2025: An IBM i Year In Review
January 12, 2026 Alex Woodie
The calendar has flipped over into the new year, bringing with it hope that the next twelve months will unfold in a positive way. It’s also a good time to reflect on what 2025 brought to the IBM i community, and to remember the big news events that occurred in our little sector of the IT market.
January
Bargav Balakrishnan, vice president of product management, IBM.
IBM hired a new vice president of product management for the Power Systems business. Bargav Balakrishnan was promoted to the position, which was previously held by Steve Sibley. Balakrishnan, who has a master’s degree in electrical engineering from the University of Michigan, started off in the System z mainframe division, and worked his way up in 2017 to be chief of staff to Ross Mauri, the general manager of the System z (or zSystem as IBM has started calling it) before moving over to Power Systems in 2022. Balakrishnan sat for a Q&A with IT Jungle later in the month, which you can read here.
Fortra formally released the results of the 2025 IBM i Marketplace Survey. Some of the results were not surprising, such cybersecurity maintaining its number one position as the top concern for the ninth straight year. But other findings were interesting, such as the increasing importance of AI/ML and BI/analytics to IBM i shops. Capacity planning also saw a surge of interest, which few probably planned for.
We received quite a few IBM i predictions, which we ran in three articles in January. Some of the predictions were spot on: Power11 servers did arrive in 2025, AI grew as predicted, modernization investments continued, more workloads moved into the cloud, IBM itself i did not die, and MFT did not go away (in fact, IBM incorporated it directly into the OS, as we would see in April with the launch of IBM i 7.6). All of our predictions are archived for posterity, and for sharing/spreading responsibility/blame. You can read part 1 here, part 2 here, and part 3 here.
February
IBM released its fourth quarter 2024 and year-end financial results this month, and the results were mixed but also promising. After running IBM’s opaque official figures through his trusty number machine, IT Jungle co-editor Timothy Prickett Morgan deduced that IBM’s “real” systems revenue amounted to nearly $9.5 billion for the year, with Power Systems pushing about $1.6 billion of that. That’s nowhere near the heyday of 2009, when Power pushed $5 billion in sales, but it’s a welcomed rebound from the low point of 2020.
Armed with fresh figures from Fortra’s recent IBM i Marketplace Report, we eagerly dove in to analyze what they meant. We looked at the distribution of Power hardware (it’s mostly Power9 and Power10 in the study). We also looked at what IBM i operating systems are used (primarily IBM i versions 7.4 and 7.5). What programming languages and open source tools are used by IBM i shops was another story. We followed that up with a story on IBM i migrations and IBM i shops’ outlook in early March.
The next batch of IBM Champions made their debut in February 2025. IBM recognized 67 IBM Champions for Power with the IBM i subgroup in the EMEA region, 51 in the Americas, five in APAC, and eight in Japan. We are hopeful that IBM i will be given its own category in the IBM Champions program this year, instead of labeling them IBM Champions for Power within an IBM i sub-group.
March
IBM raised prices across the board on March 3, including Power Systems servers, FlashSystem and Storwize storage systems, PowerVS cloud, and tape drives. Shipping and handling fees also went up, and software license fees also went up. IBM followed it up with another set of targeted price hikes later in the month. Together, they represented the fourth round of broad price increases for Big Blue over the past year. The hikes went into effect on April 1, yet nobody was laughing.
SAP has taken its lumps for its plan to move its entire customer base to S/4 HANA running in the cloud. But the company was bullish on its plan to move its older SAP Business Suite customers running on-prem on IBM servers to PowerVS, IBM’s public cloud offering. Companies that run older SAP software on IBM i servers may not be fully satisfied, but moving SAP apps to a Power-based cloud may be preferable than running it on X86.
Elon Musk waving his “chainsaw for bureaucracy.”
Elon Musk would have a falling out with President Trump later in the year, but DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency) was in full swing in March 2025. By some counts, the “chainsaw for bureaucracy” slashed more than 200,000 federal jobs. He also brought to light the need to modernize business processes at the Office of Personnel Management, which he claimed limited the number of people that can leave the federal government due to the need to move paperwork down an elevator shaft in an Iron Mountain facility located in an abandoned limestone mine in rural Pennsylvania. After a public feud with the president, Musk left DOGE early. At publishing time, it’s not clear if his paperwork has been processed.
April
The long wait for the new release of the IBM i operating system was officially over on April 8, when IBM officially launched IBM i version 7.6. The big new feature in 7.6 was the addition of integrated a multi-factor authentication (MFA) facility, which the IBM i security architect declared a “massive security improvement.”
