The IT Jungle

Bob 1.0 Users Bugged By Lack Of One Feature

April 6, 2026 Alex Woodie

The launch of the Bob AI coding tool in late March has been met with considerable amount of hoopla by IBM, as well as anticipation by the IBM i community. The early reception to Bob has been mixed, due in part to the lack of one particular feature.

Bob is a new AI tool from IBM that’s designed to help developers understand, document, and generate code in a variety of languages and platforms. On the IBM i server, Bob supports RPG, as well as CL, SQL, DDS, and COBOL, while it supports other languages on other platforms. IBM introduced Bob …
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Here Come The AI-Based Code Modernization Offerings

April 6, 2026 Alex Woodie

IBM i shops that are stuck with old code but don’t have the manpower to modernize it themselves are now considering the use of AI to handle much work. This new era of AI-assisted application modernization that we are now entering has the potential to be a boon for understaffed IBM i shops, but it raises new questions and concerns that IBM i professionals should keep in mind.

The capability of AI to understand, document, and generate computer code has increased significantly over the past year. Thanks to fundamental improvements in large language models (LLMs), we’re now at the point …
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Guru: Cohesion First – What A Procedure Should Be Responsible For

April 6, 2026 Gregory Simmons

One of the easiest mistakes to make in procedure-driven RPG is assuming that small procedures are automatically well-designed procedures. They are not. Size and cohesion are related, but they are not the same thing. A cohesive procedure has a single, clear responsibility. It exists to answer one business question or perform one business action. When a procedure tries to do more than that, it stops being a reusable building block and starts becoming a liability.

In procedural RPG, nothing enforces this discipline. There is no compiler warning when a procedure quietly takes on a second responsibility. There is no language …
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IBM Offers Trade-Ins On Storage To Grease The Upgrade Skids

April 6, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Business partners who want to help customers upgrade their flash storage are pleased that Big Blue has updated a long running trade-in program for various flash, disk, and tape storage products.

As we previously reported, IBM has just revamped the FlashSystem all-flash array lineup, with the idea of helping customers make-do in a market where prices of main memory and flash memory have all skyrocketed because of exuberant demand on behalf of the hyperscalers, cloud builders, and AI model builders who are all trying to build gigawatt-scale systems to create better models and higher performance inference engines to turn …
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IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 28, Number 14

April 6, 2026 Doug Bidwell

Happy Easter, everyone, and may the spring renew everyone. There’s only one security vulnerability this week, so let’s get to it.

That would be Security Bulletin: IBM i is Affected by Use of Hard-coded Cryptographic Key, Cross-site Scripting, and Prototype Pollution Vulnerabilities in IBM WebSphere Application Server Liberty [CVE-2025-14923, CVE-2025-12635, CVE-2026-29063], which you can find out more about here. The affected releases and their PTFs are as follows:
```
IBM i Release	5770-SS1 Option 3 	PTF Number(s)
7.6					SJ09013	
7.5					SJ09014
7.4					SJ09015 
7.3					SJ09016	
7.2					SJ09017
```
Here is the rundown of PTF Groups by IBM i release level since …
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What IBM i Ideas Are Cooking In IBM’s Ideas Portal?

March 30, 2026 Alex Woodie

It is early spring, which means we are getting close to Technology Refresh (TR) time. What new functionality will IBM add to the IBM i operating system and related products? Nobody knows except IBM and its closest business partners, but we can get an idea of what might be cooking in the next IBM i TR by checking out the IBM Ideas Portal.

The IBM Ideas Portal was implemented back in 2022 to replace the IBM Request for Enhancement (RFE) process, which IBM formalized with a Web-based voting and ranking system back in 2016. The Ideas Portal works as …
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Early Bob Excels In Medhost IBM i Tryout

March 30, 2026 Alex Woodie

One of the early testers of the IBM Bob AI tool is Medhost, the longtime developer of an integrated IBM i-based healthcare applications for community and rural hospitals. According to a joint presentation between IBM and the software vendor last week, the beta test was a success, as Bob assisted Medhost in not only understanding its RPG and SQL codebases, but modernizing and enhancing them.

