• 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 optimizer …

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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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• No Joke: Big Memory And Flash Price Hikes Coming April 1

  March 9, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As I told you about last week, price increases for Power Systems and Storage products have indeed come to pass. We were poo-pooing the idea that IBM would have a 25 percent across-the-board price increase, saying this would be unprecedented and unjustified. But the price increases that go into effect in three weeks (just after the first financial quarter of 2026 ends) are jaw dropping even if they are mainly for main memory and flash drives.

  We would love to show you the link to the announcement letter, but as far as we know there is no customer announcement …

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• Strategic Topics To Think About For 2026, Part 2

  March 9, 2026 Philippe Magne

  Last month, in the first part of this series, I presented a bunch of strategic topics that I think the IBM i community needs to think about as we figure out what needs to be done in their application estates in 2026 and beyond. I talked predominantly about pragmatism versus hype with AI and then DevSecOps transformation and AI integration into DevSecOps. You can read Part 1 at this link, and that is probably a good idea before diving into Part 2.

  In Part 2, I want to focus in on application security. This is a big theme, and …

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• Guru: IBM i Job Log Detective Brings Structure To Job Log Analysis In VS Code

  March 9, 2026 Gregory Simmons

  Remain Software has released a new Visual Studio Code extension called IBM i Job Log Detective, and it targets a pain point every IBM i developer understands: reading job logs efficiently.

  In addition to its marketplace availability, IBM i Job Log Detective is open source under the MIT license and can be found on GitHub at: https://github.com/RemainSoftware/jld

  There has never been anything wrong with IBM i job logs themselves. They are exhaustive, consistent, and remarkably detailed. When something fails, the job log contains the truth. The issue has always been consumption. Large QPJOBLOG files can run thousands of lines (or …

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• IBM Launches Hybrid Cloud Backup Product With Cobalt Iron

  March 9, 2026 Alex Woodie

  IBM and its business partner Cobalt Iron last week announced the launch of a new cloud backup product. Dubbed Secure Automated Backup with Compass for IBM Cloud, the new SaaS offering can protect data residing across customers’ landscape, including IBM Cloud, other clouds, and on-prem systems like IBM i.

  Cobalt Iron was founded in 2013 with the goal of modernizing backup and recovery. Founder Richard Spurlock saw that companies were spending too much time with platform-specific backup products, so he decided to build a centralized virtual tape library (VTL) solution that could back up and recover data across a range …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 28, Number 10

  March 9, 2026 Doug Bidwell

  It was a super quiet week in IBM i Land this week. Seriously. Like, we have never seen it so quiet. No security vulnerabilities, no new PTF groups issued for any of the five supported IBM i releases. It has been very, very quiet indeed. So that probably means you need to brace yourself for a bunch of stuff in the next couple of weeks.

  We did want to point out that there are massive price changes coming for Power Systems main memory, which were announced to business partners on March 2 and which take effect on April. (This is …

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• Why You Need To Think About Offsite Data Protection

  March 9, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Many of you do tape backups as part of your disaster recovery plan, and some of you only have tape backups as your only disaster recovery plan. Tape drives have their place, just like disk arrays do. But in the 21^st century, two decades after cloud compute and storage went mainstream, it really is time for you to get an offsite data protection plan together that is a little faster and more interactive than recovery from tape backups.

  Tape is fine, but it simply is not enough. In a modern world where people or increasingly AI agents can hack …

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• IBM Gets Bob 1.0 Off The Ground

  March 2, 2026 Alex Woodie

  IBM this month finally will get a coding co-pilot into the hands of its IBM i installed base with the launch of Bob. The general availability of Bob 1.0.0 on March 24 will mark the end of the long wait for IBM i customers – and in particular, the large population of RPG developers – to start using IBM-branded AI software to maintain and develop IBM i software.

