • The latest cumulative package for 7.5 is C6197750
  • The latest cumulative package for 7.4 is

  … Read more

• The Power11 IBM i P05 Entry Machine Finally Arrives

  July 20, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The new entry “Bonnell+” Power S1112 server, based on the Power11 processor that IBM introduced a year ago in all of the other Power Systems machines, was revealed last week and will be shipping almost everywhere in the world starting on July 24. The exceptions are that the Power S1112 will ship in Taiwan on September 14 and will ship in China and India starting December 11.

  The other members of the Power11 server family were announced on July 8 last year, and the Power11 lineup has been without a machine that is in the lowest P05 software tier …

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• Big Blue Finally Unveils First IBM i Tech Refreshes Of 2026

  July 20, 2026 Alex Woodie

  Well, that took a little longer than usual. Last week, IBM finally made its first IBM i Technology Refresh announcements of 2026, formally unveiling the group of updates that collectively will make up IBM i 7.6 TR2 and 7.5 TR8. With the fall TR ostensibly just three months away, the good news with the two new TRs is that the general availability date is this Friday.

  Since IBM moved to the TR cycle back in 2010, it has traditionally given the IBM i community two big updates per year, one in the spring (normally April) and one in the …

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• Guru: Analyzing User Session Statistics, Part 1

  July 20, 2026 Mike Larsen

  I wanted to report on user activity on our IBM i. Knowing that there is a wealth of SQL table functions available to me, I knew it wouldn’t be hard to find something that would help me. For this report, I wanted to see how many times a user logged into the system during a certain timeframe.

  The table function I used is QSYS2.HISTORY_LOG_INFO. I’ll show the code I built, followed by a breakdown of what is does.

  Here is the SQL statement to determine the number of times a user signed in:

  SELECT COUNT(DISTINCT DATE(MESSAGE_TIMESTAMP)) AS DAYS_LOGGED_IN
  FROM 

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• Relion Solutions Launches With A Focus On Customer Service

  July 20, 2026 Alex Woodie

  Customer service sure isn’t what it used to be. Instead of helpful customer service representatives who pick up the phone before the second ring, you have overgrown phone trees, unhelpful AI agents, and ticketing systems that seem designed to shield customers from companies and companies from customers. You won’t find any of this at Relion Solutions, a new IBM midrange business partner that launched earlier this month with a desire to focus relentlessly on serving the needs of its IBM i customers.

  Relion Solutions was co-founded by Heather Dinho and Richie Palma, two IBM i veterans with years of experience …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 28, Numbers 23 And 24

  July 20, 2026 Doug Bidwell

  It is Ketchup Week here at the IBM i PTF Guide once again, and Big Blue made it a little more interesting by announcing the Technology Refreshes for IBM i 7.6 and IBM i 7.5 last week.

  Let’s dive in, starting with Volume 28, Number 23, dated July 11 and beginning with two bugs and two security vulnerabilities you need to be aware of.

  First, we have Security Bulletin: Multiple vulnerabilities in IBM Rational Developer for i, which you can find out more about here. IBM strongly recommends addressing the vulnerability now by upgrading. This upgrade fixes 15+ CVE …

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• 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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