The IT Jungle

Fall TRs Expected Next Week At Combined IBM-COMMON Conference

October 19, 2026 Alex Woodie

Big Blue delayed its spring Technology Refreshes for IBM i earlier by three months this year so that it could simultaneously announce the new entry level Power server. It seems very unlikely that we’ll see such a delay for the fall TR, however, as IBM gears up for its semi-annual announcement for the still-popular midrange server at next week’s combined IBM-COMMON conference.

There are several indicators that the fall TR is looming. For starters, IBM essentially said that the fall TR is coming in the description for one of its upcoming IBM i Guided Tours, which have become the …
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GenAI Brings A New Kind Of Agile Computing That Needs Controls Even More

October 19, 2026 Michel Mouchon

As if trying to make use of a whole new computing architecture and coming up with the budget to experiment and roll features into production were not enough, there are a slew of issues when bringing GenAI to the IBM i datacenter.

There are those who say that people cannot learn from the experience of others. We have never believed that. Which is why we want to share some of the hard-won wisdom we have developed four years after the ChatGPT moment that rocked the world and that is changing many things. But not everything needs to change or will …
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IBM i, AI, And The Cost Of “We’ve Always Done It That Way”

October 19, 2026 Peg Tuttle

I’ve spent more than 30 years in the IBM i community, and I’ve heard one phrase more times than I can count: “We’ve always done it that way.” Sometimes it’s a perfectly reasonable explanation. Other times, I think it might be one of the most dangerous things we can say about a technology environment.

Think about it. IBM i has been running mission-critical business applications for decades. Manufacturing, distribution, financial services, healthcare, retail. These systems process orders, manage inventory, run financial applications, and support operations that cannot afford to stop.

And they do it remarkably well.

That reliability is one …
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Infor Says IBM i Customers Are Welcome To Use New AI

October 19, 2026 Alex Woodie

This month, Infor launched new AI software designed to help its ERP customers automate specific business processes in industry verticals. While the AI capability uses Infor’s cloud environment, customers that run Infor’s IBM i-based ERP software on-prem can also partake of the new capabilities, Infor tells IT Jungle.

In early October, Infor launched the latest release of its Infor Velocity Suite, which is a collection of AI agents, generative AI capabilities, process mining, and automation built for specific industries. Infor first launched its Velocity Suite in April 2025 to turn customers into “agentic enterprises” where AI agents go beyond …
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IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 28, Number 36

October 19, 2026 Doug Bidwell

Just a reminder that with IBM i 7.6 TR2 and IBM i 7.5 TR8, there is a virtual Ethernet connectivity advisory. IBM is currently investigating a reported issue affecting systems running IBM i 7.6 TR2 or IBM i 7.5 TR8. Installing the Technology Refresh (TR) can cause a complete loss of network connectivity on partitions using Virtual Ethernet adapter type 268C. IBM is actively working to identify the root cause and appropriate corrective action.

Development has identified the root cause of the issue and has released the following HIPER PTFs to address it. You can read more about this issue …
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Help Us Understand The IBM i Marketplace By Taking The Survey

October 19, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan

It is October, and that means the annual IBM i Marketplace Survey from Fortra is open, and we are asking you to spend some time and give us all some insight into what is going on inside of your IT organization.

The annual survey, which is in its 13^th year, opened up on September 15. You can give back to the IBM i community and help nudge IBM and ISVs in directions that are helpful to you by taking the survey, which you can do at this link.

The results of this survey are an invaluable resource for …
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IBM Goes GA With Power Autonomous Operations

October 12, 2026 Alex Woodie

IBM is now shipping Power Autonomous Operations, a new product that uses AI to help customers manage and optimize their Power environments with little to no human involvement. In addition to lowering the manual effort for administrators, the product provides a natural language interface for administrators, which IBM says lowers operational burden and accelerates problem resolution.

Big Blue unveiled Power Autonomous Operations in July when it made its delayed Spring Technology Refresh (TR) for IBM i and announced the Power S1112 entry-level machine. It started shipping Autonomous Ops on September 23.

Just as Bob is helping to accelerate productivity of …
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IBM Wheels And Deals To Sell Power Systems, Storage, and Software

October 12, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Companies are focused on generative AI and how it might be integrated into their applications and their business, but everyone realizes by now that adding GenAI to the systems stack often means needing to upgrade existing back office (transactions) and front office (data analytics) systems so they can feed the AI beast faster and more efficiently. Because there is nothing in the world more expensive than a GPU or an XPU sitting idle when it could be chewing on or spitting out tokens.

To that end, Big Blue is offering a “Buy Now. Pay Later” deal for customers who are …
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Guru: When RNF0722 Won’t Let Your Legendary RPG Program Compile

October 12, 2026 Gregory Simmons

Some RPG programs have been around for decades. They started small enough. Then another calculation was added here, another subroutine there, a /COPY member or two, and years of enhancements, fixes, and changing business requirements.

Eventually, some of them became colossal. And let’s face it, we all have “legacy” or, as some would argue, “legendary” programs that are older than a lot of our new hires.

We all know these programs. They’re the ones everybody agrees should be broken apart someday, but they’re also important production programs that still need to be maintained today. And sometimes “today” presents a very …
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A Read-Only MCP Server For Db2 for i

October 12, 2026 Alex Woodie

IBM i developers who want to let their users query Db2 for i using AI tools like Claude Desktop and Cursor, but also want to limit their access to the database, may be interested in a new open source MCP server that connects to the database in read-only mode.

Roni Ström just wanted to be able to leverage the SQL-generation capabilities of latest AI coding assistants to be able to ask questions of Db2 for i using plain language. But the Finnish IBM i developer was becoming frustrated with the process.

