The IT Jungle

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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Big Blue Unveils Bob Premium Pack For IBM i

June 1, 2026 Alex Woodie

Early Bob users who were frustrated with the inability to work with source code residing on IBM i will be happy to hear that the functionality will soon be available in the Bob Premium Package, which IBM announced in May and will start shipping in June. The Premium Pack also includes some other new capabilities that will be useful for IBM i developers, including new modes, skills, and tools.

The first version of IBM’s Bob, the AI tool that help developers understand, document, and generate code in RPG and other IBM i languages, generally has been well-received by the IBM …
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Midrange Dynamics Sees Solid Git Adoption On IBM i

June 1, 2026 Alex Woodie

The arrival of AI tools to the IBM i community is helping to drive Git adoption, according to Michael Morgan, the chief executive officer of Midrange Dynamics, a provider of application management software for IBM i. But even without the AI push, the IBM i community is moving solidly toward modern development techniques and tools, Morgan said in an interview.

“We’re seeing the management expectations that shops use Git as the bigger driver for our customers versus AI,” Morgan told IT Jungle. “AI is a smaller driver of those wanting to get to Git. Even without AI, the movement …
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Guru: SQL Sequences In RPG Let Db2 Handle The Counting

June 1, 2026 Gregory Simmons

There is something deeply satisfying about letting the database do the counting for you. In a world where we have spent decades hand-rolling identifiers, guarding them with locks, and hoping no job collides with another, SQL sequences feel like discovering a patch of mushrooms that quietly regenerate overnight. You stop worrying about scarcity and start focusing on what matters.

In a procedure driven RPG system, this is exactly the kind of responsibility we want to isolate. Generating a new identifier is not business logic. It is not validation. It is not formatting. It is a single, well-defined action that deserves …
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From Green Screens To Smart Factories: Explaining DevOps To The Next Gen IBM i Developers

June 1, 2026 Gaurav Khanna

Over the past few years, many IBM i teams have encountered a surprising challenge when onboarding new developers. It isn’t platform complexity. It isn’t system performance. And it certainly isn’t reliability. The challenge is explaining how modern software development practices – things like CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, and centralized repositories – fit into traditional IBM i development workflows.

This gap often shows from both directions. For developers who grew up with Git and cloud-native tools, concepts like manual object promotion and library-based deployment can feel unfamiliar. At the same time, experienced IBM i professionals often hear terms like “shift-left testing” …
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IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 28, Numbers 18 And 19

June 1, 2026 Doug Bidwell

Welcome back to the IBM i PTF Guide! After traversing across the country to our new abode, we are ready to get back in the saddle and rustle up all of the patches and security vulnerabilities for you.

Let’s start, as we often do, with the security stuff. First, we have Security Bulletin: IBM WebSphere Application Server and WebSphere Application Server Liberty are affected by multiple vulnerabilities when using when using Web Server Plug-ins (CVE-2026-8633, CVE-2026-8620), which you can read about at this link. The affected products for this are Web Server Plug-ins for WebSphere Application Server and …
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Big Blue Is Still Talking About Future Power Processors, Which Is Good

May 18, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan

The details are really thin, as usual, but IBM is still talking about the advantages that the Power10 and Power11 processors have over other server-class CPUs in the market today, as Power chief architect Bill Starke did at the most recent POWERUp conference in New Orleans. And Starke always ends his presentations with a hint or two about what Power Next or Power Future – what we would call Power12 – might look like.

Many of the things that Starke talked about during his two presentations at POWERUp 2026 are things that we have been talking about with Starke for …
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Who To Consult With On Your Cloud Strategy, And Who To Manage It

May 18, 2026 Doug McMaster and John Klockenkemper

If you run IBM i, you already know what operational discipline looks like. Tightly governed security models. Decades of validated business logic embedded in RPG and DB2 for i. Systems of record that have been running continuously since before “the cloud” was anything more than a weather term. Your platform is not fragile – it is, in many ways, the most stable and secure thing in your data center.

But the world around IBM i has changed. As we discussed in our previous IT Jungle article, the latest IBM i Marketplace Survey data confirms what most shops already know: …
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Guru: DateTime Rules Of Thumb

May 18, 2026 Ted Holt

I am not a great programmer. I am a decent programmer who has found ways to stay out of trouble. I use many little rules of thumb to keep me and the people I serve from being unpleasantly surprised at inopportune moments. Today I share rules of thumb regarding datetime data that have served me in my work.

The first date field I used in an RPG program was a six-digit zoned-decimal value in MMDDYY format. This was part of a programming assignment for a class I was taking at the local vocational-technical center in days of yore. In my …
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i-Rays Performance Analyzer Now Ready for Prime Time, Omniology Says

May 18, 2026 Alex Woodie

Companies that want to address performance issues on their IBM i applications may want to check out the i-Rays software from Omnilogy. The product has matured considerably since it was introduced to the U.S. market last year, and it now has the backing of prominent IBM i performance expert Dawn May.

When we first wrote about i-Rays back in May 2025, the offering was brand new to the American market. Marek Walczak, the chief commercial officer for the Polish firm Omniology and the general manager of i-Rays, attended the COMMON POWERUp 2025 conference in Anaheim, California, to test the …
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CNX Adds AI To Valence Development Tool

May 18, 2026 Alex Woodie

CNX is adding a new AI assistant to Valence, its no-code development environment for IBM i. The AI will provide a range of enhancements to the Valence experience, from helping with modernizing existing greenscreen applications to providing the ability for executives to “chat” with their Db2 for i data.

Valence is a collection of tools for creating new Web and mobile applications that run on IBM i. The software features RPG procedures for integrating with existing IBM i logic, and generates JavaScript front-ends that are served by IBM i’s native HTTP Server (the one powered by Apache). Popular add-ons include …
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