  The world of generative AI moves quickly, as the large language models (LLMs) from frontier providers improve on a weekly, if not daily, basis. This is both exciting, as the capabilities of …

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• You Store The Crown Jewels In A Safe, Not In A Bucket

  March 2, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  All petabytes are not equal. A petabyte of unstructured data that may have a few nuggets of informational gold veins running through it, for instance, is definitely a lot more valuable than a petabyte of cat videos. But it is not anywhere nearly as valuable as the database and application code backups of thousands of customers running IBM i systems.

  And that, in a nutshell, is why Fresche Solutions, which is perhaps best known as a provider of application and database modernization tools in the IBM i market, but which is also a cloud in its own right as well …

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• More Power Systems Withdrawals, And Some From Red Hat, Too

  March 2, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It is a quiet time in IBM i Land right now as we await the P05-class Power Systems 1112 “Mini” system announcement, which we are guessing will happen sometime between March and the POWERUp 2026 conference, which will be hosted in New Orleans between April 27 and 30. There are some sundry things that you should be aware of, just the same.

  In announcement letter AD26-0071, dated February 24, IBM is tearing a whole bunch of features and cables from the Power Systems lineup, effective immediately. A cursor look shows that a lot of these are pretty old features …

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• Price Increases Are Here, Or Pending, And For Sure For Memory

  March 2, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The rumor mill was buzzing last week about price increases at IBM and in its Power Systems business in particular. We have no idea what is real or not, but we thought it was our responsibility to let you know what is going on in the infrastructure market and why prices increases are inevitable – if they have not already taken place.

  What we can tell you is that we watch IBM’s announcements like a hawk and we have not seen any price increases thus far this year. But given the state of the flash and main memory markets, we …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 28, Number 9

  March 2, 2026 Doug Bidwell

  Welcome to March. You have five security vulnerabilities to take care of. The good news is that there is not a lot of other PTF stuff you have to worry about if you are on IBM i 7.3 through IBM i 7.6. There are Group HIPER and Group Security updates for IBM i 7.2, which is still under extended support.

  Let’s go through the security vulnerabilities to start, as we usually do.

  First, we have Security Bulletin: IBM Rational Developer for i is affected by a memory exhaustion loop (CVE-2024-4068), which you can read about here. (And for …

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• After A Few Short Years, VS Code Passes Rational Developer for i

  February 23, 2026 Alex Woodie

  It has finally happened: Visual Studio Code has passed Rational Developer for i in usage, according to the 2026 version of Fortra’s IBM i Marketplace Survey. The survey also shows lower adoption of greenscreen ADTS and increased use of DevOps tools, demonstrating some positive trends in IBM i application development.

  It’s been barely two years since Fortra started asking IBM i customers about their use of Visual Studio Code, the free, Web-based integrated development environment (IDE) originally developed by Microsoft and set free as an open source project in November 2015. The 2024 survey (which was conducted in late 2023) …

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• Why Logical Replication Has Become The New Standard for IBM i HA/DR

  February 23, 2026 Ash Giddings

  In IBM i environments, data is not simply something applications use. For many organizations, particularly in manufacturing, finance, distribution, retail, and government, the data is the business. Orders, invoices, inventory positions, compliance records, and customer histories exist nowhere else. If that data is unavailable, inconsistent, or unrecoverable, the business does not just suffer a slowdown. It stops.

  This reality has always been understood within the IBM i community. What has changed is the level of assurance now expected around data protection, recoverability, and governance. High availability and disaster recovery are no longer judged by whether data is replicated, but by …

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• Guru: Managing The Lifecycle Of Your Service Programs – Updates Without Chaos

  February 23, 2026 Gregory Simmons

  You’ve written your service programs, organized your modules, picked your activation groups, and maybe even set up a tidy binding directory. Everything seems perfect – until someone needs to update a procedure that half the shop’s programs depend on. Suddenly, that tidy structure can feel like a trap. Welcome to the reality of service program lifecycle management.

  The key principle here is simple: change with care. Any update to a service program can ripple across every program bound to it. Without a strategy, you’ll find yourself fielding calls about broken reports, failed jobs, or, worst of all, subtle logic errors …

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