IBM i chief architect Steve Will was joined by Michael Bowen, the senior vice president of technology at Medhost, in a webinar last week to discuss how the provider of electronic health records (EHR) …
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Counting The Cost Of AI Inference – And Projecting It Far Out

March 30, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan

It is probably a good thing that most IBM i shops did not spend a lot of money trying to figure out AI in the past decade. It was enormously expensive to develop first generation machine learning algorithms, and they had limited applicability. With large language models and their generative capabilities, the use cases for AI have skyrocketed, but the costs for training have been crazy expensive since the end of 2022, when the chattybot eureka moment – some might say emergent behavior – happened.

The cost of training what are called foundation models – very large models with hundreds …
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IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 28, Number 13

March 30, 2026 Doug Bidwell

Welcome to Monday and a whole new batch of security vulnerabilities with the IBM i platform, all thanks to the open source variant of the venerable Apache Web server embedded in the WebSphere Application Server Liberty edition.

That’s the good thing about open source software: When there are problems, people find them and they fix them. The bad thing is that a lot of really smart people are constantly looking at the code for issues, and they are always find them. Think of it as Continuous Vulnerability/Continuous Patching, I guess.

Let’s go through them, and all of the vulnerabilities affect …
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The Next Generation Of IBM i Talent in GenAI Action

March 30, 2026 Laura Ubelhor

The future of IBM i is not just being imagined – it is actively being built by the next generation of IT professionals.

The IBM i Agentic iMPACT AI Student Project provided Pennsylvania School of Technology network and technology students with a unique opportunity to participate in a real-world, industry-sponsored innovation challenge. This hands-on initiative focuses on implementing agentic artificial intelligence (AI) within the IBM i environment, giving students exposure to cutting-edge integration and automation technologies while building valuable, real-world experience.

The project was offered as an extracurricular component of the curriculum; the project launched its first challenge with participation …
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IBM Taps Nvidia GPUs For AI-Turbocharged Data Mart

March 23, 2026 Alex Woodie

Nvidia became the world’s most valuable company thanks to its powerful GPUs, which can be used to train massive AI models containing trillions of parameters. But those GPUs can also be used to accelerate traditional SQL analytics on structured data sitting in a data lake, as IBM’s customer Nestlé found out in a recent deployment.

Nestlé is the world’s largest food manufacturer, with more than 2,000 brands and operations spanning 186 countries. The Swiss company, which recorded revenues of CHF 89.5 billion ($113.5 billion at current exchange rates), operates 335 factories and employs about 271,000 people.

The company, which is …
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Izzi Partners With Capricorn For IBM i Services And Bluehouse For Software Peddling

March 23, 2026 Alex Woodie

UPDATED: Izzi Software has partnered with a pair of companies with connections to IBM midrange and mainframe systems, including Capricorn Information Systems, a New York provider of IBM i technical services, and Bluehouse, a software distributor with a global network of sellers.

Izzi emerged in early 2025 with a goal to buy smaller, founder-led software companies with revenues in the range of $2 million to $10 million who play in the IBM i and System Z markets. The Minneapolis, Minnesota-based company has made a handful of acquisitions to date, including System Z development tool provider Colesoft in 2025, …
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IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 28, Number 12

March 23, 2026 Doug Bidwell

Happy Spring everyone! We are well into Daylight Savings Time and have longer – meaning brighter – evenings, so it is hard not to be optimistic about the spring, summer, and fall ahead. This week, we have one notice and two security vulnerabilities to start with. Let’s get to it.

Let’s start with the OSP-Distribution requisite for Technology Refresh PTF, which you can find out more about at this link. The PTFs are as follows:
- For IBM i 7.4: FI0138771, which is PTF SJ09037
- For IBM i 7.5: FI0138772, which is PTF SJ09038
Now, for the security vulnerabilities. First, …
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What Is Your Plan For Offsite Data Protection?

