2023: An IBM i Year in Review

December 13, 2023 Alex Woodie

With another year nearly in the books, it’s time to take a stroll through the IT Jungle archives and reconsider some of the 728 stories we published in 2023. Here’s a look back at the biggest IBM i news stories of 2023.

January

The top concern of IBM i professionals, according to Fortra’s annual IBM i Marketplace Study, was once again security, a position it has held for six straight years. The latest crop of IBM Champions unveiled in January featured about 90 members from the IBM i community, out of a total of 839 for the year. Is Julia coming to IBM i? That was the scuttlebutt back in January, but alas, support for the open source programming language didn’t materialize. The Loopback Hackathon held by Common Europe in the fall of 2022 was such a hit that COMMON North America organized its own event in January. ChatGPT’s popularity was just starting to grow last January, but it’s inevitable impact on the midrange was already being discussed.

February

IBM used Valentine’s Day to unveil a new subscription pricing plan for current releases of IBM i on Power9 and Power10 servers. The IBM i debugger was finally unhooked from Rational Developer for IBM i and made available to Code for IBM i, the uber-popular VSCode-based development environment created by Liam Allan. In a preview of IBM i security vulns to come, security researchers at Silent Signal demonstrated a successful real-world penetration test of a bank. Fortra scrambled to patch a zero-day in GoAnywhere MFT. While the Power10 upgrade cycle started to look up as Power Systems revenue increased, prognosticators prognosticated that overall IT spending was not going to be very robust in 2023.

March

We all knew that the IBM i installed base is old, but it turns out that it’s older than we thought, according to IBM i Marketplace Study data. IBM made some pricing tweaks, including raising the cost of memory. LANSA launched a business intelligence tool, a first for the vendor. And IBM touted a pair of IDC studies, including one showing that its support is among the best in the business, and another declaring that IBM i does, indeed, have a future, but only “if kept up to date.”

April

IBM launched Technology Refreshes for IBM i 7.4 and 7.5 on April 11, with enhancements to IBM i Navigator leading the way, along with new features for the database and application development, among others. A week later, COMMON held its annual POWERUp 2023 conference in Denver, Colorado. Meanwhile, strong storage sales helped IBM grow Power Systems revenues in the first quarter, but global IT spending continued to weaken.

May

PowerVM was hit with a critical security vulnerability, impacting Power Systems customers across IBM i, AIX, and Linux operating systems. Remain Software was the first IBM i ISV to incorporate ChatGPT to help with coding tasks. Fortra meanwhile issued its 20th consecutive State of IBM i Security report, which confirmed that security is still a pressing issue. IBM launched watsonx, its new line of data analytics and AI products at its annual Think conference, giving us the oft-heard but unfortunate marketing phrase “to watsonx your business.”

June

The big news this month was the much-anticipated 35^th anniversary of the AS/400’s launch back in June 1988, which IBM celebrated with a series of fun and informative online and in-person events. Following the release of IDC reports that cast IBM i in a positive light, IBM released more glowing reports, this time from Forrester’s consulting business. The first of a series of security flaws in IBM i was formally revealed by Silent Signal, this one in the Distributed Data Management (DDM) component of the operating system.

July

Silent Signal started the second half of the year disclosing more serious security flaws in IBM i, and promised more were on the way. IBM, which held server revenues steady in the second quarter, also announced a slew of Power features have been dropped. Big Blue also introduced standard shipping for IBM i systems, giving customers a break on the cost of shipping new servers. A new report from Gartner found that large companies planned to expand their IT staffs in 2023. Everybody loves to hate on SEU, so shouldn’t it be killed? That question elicited some interesting answers from the IBM i community. Meanwhile, Rocket Software studied what keeps IT leaders up at night (besides too much coffee).

August

IBM made some tweaks to its packaging of its PowerVM hypervisor, including getting rid of the base version, leaving only PowerVM Enterprise Edition. Banking software provider Jack Henry reiterated its support for IBM i “for the foreseeable future.” Concerns with the Work Problem (WRKPRB) command in IBM i cropped up, according to IBM business partners. New Fresche CEO Joe Zarrehparvar sat down with TPM for a Q&A. Briteskies salesman Josh Bander executed his simple but effective plan to boost IBM i visibility. Meanwhile, new reports indicated IT spending was actually increasing, thanks to inflation.

September

IBM shifted to an all-subscription pricing scheme for low-end P05 and P10 tiers. The world’s biggest tape drive, a 150 TB monster, was unveiled by IBM and Fujitsu. Hundreds of IBM i customers have adopted Merlin, the Web-based modernization tool, according to IBM and its partner ARCAD. The IBM i vendor also confirmed that its deal to supply components to Merlin is exclusive. Meanwhile, MGM Resorts fell victim to a “vishing” and ransomware hack that took down systems at several of its casinos and ultimately cost it more than $100 million.

October

The fall Technology Refresh was unveiled by IBM on October 10, giving customers a little bit of everything but nothing too earth-shattering. The bigger news that day may have been the sudden death of Db2 Web Query, the analytics tool that IBM OEM’ed from Information Builders, now owned by TIBCO. The unexpected end of Db2 Web Query, which has still not been fully explained, left many customers in the lurch. The latest All400s community survey was released, providing a different take on the IBM i community’s makeup.

November

Tom McPherson, the new general manager of IBM’s Power division, sat down with TPM for a Q&A. The search for alternatives to Db2 Web Query picked up this month as customers wondered what to do. Power Systems sales continued to do pretty good in the third quarter, according to TPM’s unwinding of IBM’s untransparent financial figures. IBM released some small tweaks to various software offerings, including PowerVM, PowerVC, and others. Meanwhile, momentum created by ChatGPT and GenAI helped convince IDC to boost its spending forecast for 2023 and beyond.

December

Alison Butterill, the longtime IBM i product manager, announced her retirement from IBM after a 29-year career with Big Blue; her replacement is Douglas Gibbs, who previously managed I/O products for IBM. Fresche followed in the footsteps of IBM by announcing that it will move away from traditional licensing in favor of software subscriptions. The year of serious security vulnerabilities continued with revelations of more problems in core IBM i products, including ACS and Merlin. Meanwhile, the SEC announced it would require companies to reveal material cybersecurity events within four days of the event.

That’s it for this year. Have a safe and fun holiday season, and we’ll see you back here in 2024.