Steve Will Lifts the Curtain On “Major IBM i Announcement,” But Just A Smidge
March 3, 2025 Alex Woodie
If you haven’t heard yet, here it is: IBM is planning to make a major IBM i announcement soon. IBM i chief architect Steve Will said as much during his recent IBM i Guided Tour. While Will shared a general outline of what IBM has in mind for the major announcement, specifics still are few and far between.
Will, who also holds the titles of IBM i CTO and IBM distinguished engineer, teased the IBM i community with his one-hour February 12 presentation, which is titled IBM i in 2025 – A Strategic Preview. You can access a recording of the presentation here.
Will made no attempt to hide the elephant in the room: A big announcement is looming. “All of you should be expecting a major release this year, because we do three years between major releases,” he said out of the gate. “I can’t announce everything or anything specifically right now, but you all should be expecting that.”
Reading between the tea leaves gives us a little more insight about what Big Blue might have up its sleeve. IBM launched the most recent release of IBM i, release 7.5, in 2022. That was three years after the launch of IBM i 7.4 in 2019, and six years after the launch of IBM i 7.3 in 2016. It shipped IBM i 7.2 in 2014 (only two years), but IBM i 7.1 came out in April 2010 (a four-year spread), bringing the recent average to three years between minor releases.
So, what exactly will IBM be announcing? Clearly, we will be getting a new release of the operating system. The question is whether it will be another minor release, i.e. IBM i 7.6 or whether it will be an entirely new version, i.e. IBM i version 8.1. (There never was an IBM i 6.0 or an IBM i 7.0 release because, as we all know, no one wants an X.0 release, except of course for OS/400 1.0 from 1988. There was no OS/400 V2R0, V3R0, V4R0, or V5R0 either, and for the same reason.) The early references we have seen in patches for the IBM i platform call it IBM i 7.6.
Source: IBM
But depending on how dramatic the changes to the software, this could change. The odds seem better for the latter, IBM i 8.1, in part because of the wording. Will said it will be a “major release,” which seems to hint at a new version. The timing also seems to favor a new Version, with a capital V. It’s been 15 years since IBM delivered a new version of IBM i, going back to version 7.1. If IBM waits another three years to deliver a new version, that would be 18 years between new versions. That would mean that nearly half the platform’s entire lifespan (40 years in 2028) would be spent on version 7. Which seems doubtful.
History suggests that Rochester has a full-blown new version of the OS in the works. IBM launched OS/400 V5R1 in May 2001, and unveiled i5/OS V6R1 in April 2008, about seven years later. IBM delivered five minor releases of V4 over four years, and four minor releases of version 5 over seven years. It delivered seven minor releases of version 3, but did all that within a quick three-year period, from May 1994 (V3R0M5) to August 1997, when it released OS/400 V4R1. The data hints that a new version is in the offing.
IBM may, of course, do IBM i 7.6 in the spring and IBM 8.1 in the fall when new Power11 machines are out.
Whatever the new number or the new name (Heidi Schmidt of PKS Software has suggested it may be time for a new name, something IBM hasn’t done since April 2008) turns out to be, what is arguably more important is what new features and capabilities IBM ships with the new midrange OS. Will provided some hints about what’s coming down the pike during his Guided Tour.
“I don’t really think the strategy that we have has changed at its core. But there are new things happening in every strategic area,” Will said. “There are things coming. Again, I am restrained by what I can actually announce, but there are anchor functions.”
Those so-called anchor functions include AI, security, open source, application development, high availability, cloud, Db2, and the ACS and Navigator for i power tools.
On the AI front, IBM has been open about the development of an AI-powered co-pilot designed to help with RPG coding, dubbed RPG Code Assist (or sometimes Code Assist for RPG). The product is currently in development, with a beta release slated for the second quarter and general availability planned for the second half of the year.