March 23, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan

IBM i shops have a lot of options when it comes to getting offsite data protection for their systems of record. We want to understand what you are doing, and how that might change.

Like many IBM i shops, you probably back up your systems to tape and then store tapes offsite, or you might use cloud backup services that accomplish the same feat.

We would like to better understand what you do, why you do it, and how well this strategy works for you. And to that end, we are working with FalconStor, which provides offsite data protection services …
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What Is Threatening IBM i Security Now

March 16, 2026 Alex Woodie

The nature of cybersecurity threats is always changing, which requires constant vigilance by those who value security. IBM i is just as exposed to threats as any other networked operating system on the planet, but it’s also unique in certain ways, which actually makes security harder. To get the lowdown on how these phenomena interrelate in the first quarter of 2026, we turn to renown IBM i security expert Carol Woodbury from Kisco.

Woodbury recently sat down with Justin Loeber, the Kisco owner and head of business development, to present a webinar titled IBM i Threat Landscape 2026: A Fireside …
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GiAPA Tracks SQL Performance Issues On IBM i

March 16, 2026 Alex Woodie

Tracking down SQL performance problems with IBM i applications sometimes can be difficult, thanks to the mysterious ways that IBM’s Db2 query optimizer works. To help shine a light on changes the optimizer may suddenly make to query access plans, the IBM i performance experts behind GiAPA developed a new tool, dubbed SQL Observer.

The Db2 query optimizer is a wonder of software engineering. The IBMers who developed it deserve a ton of credit for creating a smart piece of software that keeps SQL queries running so efficiently. Users simply submit the query they want to run, and the …
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LegacyBridge Uses AI To Automate Data Entry On 5250 Screens

March 16, 2026 Alex Woodie

IBM i shops that are interested in eliminating manual data entry on 5250 screens may be interested in a new AI-based offering from a startup called LegacyBridge. According to the product’s developer, LegacyBridge uses computer vision and language AI technology not only to understand the information on source documents like PDFs, but also to navigate the 5250 screen and enter the pertinent data into the appropriate field.

You could say that Dmitrijs Tarasovs is an automation afficionado. “I’ve had a thing for automating boring, time-consuming tasks long before the AI boom,” he told IT Jungle in an email interview. “Finding …
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As I See It: The Surgical Years

March 16, 2026 Victor Rozek

Should you be lucky enough to live so long, you will enter what I call “The Surgical Years.” Inevitably, regardless of how much kale you eat, or exercise you get, or protein drinks you guzzle, your body will betray you and you will require serious medical intervention. That poses a two-pronged dilemma for millions of people: cost and availability.

Insurance premiums and co-pays are skyrocketing. Out of network care is often simply unaffordable. Rural hospitals are closing, medical appointments, particularly with specialists, are often unavailable for months. Many people are forced to ignore nagging pains until their condition becomes unbearable, …
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IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 28, Number 11

March 16, 2026 Doug Bidwell

The Power11 processors and their systems have in the field since last summer, and for those of you fortunate enough to have a server with that “new car smell,” now is the time to learn about the new processor and systems and figure out how to optimize performance on these machines and take advantage of their special features.

To that end, IBM has put out a new best practices guide called IBM Power11 Performance Optimization For IBM i to help you begin the processor of tuning up your new machine. You can download it here.

In addition to this, …
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We Need To Get A Little Insight From You

March 16, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan

There are a lot of shops that backup their systems to tape and then store tapes offsite, or they use cloud backup services that accomplish the same feat.

We don’t judge, but we do need to understand what you do, why you do it, and how well this strategy works for you. And to that end, we are working with FalconStor, which provides offsite data protection services for the IBM i platform, to survey readers of The Four Hundred.

The survey only takes a few minutes and will give us insight into what is really going on out …
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What Is Your Plan For Offsite Data Protection?

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