• Guru: DateTime Rules Of Thumb

  May 18, 2026 Ted Holt

  I am not a great programmer. I am a decent programmer who has found ways to stay out of trouble. I use many little rules of thumb to keep me and the people I serve from being unpleasantly surprised at inopportune moments. Today I share rules of thumb regarding datetime data that have served me in my work.

  The first date field I used in an RPG program was a six-digit zoned-decimal value in MMDDYY format. This was part of a programming assignment for a class I was taking at the local vocational-technical center in days of yore. In my …

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• i-Rays Performance Analyzer Now Ready for Prime Time, Omniology Says

  May 18, 2026 Alex Woodie

  Companies that want to address performance issues on their IBM i applications may want to check out the i-Rays software from Omnilogy. The product has matured considerably since it was introduced to the U.S. market last year, and it now has the backing of prominent IBM i performance expert Dawn May.

  When we first wrote about i-Rays back in May 2025, the offering was brand new to the American market. Marek Walczak, the chief commercial officer for the Polish firm Omniology and the general manager of i-Rays, attended the COMMON POWERUp 2025 conference in Anaheim, California, to test the …

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• CNX Adds AI To Valence Development Tool

  May 18, 2026 Alex Woodie

  CNX is adding a new AI assistant to Valence, its no-code development environment for IBM i. The AI will provide a range of enhancements to the Valence experience, from helping with modernizing existing greenscreen applications to providing the ability for executives to “chat” with their Db2 for i data.

  Valence is a collection of tools for creating new Web and mobile applications that run on IBM i. The software features RPG procedures for integrating with existing IBM i logic, and generates JavaScript front-ends that are served by IBM i’s native HTTP Server (the one powered by Apache). Popular add-ons include …

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• Q&A With IBM’s New GM Of Power, Hillery Hunter

  May 11, 2026 Alex Woodie

  IBM’s new general manager of Power, Hillery Hunter, made a solid first impression on the IBM i community during her attendance at the POWERUp conference in New Orleans two weeks ago. In addition to delivering a keynote address, Hunter spoke with many IBM i professionals at the show. She also made some time to speak with IT Jungle. Here’s an edited transcript of our conversation.

  Alex Woodie: Your keynote address during the POWERUp Opening Session was great. Could you elaborate on some of the points you were making about using IBM i as a platform for AI?

  Hillery Hunter: …

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• When IBM i Skills Become A Resilience Risk

  May 11, 2026 Ash Giddings

  For many IBM i organizations, availability planning has traditionally focused on technology failure. Hardware faults, storage issues, site outages, and more recently cyber incidents, have shaped how high availability and disaster recovery strategies are designed.

  What is less frequently acknowledged is that people have become one of the most significant availability risks in modern IBM i environments.

  Skills shortages, retirement trends, and reliance on a small number of highly experienced individuals are changing the risk profile of the platform. In many cases, the greatest threat to continuity is no longer whether systems can fail over, but whether the right people …

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• Guru: Load A Varying-Dimension Array With One SQL Fetch

  May 11, 2026 Ted Holt

  One thing I really like about working in different shops is the vast amount of source code I’m exposed to. But that’s not the best thing. The best thing is the people I meet and get to know. The more clients, the more teachers. Combine source code and people, and my life, personally and professionally, is enriched.

  Today I’m pleased to pass along an SQL technique I picked up from the IT shop of a manufacturer. The programmers use this technique to load subfiles from SQL cursors in RPG programs. It works in client-server applications as well. It combines a …

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• You Have To Speak IBM’s Language If You Want To Be Heard

  May 11, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Like many of you, I had been expecting for Big Blue to deliver the kicker to the entry level “Bonnell” Power10-based Power S1012 that was announced a few years back during the PowerUP 2026 conference. This long-awaited machine will be the only Power11 system that is offered for those many, many IBM i customers in the P05 software tier, and will presumably have a beefier hardware configuration that crosses over into the P10 IBM i software tier.

  POWERUp 2026 came and went, and there was no Bonnell+ kicker and there also was not the expected Technology Refreshes for the IBM …

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• Raz-Lee Revs iSecurity Suite With 2026 Updates

  May 11, 2026 Alex Woodie

  Raz-Lee Security used the recent POWERUp conference in New Orleans as the launch pad for a major new release of its iSecurity Suite. As CEO Shmuel Zailer tells us, the company made substantial changes to ensure that all of the products within the suite work in a more integrated fashion.

  Raz-Lee is one of just a handful of independent IBM i security software vendors left in the market following a period of consolidation by larger firms. However, Raz-Lee’s iSecurity Suite is arguably one of the most complete, with around two dozen point products across seven suites, spanning authentication/authorization; auditing and …

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• The Big Easy: Connecting The Dots On Big Blue’s AI Strategy For IBM i

  May 4, 2026 Alex Woodie

  IBM has not yet formally announced the new AI products that it is building for IBM i. We know about Bob and the MCP server, but there is a lot more AI stuff coming to IBM i. IBM shared details of what is coming in closed sessions at POWERUp in New Orleans last week, but hints about where it is going and what is coming were there, if you knew where to look.