IBM i 7.6 brought a variety of other improvements to other parts of the IBM i stack. That includes enhancements to Navigator for i, enhancements in IBM i networking, several new features in the Db2 for i database, a big new SQL function, and other security enhancements in IBM i.
After announcing it was hiking the price of a bunch of things in March, IBM actually offered some price decreases in April. If you were buying a Power box in Japan, Sweden, Poland, or Thailand, then you saw prices going down.
May
IBM i 7.6 marked the end of the road for a number of old greenscreen tools. That includes Application Development ToolSet (ADTS) tools like Screen Design Aid (SDA) and Report Layout Utility (RLU), along with FAX/400 and CICS for i. The end of support should not have come as a surprise to the IBM i community, as Big Blue stated it was going to do this two years earlier. SEU escaped the knife, for now.
The IBM i community descended on Disneyland for COMMON’s annual conference. POWERUp 2025 attracted around 1,200 attendees (100 more than POWERUp 2024 in Fort Worth) for a week of IBM i education, training, and socializing. The IBM i youth movement was once again visible and strong, and there were many first-time attendees. “Our goal is to ensure the next 65 years,” COMMON president Floyd Del Muro said during the opening session.
The POWERUp 2025 opening session.
IBM launched a new open source event monitoring tool for IBM i. Dubbed Manzan, the free product was designed to provide developers with a versatile way to ingest and redistribute a variety of IBM i event data types to downstream tools.
June
When will we see IBM i version 8? Is Power12 in the works? What will become of SEU? These are the questions we asked IBM i Chief Architect Steve Will and his various lieutenants during an interview at the COMMON conference. Will said the IBM i community will not see a version 8.0 anytime soon, at least until 7.9 has been out for a while. On SEU’s fate, he was pretty clear: “I do not see a reason ever to kill SEU,” Will said.
IBM made some news around its LTO-10 tape offerings this month. The new generation of tape offers some impressive capabilities, including native capacity of 30 TB on LTO cartridges and 400 MB/sec data speeds. Thanks to GenAI, the value of data is going up, and tape remains the most affordable way to store huge amounts of data.
The IBM i turned 37 on June 21, during the summer “Soltis,” as it were. It’s quite an achievement that the AS/400 has lasted this long. The future, however, is not at all clear. As TPM writes: “And it feels like the rate of change in IT is accelerating once again as GenAI is consuming a lot of the oxygen, imagination, and budget in the IT department, with a certain amount of fear, trepidation, and hope tossed in.”
July
In early July, IBM announced its new Power11 processor, as well as several new Power 11 systems. The new 16-core chips, which are based on a 7 nanometer process and manufactured by Samsung, run at a clock rate of 4.0 GHz to 4.15 GHz and utilize DDR5 memory (although some chips can use DDR4). It also announced several Power11 machines, including Power S1122, Power L1122, Power S1124, Power L1124, Power E1150, and Power E1180.
IBM’s new integrated MFA facility in IBM i 7.6 focused attention on the need for better authentication. However, the new MFA offering can’t be used in every environment, including IBM i 7.5 and earlier operating systems, which are not supported. To fill in the gaps, the IBM i vendor community stepped up to provide additional MFA capabilities that can work independently of IBM’s product or extend it, as needed.
IBM pulled out the stops on Migrate While Active, a new offering it originally unveiled in late 2024 to help PowerHA customers move data into PowerVS as part of the setup for an IBM i high availability environment. IBM recognized how important data migration is becoming in the hybrid cloud world, and so it announced that it would widen the scope with Migrate While Active. That means supporting additional protocols besides the Db2 Mirror protocol that it originally used, including the new partition mirror protocol it announced.
August
The IBM i pricing saga continued this month, with price increase and price cuts to various products. A couple of dozen countries got across-the-board cuts (or “foreign exchange price normalizations” for those keeping track at home) to Power9 and Power10 systems and storage. IBM also announced a cut to the Power S1012 Mini (code-named “Bonnell”) by about 12 percent.
Over the summer, IBM announced a new technical support program for Code for i, the popular plug-in for VS Code that allows IBM i developers to work with the code editor. VS Code has quickly become arguably the most popular IDE for IBM i developers, since Liam Allan launched the group of IBM i extensions under the Code for i package back in 2021. The support package, which covers the Code for i package itself along with various plug-ins, costs $24,500 per core per year, and covers five users per core.
