SEU’s Fate, An IBM i V8, And The Odds Of A Power13
June 2, 2025 Alex Woodie
At COMMON’s recent POWERUp conference, IT Jungle got a chance to sit down with IBM executives to talk about the IBM i business, upcoming Power announcements, and sundry other topics, like is IBM preparing to finally kill SEU, when will we see IBM i 8.0, and does IBM feel lucky enough to launch Power13? Here’s a brief accounting of what was said.
IBM Rochester has been in a housecleaning mode for a while now, clearing out the dead wood and rejiggering the product library for the 21st century. As part of this work, it’s moved to a subscription model and modernized its update methodology for open source software. Large swaths of the legacy Application Development ToolSet (ADTS) have been relegated to the digital chipper as IBM pushes customers to adopt modern development tools, such as VS Code and RDi, to create modern applications.
The launch of IBM i 7.6 marked the end of the road for two dozen IBM i tools in ADST and elsewhere, like Fax/400 and CICS for i. IBM also created a placeholder on one of its IBM Support webpages for a future round of product cuts in the next release of the operating system. That raised speculation in some circles that IBM was finally getting ready to put two of the most used – and also much hated – tools in the IBM i toolbox out to pasture: Source Entry Utility (SEU) and Programming Development Manager (PDM).
That will not happen, according to IBM i chief technology officer Steve Will.
“It’s hard to say never,” Will told us at POWERUp. “But I do not see a reason ever to kill SEU.”
While SEU is widely despised by folks who want IBM i customers to invest in building modern applications, it’s also widely used by folks who still run legacy applications built decades ago. SEU is by far the number one development tool on the platform, IBM i Marketplace studies show, which show how pervasive those old apps are. Besides that, in some instances, SEU is the perfect tool to quickly get onto the system and make a few quick changes.
IBM’s brass needs to balance these competing demands. “I understand why people would like it to not be an option,” Will said. “But I also have been talked to by enough clients who say every once in a while, you just got to go and make a quick change, and that is the best way to do it.”
The problem with killing SEU is that, in some instances, SEU isn’t just the best way to access IBM i – it’s the only way, said Tim Rowe, the IBM i architect in charge of development tools and Navigator.
“We can’t kill SEU. How’s the system manager when they’re in a restricted state going to edit anything?” Rowe said. “We don’t want customers using SEU to develop RPG and COBOL code. But it really needs to be there as a systems management editor, being able to do things. So from that perspective, SEU, PDM, we have no plans whatsoever” to kill the product.
IBM i 8.0?
Back in March, before the spring IBM i Technology Refresh in April, we speculated what the announcement might be. It could be IBM i 7.6, or maybe IBM would bite the bullet and move all the way up to version 8? Will had promised a “major IBM i announcement,” after all. Was a dot-release a “major announcement”?
It turns out of course that IBM went with version 7.6. Which begs the question: When will we finally get to version 8? IBM i version 7.1 launched back in 2010. Would IBM really spend two decades on a single version?
According to Will, it could actually be much longer, more than three-and-a-half decades, in fact. The next release will be IBM i 7.7, he said, and he has “absolutely no” plans to move to 8.0 any time soon. “Once we are done with 7.9, we will have to think about doing 8.0,” Will said.
Which begs another question: Has IBM ever had an X.9 release of IBM i or its predecessor operating systems, i5/OS and OS/400? The answer is no. The highest number of a point release is seven, reached with V3R7. If IBM ships a minor release every three years, its projected pace, then that means we’ll see IBM i 7.7 in 2028, 7.8 in 2031, and 7.9 in 2034. Then finally in the year 2037, IBM may think about rolling over the counter.
Or, maybe not. Will is not above having some fun with pesky reporters, after all. And IBM doesn’t discuss product releases this far out typically. Still, we had to ask, and that is what he said.
Speaking of numbers, IBM has long since given up on trying to keep its IBM i release numbers and Power processor version numbers in sync. The last time the numerical heavens lined up like that was Power7 and IBM i 7.1 back in 2010. It seemed like a good idea at the time, said Steve Sibley, vice president and business line executive in IBM Systems.
“We didn’t need to go to seven,” Sibley said. “We went to seven because we announced our seven hardware and we thought it rhymed.”
There appears to be no great rush within Big Blue to get to IBM i 8.0 (or really 8.1 because nobody wants a dot-oh release). In the olden days, there may have been some marketing benefits of having a bigger number, because it showed that customers were using the latest, greatest software. But that psychology actually works against IBM now, as customers are loathe to make the leap if they think it will be too disruptive.
“There’s not, at least in my view, that push in the market that says ‘Oh, you’re old because you’re still on IBM i 7.’ It’s more of an ‘Oh, if I move to 8, the people that are running it think that’s a bigger step,” Sibley said. “It actually potentially becomes more of an inhibitor of people moving forward versus an enticement.”
A different psychology may be at play when it comes to naming Power generations, which have progressed much more quickly than the IBM i operating system. IBM is on the cusp of announcing Power11, and Bill Starke, the IBM Distinguished Engineer and chief architect of the Power processor, talked openly at COMMON about early work on Power12 and beyond.
At risk of flaunting our arithmetic skills, we asked: What comes after Power12? Could it be Power13? There is obviously some skittishness to use the number 13, which superstitious people view as unlucky. Many hotels skip having a 13th floor, which has the effect of making the 14th floor the true 13th floor.
Would IBM’s marketing be able to overcome the superstition surrounding the number 13? Or would it be better to pull a page out of the PHP manual and make a big leap to a better number?
“That’s a really good point. I hadn’t gotten there yet,” Sibley allowed. “We may have to skip 13.”
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