“I kept doing the same thing,” Ström wrote in …
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IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 28, Number 35

October 12, 2026 Doug Bidwell

Another week, another bunch of things to ponder about the IBM i platform and get fixed or re-fixed. This is ever the way with systems software, which is constantly changing, and despite the fact that Big Blue is not Meta Platforms and it is not interested in “moving fast and breaking things” sometimes things don’t work right or stop working due to unintended consequences.

This is life on an Earth with an icing of software on it.

First up, here is something to look out for: NTP Client job can’t start after applying latest PTF (SJ11498). More information is available …
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Please Take The IBM i Marketplace Survey So We Know What You Know

October 12, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Yup, it is that time of the year again. The annual IBM i Marketplace Survey from Fortra is open, and we are asking you to spend some time and give us all some insight into what is going on inside of your IT organization.

The annual survey, which is in its 13^th year, opened up on September 15. You can give back to the IBM i community and help nudge IBM and ISVs in directions that are helpful to you by taking the survey, which you can do at this link.

The results of this survey are an …
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IBM’s Bob AI Assistant Can Now Live In Your Datacenter

October 5, 2026 Alex Woodie

Bob, the AI assistant developed by Big Blue for IBM i and other environments, is now available for deployment on-prem, IBM announced last week. The news is a boon for enterprises, government agencies, and other organizations that can’t risk sending sensitive data off site.

IBM announced Bob about a year ago to help with application development tasks, including understanding, explaining, generating, refactoring, transforming, and testing code. When Bob 1.0 launched in April, Bob supported IBM i-specific languages like RPG, CL, and DDS, as well as SQL and COBOL. However, it lacked a native connection to IBM i code residing …
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Start Where the Data Lives: Best Practices for Taking IBM i Into AI

October 5, 2026 Doug McMaster Ron Venzin and Gregg Rohaly

The AI conversation has arrived at the IBM i shop, and in most cases, it did not come in through the computer room door. It came down from the boardroom, or over from finance, or sideways from a sales vice president who watched a demo at a conference and wants to know why the company cannot ask its own order history a question in plain English. The IBM i manager is then handed a question that sounds technical but is strategic: can our core platform play in this, or do we need to replace it to get there?

That is …
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Guru: A Modernization Experiment Using IBM Bob 2.0

October 5, 2026 Dan Darnell and Eric Whitcomb

The most common use case for business applications is the CRUD model. The Create, Read, Update, and Delete operations, performed against a business database, are found almost everywhere. Behind every fancy inquiry dashboard with all the graphical bling you can muster are a slew of tried and true so-called “maintenance programs” doing the heavy lifting over the data being presented. Whether it is back-office parameter tables, customer maintenance, or order entry applications, the CRUD model is fundamental. Most of us can whip out a simple green-screen maintenance program with our eyes closed in, oh, a couple hours or so, depending …
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How Are IBM i Shops Using AI? Fortra and COMMON Want to Know

October 5, 2026 Alex Woodie

Artificial intelligence is taking the world by storm, changing how we do things in fundamental ways. It’s automating complex tasks, accelerating scientific breakthroughs, and shifting how people work. It’s also changing how we interact with the IBM i server, which is the focus of a new survey you can take now from Fortra and COMMON.

Fortra is no stranger to surveys on IBM i, as we see with the IBM i Marketplace Survey. The company ran its first IBM i Marketplace Survey in the fall of 2014 for release in early 2015, back when it was still known as HelpSystems. …
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IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 28, Number 34

October 5, 2026 Doug Bidwell

This week, you have a bunch of things to look at and ponder, as well as patches to Rational Developer for i and a bunch of security bulletins.

First, there is a Virtual Ethernet Connectivity Advisory for IBM i 7.6 TR2 and IBM i 7.5 TR8. IBM is investigating a network connectivity issue that can affect IBM i 7.6 TR2 and 7.5 TR8 systems using Virtual Ethernet adapter type 268C. Read this link for further details and do so before putting on the latest cume and groups.

And in the whoops column, there is also a note that Security PTF …
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It Is Time Once Again To Take The IBM i Marketplace Survey

October 5, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan

The time has come to take the annual IBM i Marketplace Survey from Fortra, and we are asking you to spend a few precious moments and give us all some insight into what is going on inside of your IT organization.

The annual survey, which is in its 13^th year, opened up on September 15. You can give back to the IBM i community and help nudge IBM and ISVs in directions that are helpful to you by taking the survey, which you can do at this link.

The results of this survey are an invaluable resource for …
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PHP’s Evolution On The IBM i Platform Continues

September 28, 2026 Alex Woodie

PHP was one of the first open source languages and runtimes to come to IBM i way back in the early 2000s. More than two decades later, open source is thriving on IBM i with hundreds of projects, while PHP is considered a hardened, enterprise-grade language for modern Web applications. This fall will see at least one new release of PHP coming to IBM i, version 8.6, and perhaps more.

We are all indebted to the early backers of PHP on the IBM i platform, who saw the potential for the open-source project to evolve into the sturdy business language …
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Protecting IBM i Data For The AI Revolution

September 28, 2026 Richard Dolewski

AI is a prime-time conversation in every walk of life. No longer just a buzzword. AI is changing the Enterprise Security model, so I ask, “Are you ready for this next IT transformation?” Organizations everywhere are accelerating artificial intelligence initiatives at a rapid pace and scale.

Most conversations focus on what AI can do for business today and how fast it will be deployed. AI drives automated workflows, autonomous efficiencies, supply chain improvements, faster time to market, and productivity. True modernization comes from constantly reviewing how things are done, embracing new tools, protocols, and working practices to improve …
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