• Big Blue Raises IBM i License Transfer Fees, Other Prices

  June 9, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The price increases that may or may not be happening to cover increasing costs at IBM continue apace. Some of the price increases we have seen over the past several months might be driven by increasing costs or the expectation of increasing costs, and others might be initiated to drive services and software revenues higher to push the profit level of the overall Power Systems business.

  It is hard to say for sure.

  But what we can say for certain is that last week, in announcement letter AD25-1142 dated June 2, Big Blue once again increased prices on various Power …

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• Keep The IBM i Youth Movement Going With More Training, Better Tools

  June 9, 2025 Alex Woodie

  Nobody is going to mistake an IBM i conference for a college campus anytime soon. But if the recent POWERUp 2025 conference at Disneyland was any indication, there is a definite trend toward younger professionals working on the platform. While the IBM i youth movement is real, companies will benefit from some simple ways to attract and retain these new IBM i professionals.

  IBM is still working to get IBM i content back into four-year universities through the Power Skills Academy, which has been a struggle. Colleges are reluctant to invest in building a curriculum based on technologies that they …

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• Remain Begins Migrating DevOps Tools To VS Code

  June 9, 2025 Alex Woodie

  For years, Remain Software was 100 percent devoted to Rational Developer for i (RDi) IBM’s flagship development tool for IBM i. It was a good bet, as the bulk of the market used RDi. However, in recent years, popularity of VS Code has soared, and now Remain is embarking upon a major project to redevelop all of its DevOps functionality to work with the browser-based IDE.

  Wim Jongman, the managing editor of Remain Software, started working on the company’s flagship change management product for AS/400, TD/OMS back in 1992. During its iSeries years in the early 2000s, Remain pivoted …

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• IBM Readies LTO-10 Tape Drives And Libraries

  June 9, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As the capacities on flash and disk arrays continue to embiggen and the desire to keep data around is at a fever pitch as everyone is trying to figure out how to train generative AI models using all of their data, the need for tape backup for transactional and operational data has never been higher.

  Which is why it is good timing for IBM to be rolling out its tape drives based on LTO-10 cartridges.

  The IBM 3589 Ultrium LTO-10 cartridges, which are known as Models 554 and 654, have a native capacity of 30 TB, and with 2.5X data …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 27, Number 23

  June 9, 2025 Doug Bidwell

  It’s pretty quiet this week, which is good. We gave you a lot of stuff to do last week anyway, so now you can really get caught up.

  The important thing is a new security vulnerability, which is in Security Bulletin: IBM Rational Developer for i is affected by an unspecified Java runtime encryption vulnerability (CVE-2025-21587). You can find out more about this issue with RDi at this link. The affected releases include Rational Developer for i 9.8.0.0 through 9.8.0.4, and the recommended fix is to install the RDi 9.8.0.5 update.

  Here is the rundown of PTF Groups by …

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• SEU’s Fate, An IBM i V8, And The Odds Of A Power13

  June 2, 2025 Alex Woodie

  At COMMON’s recent POWERUp conference, IT Jungle got a chance to sit down with IBM executives to talk about the IBM i business, upcoming Power announcements, and sundry other topics, like is IBM preparing to finally kill SEU, when will we see IBM i 8.0, and does IBM feel lucky enough to launch Power13? Here’s a brief accounting of what was said.

  IBM Rochester has been in a housecleaning mode for a while now, clearing out the dead wood and rejiggering the product library for the 21st century. As part of this work, it’s moved to a subscription model and …

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• Tandberg Bankruptcy Leaves A Hole In IBM Power Storage

  June 2, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  A problem has been brewing for back and archiving needs for entry and some midrange IBM i shops, and we did not know about it until the spit hit the fan last week. Had we known earlier, we could have warned you. And maybe Big Blue could have and should have warned you directly more immediately a few months ago instead of in the announcement that came out last week and that did not actually explain what was going on even a little bit.

  In announcement letter AD25-0836, dated May 27, IBM said that effective that day it was …

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• RPG Code Generation And The Agentic Future Of IBM i

  June 2, 2025 Alex Woodie

  IBM is making progress with Watsonx Code Assistant for i, which is on track to become available as a public preview next month. And while IBM perhaps is running into some challenges with generating RPG code, the long-term potential of agentic AI on IBM i is brighter than ever.

  As we previously reported, IBM is now taking names for the folks who will be given access to the public preview of WCA for i, which you can sign up for here. According to IBM i CTO Steve Will, the preview will deliver RPG code understanding capabilities, which is …

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• A Bunch Of IBM i-Power Systems Things To Be Aware Of

  June 2, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Sometimes you get a bunch of big announcements for the IBM i platform or the Power Systems machinery it runs on, and sometimes there are some smaller things that are interesting to a smaller group of people but no less important in their worlds than the big stuff.

  So it is this week.

  In announcement letter AD25-0887 dated May 27, which is where we also saw the withdrawal of marketing of RDX disk backup units and which we reported on elsewhere in this issue, we also see that the 1 TB and 2 TB removable disk cartridges are being removed. …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 27, Numbers 21 And 22

  June 2, 2025 Doug Bidwell

  It is once again “ketchup week” here at The Four Hundred thanks to the Memorial Day holiday last week in the United States, and that means you get two IBM i PTF Guides for the price of one this week.

  So let’s start with Volume 27 Number 21 dated May 24. There is a whole bunch of stuff to deal with.