Source: IBM
Will hinted at additional AI capabilities in the new release. “We want to embed AI into Db2 and make it easy for Db2 data to be shared with AI environments. We want solution providers who are building their own AI features to be able to use Power and its capabilities and IBM i underpinnings to be able to use those solutions . . . more efficiently and very tightly integrated, if they want them to be,” he said.
“We want to make it easier for people to deploy and manage AI workloads that are connected to IBM i, and we want to allow people to have assistance in managing and anticipating issues,” Will continued. “You won’t see necessarily an announcement about every one of these things in 2025, but we are setting ourselves up with the underlying underpinnings that each of these can be addressed as they become more necessary in our environment and as they become more mature in their technologies.”
Security has been the top concern of IBM i shops for nine straight years, according to Fortra’s annual IBM i Marketplace Study, and IBM will be looking to make it easier for customers to configure the system to be secure.
“Security is going to be a big part of what we do,” Will said. “And we’re going to be talking a lot about it when we get to that next release.”
IBM’s application development strategy is heavily dependent on open source. Support for new languages, such as Python, Node.js, and PHP, has been delivered through open source software that runs in the PASE AIX runtime. More recently, adoption of the open source VS Code development environment has skyrocketed with the availability of Code for IBM i, which is something that IBM has supported.
“That has been a real boon, a real benefit for people who hire people out of school who don’t know RPG,” Will said. “That’s helped us make decisions on how we’re going to support doing application development and application modernization and artificial intelligence into the future of IBM i.”
Source: IBM
Beyond programming, Will stated that working on IBM i and managing the IBM i environment should become more open and “Linux-like.”
“Some of the skills issues are people don’t know how to manage IBM i and IBM i’s unique way, and so we need to be able to make it possible for people to manage IBM i, learning how to use things in tools that are more open,” he said. “We know that the experience that most people have with open source is open source running on Linux in environments, and so we’re going to have to make it easier than ever to do open source in a Linux like way.”
One item that Will did not bring up was whether or not some of the old utilities that have been around since, in some cases, the System3 days, will survive into the new release. For instance, will SEU still be around? Liam Allan received quite a bit of feedback when he asked in 2023 whether it should be killed off. IBM began the purge of old greenscreen utilities with the May 2024 Technology Refresh for IBM i 7.4 and 7.5, which saw several tools get the ax.
Will didn’t address the topic in his IBM i Guided Tour. “What we’ve been driving towards is making sure that IBM i of tomorrow or today is not just what IBM i was in the past,” Will said.
On the high availability front, IBM has seen solid adoption of PowerHA and its Db2 Mirror product. In October, IBM announced a new “migrate while active” offering that leverages Db2 Mirror data replication to move IBM i environments from on-prem into IBM’s Power VS environments running in IBM Cloud. Will hinted that there will be an expansion of the “while active” tech.
“I’ve talked a bit about Db2 Mirror-based technology that’s been applied to helping people migrate workloads to the cloud if they want to,” he said, “and I’ve given you a hint that that same kind of technology is going to be applied to more users through more use cases, more examples of how that technology can help clients reduce downtime, even if they’re not using it specifically to do a mirrored continuous availability environment.”
Will and his team heavily rely on customer feedback from the IBM Ideas portal and customer advisory councils to guide development of the IBM i platform. To that end, there will be a certain number of enhancements to existing products, as every major new version and minor Technology Refresh sees, he said during the IBM i Guided Tour.
“Because we continuously are evaluating the ideas that have been submitted to us and the suggestions that have come from our advisory councils on new Db2 capabilities, new SQL services, new Navigator and ACS stuff, security things beyond the big thing that we’re going to be doing – all of that stuff gets new enhancements this year,” he said. “As we do our announcements and go and participate in the conferences, you’ll get the details behind all of that.”
When will we see the announcement? Well, we know IBM favors Tuesdays for big announcements. There are 11 Tuesdays between now and May 19, when COMMON’s POWERUp 2025 conference begins at the Disneyland Hotel in Anaheim, California. Which one of those Tuesdays will be the big one? Keep reading IT Jungle to find out.
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