IBM Expert Labs (formerly Lab Services) has been quietly churning out code for years. In August, IBM announced that it will be adding a pair of high availability capabilities developed by Expert Labs into its Power HA SystemMirror product. The new capabilities include Full System Replication (FSR) and Full System FlashCopy (FSFC).
September
IBM announced it was officially withdrawing IBM i 7.4 from marketing this month. The move was not unexpected, as IBM prefers to keep only two operating systems available for purchase on its shelves. IBM i shops have until April 30, 2026, to buy a copy of 7.4, along with the various licensed program products (LPPs) that go along with it.
This month brought us two IBM i conferences, including Infor’s inPower 2025 conference in Wisconsin, and COMMON’s NAViGATE conference taking place in Pennsylvania. imPower 2025 attracted about 450 Infor customers of ERP LX, ERP XA, and ERP System21, its three primary IBM i-based ERP systems and was hosted by those ERP systems’ user groups. NAViGATE 2025 hosted more than 110 sessions across various topics and also featured a vendor expo.
The cost of everything seems to be going up, but there’s one item that is going down in cost: mainframe modernization projects. That was the conclusion of Kyndryl’s 2025 State of Mainframe Modernization Survey, which included IBM i and zSystem customers. The short of it: Practitioners are getting better at modernization, they’re biting off smaller incremental projects instead of going for the Big Bang, and modernizations are proving to provide a better ROI than other IT projects (we’re looking at you, GenAI).
October
This month started off with a bang as IBM made its annual fall Technology Refresh announcement for IBM i 7.6 TR1 and 7.5 TR7. There wasn’t a ton of new stuff in the TRs, but what did make news was the end of two products, including Merlin and Watson Code Assist for IBM i. IBM’s mercy killing of Merlin was not unexpected, as it never gained much traction (who could have known IBM i shops would resist Kubernetes?) and suffered from poor market timing against the VS Code and Code for i juggernaut. WCA, however, was killed before it ever came to market. The replacement for WCA is Project Bob, which is currently in development.
AI accelerators are hot at the moment, as Nvidia customers and shareholders can attest. IBM cut ties with the GPU giant several years ago, but this month made some news around its AI accelerator named Spyre. Plugging into the PCI bus, a Spyre card is designed to accelerate the matrix math that’s critical for AI workloads. This could be a boon for running AI on zSystems and Power Systems.
The Power11 upgrade cycle helped to boost IBM Power Systems sales in the third quarter of 2025. IBM reported that sales of all servers and all storage accounted for $2.2 billion in revenues, which was a 28 percent increase compared to the third quarter of 2024. However, that was the end of the Power10 cycle, and customers may have been waiting for new Power11 servers. While it doesn’t look like IBM will hit $2 billion in Power Systems sales for the year, it looks to be on track for $1.67 billion, per TPM’s model.
November
Who needs pricing information to size new Power machines? Judging from the availability of this data on the IBM website, it seems that entry-level Power prospects and customers do not need it. Unfortunately, it’s much easier to get these details if you’re planning to run in the cloud or on X86 than running IBM midrange gear.
Getting price-performance information can be difficult. But it’s not impossible, as TPM showed us with his detailed story on entry level and midrange Power10 and Power11 machines. A week later, he brought you pricing information on some larger machines, including the S1122 and S1124.
Server sales have been hot, thanks to the AI boom. According to Gartner, data center systems sales in 2025 increased by 47 percent over 2024. Gartner expects hardware spending to cool considerably in 2026. However, it forecasts an increase in sales of software and IT services. It sees overall IT spending growing about 10 percent to $6.1 trillion.
December
Think Project Bob will be just another AI coding assistant for IBM i? Think again, IBM i Chief Architect Steve Will said during a recent IBM i Guided Tour. “It knows things about IBM i,” Will said. “It’s more than just a code assistant. It can understand what you are trying to do.” Bob is currently under development, with no timeline for delivery.
IBM i business architects Tim Rowe and Scott Forstie published their 100th episode of iSee, the video series they started in the winter of 2020. If you haven’t checked out iSee, it’s highly recommended. Rowe and Forstie give you the IBM i technical content you crave and a dose of humor to boot.
There’s a sector of the IT community that hopes that the GenAI boom will lead to artificial general intelligence (AGI). IBM CEO Arvind Krishna is not a member of that sector, as he made crystal clear during a recent interview. “I think that it is going to unlock trillions of dollars of productivity in the enterprise, just to be absolutely clear,” he told The Verge. “That said, I think AGI will require more technologies than the current LLM path.”
