• With Power11, Power Systems “Go To Eleven”

  July 8, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Today is Power11 announcement day, and as sometimes happens during the debut of a new processor and a new platform to go along with it, we do not have all of the details necessary to tell you everything you need to know about the new Power11 processor and the four of the five Power Systems machines that will make use of it and start shipping on July 25.

  Here is what we generally know. First, you will hear a lot of Spinal Tap jokes, like the one in the title above, which refers to special Marshall amplifiers which go …

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• With Subscription Price, IBM i P20 And P30 Tiers Get Bigger Bundles

  July 8, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Big Blue has been noodling how it might tweak the subscription pricing for the P20 and P30 tiers since getting feedback on the first pass it did on its big iron Power Systems machines way back in February 2023. That feedback from the company’s biggest IBM i customers was not entirely glowing, but IBM has been clear that it would in the fullness of time move from perpetual software licensing to subscription pricing on all of its software, and that IBM i would not be an exception.

  To cushion the blow – and there is one because customers keep machines …

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• Izzi Buys CNX, Eyes Valence Port To System Z

  July 8, 2025 Alex Woodie

  Izzi Software today announced the acquisition of CNX Corp., owner of the Valence suite of Web development tools for IBM i. The deal is the first IBM i-related acquisition for Izzi, which was founded last year with a mandate to buy smaller IBM i and mainframe vendors that typically don’t get M&A attention from bigger players.

  CNX is a Chicago-based software vendor and consulting firm founded in 1996 by Richard Milone and Robert Swanson. The two had worked with BPCS (now Infor ERP LX) customers, and developed a product that extended that ERP system to the Web. That product, then …

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• IBM i Shops “Attacking” Security Concerns, Study Shows

  July 8, 2025 Alex Woodie

  Faced with ever-growing security concerns, IBM i shops are “attacking” the problem and taking real steps to improve their security posture, Fortra’s says in its latest State of IBM i Security study. It is the second straight year that Fortra has noticed an improvement in IBM i shops’ approach to security. However, there are still areas that require improvement.

  Fortra and its predecessors (HelpSystems, PowerTech) have been running the annual State of Security study for 22 years, providing a unique glimpse into the security configurations of IBM i customers that is unmatched in the industry.

  Every year, a new group …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 27, Number 26

  July 8, 2025 Doug Bidwell

  Brace yourself because the IBM i platform has five security vulnerabilities that you have to analyze and cope with in this week’s issue of the IBM i PTF Guide.

  Let’s just jump right in and get to it.

  First, we have Security Bulletin: IBM WebSphere Application Server is affected by arbitrary code execution (CVE-2025-36038), about which you can find out more at this link. The affected software is IBM WebSphere Application Server 8.5 and 9.0.

  Second, there is Security Bulletin: IBM i is affected by a user gaining elevated privileges due to an unqualified library call vulnerability in …

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• Liam Allan Shares What’s Coming Next With Code For IBM i

  June 23, 2025 Alex Woodie

  The rise of Code for IBM i arguably is the best IBM i technology story of the past few years. The VS Code development environment came out of nowhere to challenge Rational Developer for i as the pre-eminent developer tool on the platform. And according to Liam Allan, who started this whole thing, Code for i is only going to get better in the months and years to come.

  There is clear and unmistakable momentum behind VS Code and Code for IBM i, the VS Code plug-in that Liam Allan created back in 2021 while working at Seiden Group …

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• From Stable To Scalable: Visual LANSA 16 Powers IBM i Growth – Launching July 8

  June 23, 2025 LANSA

  IBM i remains one of the most trusted enterprise platforms in the world, running mission-critical operations across industries like manufacturing, logistics, and finance. Its unmatched reliability and performance have made it a mainstay for organizations running high-volume, always-on business systems.

  But as innovation speeds up, IBM i teams are under pressure to do more: modernize applications, integrate with newer systems, and deliver modern user experiences – all without compromising business operations. The problem? Most legacy environments weren’t built for agility, and rewrites are often expensive and risky.

  That’s where Visual LANSA 16 comes in. Originally built for IBM i and …

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• VS Code Will Be The Heart Of The Modern IBM i Platform

  June 23, 2025 Sebastien Julliand

  For application programmers, the workspace is not a place to sit with a screen, a keyboard, a chair, but rather is an integrated development environment within which code can be created, shared, compiled, and managed either inside the tool itself or through plug-in extensions that link it to other tools. IDEs have been around for decades and are not anything new. What is new is how suddenly popular one particular IDE – VS Code – has become.

