It Looks Like 2026 Will Be a Good Year For Power-IBM i Upgrades

January 26, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan

We look forward every year to having our hands on the latest IBM i Marketplace Survey results, which are gathered in the fall and presented in January the following year. This is the 12th IBM i Marketplace Survey, and we never forget that it was our own Dan Burger who talked to Tom Huntington at HelpSystems, now Forta, to get the survey started. We do our part to try to get you all to take the survey and we use it as grist for our models of the base, which we also share with you.

This being a new year with a new Power11 generation of processors announced in July and shipping in volume through the fall and into this winter, we are going to start by looking at the upgrade plans that the 315 people who took the survey said they had for 2026. We could argue about how statistically significant this polling data is, but the simple fact is this is all the data that we have. So we have to make good with what we got.

As you can see, 8 percent of those polled said that they planned to upgrade only their systems hardware this coming year with another 25 percent saying the plan was to upgrade their systems software. (We assume that people are not conflating systems software with application software, but as we look at it, the question is not specific. Hardware unambiguously implies system hardware, but the word software does not necessarily only mean system software.) We see that another 37 percent say they are upgrading both their hardware and systems software. Only 30 percent of customers said they were doing nothing, and when you do the math, that means 70 percent of customers are doing something.

These are pretty good numbers. A year ago, as the Power10 line was coming to its end, only 6 percent of customers said they were upgrading their hardware, and only 30 percent said they were upgrading their hardware and their software, and only 23 percent said they were upgrading their software. That meant 42 percent of customers were going to sit on the sidelines in 2025, and this is one reason why we think IBM did not reach our forecast of $2 billion in Power Systems revenues last year. Hope springs eternal, of course. . . .

If you look at the 2026 numbers another way, then 45 percent of those polled said that they were going to do a hardware upgrade this year. This is a high share by any measure, particularly when we know plenty of AS/400 and Power Systems shops have kept their machines in the field for five, six, and even sometimes seven years. Which brings up another point. A hardware upgrade might not mean a system swap, but just the activation of additional capacity on an existing machine. Which is fair. Bit a new system and a capacity on demand activation are both “hardware upgrades.” Customers are spending more money for more capacity.

It would be interesting to see which way those taking the poll thought about this, and as far as I know, this is the first time I thought of this distinction. And I didn’t think of it when I was on the webinar for the survey results, either. But it has been bothering for a few days that it looked like nearly half of the base was looking to upgrade in 2026.

This would be great, of course, but it flies in the face of what we know anecdotally happens at customers. Customers are loathe to do serial number upgrades because it forces them to write off their investments early if they have had the machine less than five years. And they put off upgrading their system – by which I mean changing the processor generation either by a formal upgrade from Big Blue or by swapping an old machine out and a new one in – for as long as possible and squeeze as much out of their relatively large investment in Power Systems iron and IBM i software for as long as possible.

Most of us are no different with our cars and trucks, although some just lease autos and get a new one every three years. Someone else gets the car or truck that is returned, or it is sold into a car rental fleet or in a secondary market by dealers. The analogy holds here are as well. What this chart also doesn’t show is who is lagging, always hanging back a few generations and happy to do so to save money.

The good news is that most customers are saying that they are going to do something this year. And upgrading software is relatively easy, although with IBM i 7.2 off maintenance and IBM i 7.3 in extended support, customers on these are earlier releases are going to have to do something. Big Blue will stop selling IBM i 7.4 on April 30 and this release will go into extended support on September 30, which will drive more than a few to think about IBM i 7.5 or IBM i 7.6, which means the oldest machine that can be acquired is a Power9 system running IBM i 7.5. Depending on what IBM announces with the forthcoming Power S1112 “mini” machine, a lot of entry shops might go all the way to IBM i 7.6 on Power11 rather than hang back.

We shall see.

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