  IBM i, as we all know, is a business platform. It runs enterprise applications and it runs them extremely well. If you want to model a nuclear …

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• From Migration To Maturity: The Cloud Reality For IBM i Shops

  May 4, 2026 Doug McMaster

  IBM i teams don’t need to be convinced that modernization matters. Modernization should acknowledge why IBM i continues to power critical business operations: its predictable performance, tightly integrated environment, and strong security – especially when properly managed. While cloud initiatives are often framed with the assumption that everything must move, that approach is rarely the most effective starting point for IBM i environments.

  As cloud adoption has matured, a more grounded perspective has emerged. The real shift isn’t about infrastructure –it’s about the operating model. Most challenges don’t stem from technical limitations, but from misaligned expectations around cost, security responsibilities, …

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• COMMON Dances To A Fresh New Tune In New Orleans

  May 4, 2026 Alex Woodie

  This wasn’t the first COMMON conference held in New Orleans, but it may have been the best, considering where the IBM i platform is at this particular time and what happened down on the bayou last week.

  For starters, the four-day event attracted about 1,300 attendees, which is a solid increase from the 1,200 that attended last year’s conference in Anaheim, California. But here’s the kicker: About one-third of the COMMON POWERUp 2026 attendees were attending the conference for the first time. In other words, around 400 folks decided that IBM i education and community were important enough for them …

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• Eradani Touts Native Git Connection As AI Tools Spread

  May 4, 2026 Alex Woodie

  Thanks to AI tools like Bob and Claude, IBM i shops are changing how they develop code. AI tools can crank out RPG much faster, but the quality is inherently suspect, which makes having a solid change management life cycle very important. It’s the perfect setup for the folks at Eradani, who say their IBM i change management tool’s native integration with Git provides the right capabilities at the right time.

  What makes Eradani’s approach to supporting Git with its Eradani DevOps offering is the lack of compromise. Instead of splicing Git support into an existing change management product, …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 28, Number 17

  May 4, 2026 Doug Bidwell

  We are in the middle of a house move right now, so the IBM i PTF Guide is running a little bit behind as we box and tape and lift and stack. In this week’s issue, we have two security vulnerabilities right off the bat.

  First, we have Security Bulletin: IBM WebSphere Application Server Liberty is affected by identity spoofing (CVE-2026-3621), which you can find out more about at this link. The issue affects WebSphere Application Server – Liberty versions 17.0.0.3 through 26.0.

  Second, we have Security Bulletin: IBM i is Affected by Improper Handling of Special Elements and …

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• Power Systems Still Waiting For The GenAI Bump

  April 27, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  With the Power11 systems upgrade cycle only nine months old and with price increases that have been happening monthly since early April 1 and possibly continuing through the end of the year, we expect for the Power Systems business to be up in 2026 for the full year.

  In the first quarter of 2026 ended in March, IBM’s Infrastructure group, which includes sales of servers, storage, operating systems, and used gear, posted sales of $3.33 billion, up 15.3 percent. Gross profits rose by 24.2 percent for the Infrastructure group, to just a tad under $1.9 billion, and pre-tax income for …

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• The IBM i and the Hybrid Cloud World: Things To Keep In Mind

  April 27, 2026 Gregg Rohaly

  As hybrid IT becomes the default operating model, the IBM i platform is increasingly positioned not as a legacy “system in the corner,” but as a high-value, mission-critical core surrounded by modern integration layers and cloud-connected services.

  In The IBM i And The Hybrid Cloud World: Things To Keep In Mind, a fast-paced conversation explores what IBM i leaders – and the partners who advise them – should prioritize when aligning IBM i with today’s hybrid cloud expectations.

  For this video interview, Gregg Rohaly as CloudSAFE’s business development manager, joined Ron Venzin, a CloudSAFE founder and chief development officer, …

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• CData Adds Db2 for i Support to CDC Tool

  April 27, 2026 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops that need to quickly move data from their database to other systems for AI, analytics, or operational uses may be interested in recent news out of CData. The company announced that it’s now supporting Db2 for i with Sync, its real-time change data capture (CDC) product.

  CData Software is a Cherry Hill, North Carolina-based company that has been building data integration software since it was founded in 2010. In addition to database drivers (ODBC, JDBC, OLE DB), database connectors, and embedded solutions, the company develops a data integration platform dubbed Sync that provides a range of CDC, …

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• As I See It: The Cost of Having Ethics

  April 27, 2026 Victor Rozek

  It sounds like something out of a grade B sci-fi movie. Fleets of surveillance drones, functioning as airborne behavior monitors, trailing behind people like malevolent balloons. Phone conversations and internet activity evaluated for any hint of non-compliance, location tracked. The possibility of such a dystopian future should be confined to bad sci-fi features, but it is not. At least according to Dario Amodei, co-founder of Anthropic and its controversial AI spawn Claude.

  “It might be frighteningly plausible,” Amodei writes “to simply generate a complete list of anyone who disagrees with the government on any number of issues, even if such …

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• 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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