  For the past several years, nearly three quarters of the programmers in the world polled for the Stack Overflow Developer Survey say that …

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• The AS/400: A 37-Year-Old Dog That Loves To Learn New Tricks

  June 23, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In the early years of the AS/400 platform, when we were new to the IT business and there were so many different datacenter computing platforms and even more operating systems, we didn’t think about the longevity of the AS/400 and its System/38 and System/36 predecessors. It was a new platform with a heritage, a system with both a past and a future out as far as we could see with our own youth and limited experience.

  But over the years, in the early 2000s in particular, we started to keep track of the years the AS/400 was around and celebrated …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 27, Number 25

  June 23, 2025 Doug Bidwell

  Happy Monday, everyone. The IBM i stack is starting out your week with a security issue and two security vulnerabilities.

  First, we have PH65394, which is a notification that IBM WebSphere Application Server Liberty is vulnerable to a denial of service due to Apache CXF (CVE-2025-23184 CVSS 7.5). You can find out more about it at this link.

  Second, we have Security Bulletin: IBM i is affected by a user gaining elevated privileges due to an unqualified library call vulnerability in IBM Advanced Job Scheduler for i [CVE-2025-33122]. More information is available here. The PTF number to remediate …

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• Meet The Next Gen Of IBMers Helping To Build IBM i

  June 16, 2025 Alex Woodie

  The graying of the IBM i installed base is a topic that deserves attention, as every platform must find a way to reinvent itself if it wants to survive. IBM executives have been vocal about the need for IBM i customers to hire younger people. Well, it looks like Big Blue is taking its own advice, judging from the new crop of developers working in the Rochester and Toronto labs, and beyond.

  It’s hard to believe that Liam Allan has been working on the IBM i platform for nearly a decade. Allan, who started working on IBM i when he …

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• Looks Like IBM Is Building A Linux-Like PASE For IBM i After All

  June 16, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It is pleasing, indeed, whenever you think of something that would be useful for a particular platform and then you find out that the company is working on it. This is indeed what I thought of when we reviewed the IBM i – A Strategic Preview For 2025 And Beyond session hosted by IBM i chief technology officer Steve Will at the recent POWERUp 2025 conference in Anaheim, California. I was not able to attend the event, but my co-editor, Alex Woodie, was able to, and hence we were quite pleased to see that Big Blue is apparently working on …

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• Will Independent IBM i Clouds Survive PowerVS?

  June 16, 2025 Alex Woodie

  IBM currently competes with a slew of independent IBM i clouds with its Power Virtual Server (PowerVS) offering. But as IBM’s PowerVS grows bigger and more capable, there is still a question: Can the independent IBM i clouds survive?

  Clouds have been around in one form or another for as long as the IBM midrange server has existed. Whether it’s termed co-location, a computer bureau, an application service provider (ASP), a managed service provider (MSP), or the cloud, people have been running IBM gear on behalf of other people for a very, very long time.

  Since the online bookseller Amazon …

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• Now, IBM Is Jacking Up Hardware Maintenance Prices

  June 16, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The first stirrings of hardware maintenance price increases that will affect IBM Power Systems shops have hit, starting in China for Power8 and Power9 machines and for Storage Expert Care support everywhere around the world except in Japan.

  To be quite honest, when we read the hardware maintenance price increase in announcement letter AD25-1195, we did not at first see that it was restricted to the People’s Republic Of China and assumed that it was for the United States and quite possibly for the entire planet. But, alas and good for everyone outside of China, the 10 percent price …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 27, Number 24

  June 16, 2025 Doug Bidwell

  The AS/400, under its many names, turns 37 this coming weekend, and let’s all raise a glass and celebrate this venerable and still relevant platform. Or, perhaps a cup of coffee or tea, depending on your mood.

  In the meantime, before you toast the IBM i, you have two security vulnerabilities to be aware of. First, there is Security Bulletin: This Power System update is being released to address CVE-2024-13176, which you can find out more about here. This affects the BMC’s HTTPS and SSH interfaces. The affected products and versions are as follows:

  • OPENBMC: FW1060.00 – FW1060.30
  • OPENBMC:

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• 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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