  First, there is a flash alert: IBM i HTTP Server Validation List Authentication Suddenly Fails After IBM i HTTP Group PTF Apply. You can find out more about this here. IBM says: “If you have applied one of …

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• Public Preview For Watson Code Assistant for i Available Soon

  May 21, 2025 Alex Woodie

  At the COMMON POWERUp 2025 conference this week, IBM pulled the covers back a bit on Watson Code Assistant for IBM i, the new name for the AI-powered coding assistant that IBM first started talking about one year ago. A public preview of WCA for i is becoming available to a limited number of testers, with general availability expected in the second half of the year.

  There has been quite a bit of development in the IBM i coding co-pilot this month. On May 7, during the IBM Think conference, two IBM executives wrote a blog post announcing WCA for …

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• COMMON Youth Movement Continues at POWERUp 2025

  May 21, 2025 Alex Woodie

  Here’s a shocking fact for you: Disneyland was only five years old when the COMMON user group started way back in 1960. While Mickey Mouse hasn’t aged much, the folks who belong to COMMON and attend events sure have. But if the user group’s latest initiative succeeds, the current trend toward younger and more globally diverse members will continue well into the next decade – and beyond.

  The aging of the installed base has been an issue that COMMON has been attempting to rectify for much of the past decade. It’s not necessarily a COMMON problem, but a problem for …

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• IBM Preserves Memory Investments Across Power10 And Power11

  May 21, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  While the central processing unit inside every server gets all of the glory and much of the budget, these days it is the main memory that stores the data and gives that CPU memory that is perhaps more important and is actually the most costly part of the overall system.

  This is particularly true of back office systems running relational databases, and increasingly these days, in-memory databases to speed up access to that corporate data. If you spend hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars on system memory, wouldn’t it be nice if that investment could be amortized over more …

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• Eradani Uses AI For New EDI And API Service

  May 21, 2025 Alex Woodie

  Eradani this week rolled out a new service aimed at helping customers to accelerate their EDI and API integration projects. What’s unique about its new Managed API and EDI Integration Service offerings is that it uses a large language model (LLM) to essentially take the role of the experienced integration specialist.

  Eradani has been in the data integration business since Dan Magid founded the company in 2018. The Berkeley, California, company sells a tool called Eradani Connect that seeks to eliminate the complexity of data integration challenges involving the IBM i server, and to enable users to connect the IBM …

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• Picking Apart IBM’s $150 Billion In US Manufacturing And R&D

  May 21, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Several weeks ago, we read with great interest, considering the great desire by President Donald Trump to foment a new wave of indigenous manufacturing in the United States with extreme import tariffs, that Big Blue was committing to “to invest $150 billion in America over the next five years to fuel the economy and to accelerate its role as the global leader in computing.”

  This announcement was not one, as far as we know, brokered between Arvind Krishna, IBM’s chairman, president, and chief executive officer, and Trump, which is not necessarily smart. It is perhaps best to let this commander …

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• FAX/400 And CICS For i Are Dead. What Will IBM Kill Next?

  May 19, 2025 Alex Woodie

  A number of IBM i products and functions were sunsetted and are no longer supported with IBM i 7.6, including some of the greenscreen Application Development ToolSet (ADTS) tools like Screen Design Aid (SDA) and Report Layout Utility (RLU), and more than two dozen others. This shouldn’t come as news, as IBM previously announced its intent. But what products and functions will IBM kill with the next release of IBM i? A cryptic post by IBM on its website has the community talking.

  As part of the May 2024 Technology Refresh (TR) cycle for IBM i 7.4 and 7.5, Big …

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• Fresche Overhauls X-Analysis With Web UI, AI Smarts

  May 19, 2025 Alex Woodie

  Fresche Solutions recently unveiled a new release of X-Analysis, its popular impact analysis tool, which it’s now selling under the Application Intelligence brand. The product has undergone a major overhaul and now sports a new Web user interface as well as hooks to popular AI models to provide code explanation and documentation capabilities for RPG applications.

  Fresche Solutions operates a large application modernization practice and provides an array of products and services to help IBM i customers take their RPG, COBOL, and Java applications from the legacy past into the modern present. However, before a single byte of legacy code …

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• Is It Time To Add The Rust Programming Language To IBM i?

  May 19, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Back in February, IBM announced that it had brought the Rust programming language to its AIX Unix operating system variant. Rust, of course, has long since been available on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. But, thus far, it has not been supported on the IBM i platform, neither in the PASE AIX runtime (which is a common way to get Unix stuff inside of IBM i) or natively recompiled inside of IBM i itself.

  The initial release of the Rust SDK for AIX was based on the stable Rust 1.84 release, and it uses the same LLVM compiler framework that …

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• Is IBM Going To Raise Prices On Power10 Expert Care?

  May 19, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We have a feeling that Big Blue let the cat out of the bag a little early on a price increase for its Power Expert Care technical support services for the Power10 platform. We have this feeling because IBM on May 1 canceled a price increase in the Americas region in announcement letter AD25-1009 and in the Japan region in announcement letter AD25-1048.

  This is weird, and we are showing you the Americas announcement below in case IBM takes it down:

  

  First of all, the letter number referenced for May 1 does not match the actual letter number, which …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 27, Number 20

  May 19, 2025 Doug Bidwell

  Brace yourselves, everyone. There are seven security vulnerabilities that you have to pay attention to this week for the IBM i platform. Remember, as security guru Carol Woodbury is fond of saying: the IBM i platform is not the most secure platform in the world, but the most securable platform in the world. You must be ever-vigilant and keep it secure by patching holes and killing bugs.

  So, without further fuss, let’s dive in and take them in order.

  One is Security Bulletin: IBM i is vulnerable to a machine-in-the-middle attack due to mishandling error codes when verifying the host …

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