• Brace Yourself: Another Power Systems Price Hike Coming May 1

  April 20, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  A few weeks ago, when we talked about the price increases on main memory and flash for Power Systems machines as well as some other price increases, we told you that this would probably not be the end of it. The market for DRAM and flash is so crazy right now that demand is well exceeding supply and that is driving up prices almost continuously. That’s because supply cannot be increased for either.

  To that end, Sam Werner, general manager of IBM Storage, and Ivo Körner, vice president of worldwide sales for IBM Power, Cloud, and Storage, sent out a …

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• Updates Announced for IBM i BRMS And SMTP Email Client

  April 20, 2026 Alex Woodie

  Big Blue hasn’t yet announced its spring IBM i Technology Refresh (TR), which we told you last week will come a bit later this year to align with IBM’s expected announcement of a new entry-level, P05-class Power11 machine. But that didn’t stop IBM from making other IBM i-related announcements last week, including some important updates to BRMS and the Simple Mail Transport Protocol (SMTP) email client.

  With its update for Backup, Recovery, and Media Services for i (BRMS), which IBM announced on April 14, IBM is bolstering the new Web GUI with updated capabilities that will make the product …

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• AI Will Be Front And Center At POWERUp 2026 Next Week

  April 20, 2026 Alex Woodie

  Had enough of AI? Well, if you are headed to New Orleans, Louisiana, for the POWERUp 2026 conference next week, get ready to hear a lot more about the emerging technology, which is upending not only how we play but also how we work – and the IBM i platform is not immune from this change.

  If recent POWERUp events are any indication, COMMON will be expecting 1,100 to 1,200 people for its annual conference, which is taking place April 27 through 30 at the New Orleans Marriott, just around the corner from Bourbon Street in the historic French Quarter. …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 28, Number 16

  April 20, 2026 Doug Bidwell

  April showers are supposed to bring May flowers, but this is definitely not true in a lot of the United States right now. Mayflowers can, and possibly might, still bring Pilgrims.

  Meanwhile, back in IBM i Land, there are a thousand lakes and rolling farmland with the occasional city far off in the distance, plus a remediation of a bug in the Java PTF Group and a security vulnerability that you have to take a gander at.

  Let’s start with the security vulnerability, which is outlined in Security Bulletin: IBM i is affected by a privilege escalation vulnerability in Web …

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• Spring IBM i Tech Refreshes Will Come A Bit Later This Year

  April 13, 2026 Alex Woodie

  IBM is working on a new Technology Refresh, as it traditionally does this time of year. But the spring TR announcement will not be made before the POWERUp conference takes place at the end of the month, IT Jungle has learned. Instead, the company will be holding off on the spring TR so that it aligns with a broader Power announcement.

  IBM i shops have been conditioned to expect two TRs every year, one in the spring (usually April) and another in the fall (usually October). The spring TR is usually timed to occur before COMMON holds its annual POWERUp …

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• You Are Much More Than Power Systems, And So Are We

  April 13, 2026 Doug McMaster

  The AS/400 was born in the age of minicomputers, but that was also when the rise of the personal computer started and eventually led to the revolution of client/server distributed computing. Not only was computing shifted to the PCs on our desks, but also out to file servers, print servers, and application servers that ran all kinds of different platforms, including NetWare, SCO Unix, OS/2 Server, rarely a variant of Unix, what would become Windows Server, and more recently Linux.

  Eventually, Windows Server and Linux became not only Web infrastructure and application serving platforms but ran relational databases and sometimes …

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• Startup Seeks The “Golden Path” for IBM i Modernization

  April 13, 2026 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops looking for a partner to help with RPG modernization may want to check out Golden Path Digital. The startup recently announced a modernization initiative dubbed AS/Forward that includes a mix of code documentation and AI-powered code conversion tools, all wrapped up with professional services, to give IBM i shops a lifeline for aging RPG apps.

  Golden Path Digital was founded last year in Hot Springs Village, Arkansas, by two business partners, Aaron Balentine and Ty Woods. An AI engineer at a local lumber company that runs on the IBM i platform, Valentine is the technical one, while …

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• What Can IBM Do To Make The Future Power S1112 Mini System Compelling?

  April 13, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The Power11-based Power Systems lineup remains incomplete, with the single-socket, half-width “Bonnell” system that debuted back in May 2024 still only available with Power10 processors and not yet upgraded to Power11. We know such a machine is in the works, because Big Blue has been clear about the need to ship a machine in the IBM i P05 software tier, the lowest rung on the IBM i ladder.

  We have not heard anything precise about the Bonnell kicker, and we would have thought it would have been launched in February or March. It has not. It is reasonable to expect …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 28, Number 15

  April 13, 2026 Doug Bidwell

  Well, this week’s security vulnerability looks pretty serious, so you best not skip this one. And as usual, it is happing with open source software embedded in the IBM i platform. The vulnerability is outlined in Security Bulletin: IBM i is Affected by Security Control Bypass and Uncontrolled Resource Consumption Vulnerabilities in IBM Java SDK and IBM Java Runtime [CVE-2026-21925, CVE-2026-21933, CVE-2026-21932, CVE-2026-21945].

  You can read more about it at this link. Here is the list of remediations and fixes for the Java hole, which are available for IBM i 7.4, IBM i 7.5, and IBM i 7.6:

  Remediation/Fixes, 

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• 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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