Timothy Prickett Morgan
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Big Blue Converges IBM i RPG And System Z COBOL Code Assistants Into “Project Bob”
October 13, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan
We have been anticipating the rollout of the Watsonx Code Assistant for RPG on the IBM i platform ever since IBM previewed a code assistant for the System z mainframe platform in August 2023 to help COBOL shops port their applications to Java on the mainframe. And lo and behold, the Rochester team followed suit, but with a slightly different approach, creating a Watsonx Code Assistant for RPG, which was also created using IBM’s homegrown “Granite” large language models.
Well, apparently, forget all of that. At the TechExchange 2025 developer conference last week, IBM was showing off a new, unified …
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Stacking Up Power11 Entry Server Performance To Older Iron
October 6, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Here we are heading into the fall and if you have budget set aside for a new system or an upgrade, now is the time to start thinking about spending it. For customers buying mainstream P10-class and P20-class systems, the Power11 machines that have been out for a few months now and are the machines you will need to consider. And if you have older Power8 or Power9 iron, you might even be considering an upgrade to a Power10.
With all of this in mind, we have put together the mother of all performance tables to compare the current and …
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It Is Time To Tell Us What You Are Thinking And Doing
October 6, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan
It is the beginning of fall, or autumn if you are in Europe, and you know what that means. No, it is not the deciduous woods turning to the colors of fire. Not it is not football (or soccer for that matter), or harvest time. But it is the time when Fortra opens up its annual IBM i Marketplace Survey, which has been running for more than a decade now.
The annual survey, which is in its 13th year, opened on September 15. You can give back to the IBM i community and help nudge IBM and ISVs in …
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The GenAI Boom Is Only Slightly Louder Than The Dot Com Boom
September 29, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan
In most markets, revenues and hopefully profits go from exponential growth to log growth to linear growth in the fullness of time. We are living in the exponential phase of AI, and for GenAI in particular, where the x in y=ax is a pretty big number and the resulting revenue growth looks like the proverbial hockey stick.
The numbers can be a bit surreal, as they seemed back in the Dot Com boom, where we turned on mainstream stores into warehouses with delivery services. With AI, we are turning the digital data of our lives into data warehouses and …
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Talking Training And Skills With System i Developer
September 29, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Between 2007 and 2021, the partners in System i Developer – Susan Gantner, Jon Paris, and Paul Tuohy – hosted two RPG & Db2 Summit events per year to help OS/400 and IBM i shops create better databases and the applications that ride atop them. The coronavirus pandemic put the kibosh on these in-person events and were, frankly, a lot of work for the partners to bring together and represented a huge financial risk as all in person events always do. (I know this from personal experience over at my other job at The Next Platform.)
But after Tuohy …
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And Then There Were Two: Big Blue Withdraws IBM i 7.4
September 22, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan
UPDATED: If you have a compelling reason to stay on IBM i 7.4 and need a license to it for a machine, or if IBM i 7.4 is the last release you can get your applications to without a major change in that code, then you have better shake a leg. Because IBM i 7.4 is only going to be sold for a few more months.
In announcement letter AD25-0894, which was dated September 16, Big Blue said that it would stop selling the IBM i 7.4 operating system on April 30, 2026. A bunch of other related system …
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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 …
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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, …
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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 …
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Price Cut On Power S1012 Mini Since Power S1112 Ain’t Coming Until 2026
August 11, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan
We told you a few weeks ago that Big Blue was not planning on putting a kicker to the Power S1012 entry server, what we call a “mini” machine due to its diminutive physical size and capacity, based on a Power11 chip into the field until sometime in early 2026. That leaves customers looking for a machine with a one or two cores and with a desire to stay in a P05 IBM i software tier a bit in a lurch.
So, on August 5, while we are away on vacation in the woods and lakes of upper Michigan, IBM …
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