Alex Woodie
Alex Woodie is Senior Editor at IT Jungle. He was previously editor of two of IT Jungle's main newsletters, Four Hundred Stuff and The Windows Observer. Prior to joining Midrange Server (as Guild Companies was formerly called) in October 2001, Alex was a products editor at now defunct publisher Midrange Computing, where he was first introduced to the AS/400 and covered hardware, software, and services for Midrange Technology SHOWCASE magazine. Before joining Midrange Computing, Alex was a staff writer for The Insurance Journal and a reporter and columnist with The Paradise Post newspaper. Woodie obtained his Bachelors of Arts degree in journalism from Humboldt State University in 1997. Upon graduation, Alex intended to make his way onto a major daily newspaper, but in 1999 he found himself drawn to the high-technology industry, where his background in science and engineering has suited him well. He lives in Northern San Diego County. When he is not writing next week's newsletters, Alex can be found in his favorite chair reading the day's paper, in the kitchen, or at the beach.
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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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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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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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IBM i Integration Gives Costco Shoppers Real-Time Inventory
September 28, 2026 Alex Woodie
Here’s the scene: Janet is perusing the computer aisles at Costco when suddenly she sees it: The exact configuration of a MacBook Pro she’s been looking for, at a really good price. As she’s getting ready to buy it, Janet makes a grim discovery: Costco is out of that particular MacBook Pro, and the item on display is the last one in the store.
Janet isn’t the first customer to be disappointed in this way. Retailers have long struggled to adequately reflect the actual warehouse product inventory with the items on display in the front of the store. Communicating out-of-stock …
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Code For i Continues To Grow. Here Is What’s New
September 21, 2026 Alex Woodie
Code for i has been the hottest open source project in the IBM i community for several years, and that popularity is not dropping. In fact, the community behind the red hot project continues to improve the VS Code-based development environment, including new functionality that we can expect to see released in the future.
Code for i is a VS Code plug-in originally created by Liam Allan in 2021 to make Web-based development possible for ILE developers on IBM i. The project has exploded in popularity over the past five years, with nearly 93,000 installs recorded on the Microsoft Marketplace …
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PowerSC: Your One-Stop Shop For Security On IBM i – And Beyond
September 21, 2026 Alex Woodie
Keeping on top of changing security threats is difficult, to say the least. It is even harder to map changing threats to changing configurations on your IBM i server. When your IT network also includes AIX and Linux systems, the difficulty gets multiplied. For these types of environments, IBM provides a tool called PowerSC.
When IBM launched PowerSC (which stands for security and compliance) as an IBM Lab Services product way back in 2010, it was primarily designed for setting up security configurations and running audits on AIX. That is not the case today, as the tool provides a plethora …
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Rocket Automates Manual IBM i Tasks With AI
September 14, 2026 Alex Woodie
Rocket Software has a multi-pronged AI strategy that spans multiple products and platforms. When it comes to the IBM i platform, this AI push has resulted in Rocket adding AI features that will automate previously manual tasks across its application modernization, change management, and high availability products.
AI continues to be the elephant in the IT room, but unlike those quiet elephants in that expression, which no one admits is there, this is the elephant that nobody can stop talking about and for good reason: The 2026 edition of AI appears to be the real deal.
Take a KPMG survey …
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LaserVault Goes iSCSI With Virtual Tape Library
September 14, 2026 Alex Woodie
LaserVault, the popular virtual tape library (VTL) for IBM i environments from Electronic Storage Corp., has gained support for iSCSI, giving customers more connectivity options beyond Fibre Channel and SAS connections. The new iSCSI support will be particularly useful for customers running the LaserVault ViTL offering in the cloud.
LaserVault ViTL is a disk-based backup solution that emulates LTO drives in IBM i and open systems environments. Customers have typically plugged the LaserVault device – either the appliance sold by Electronic Storage Corp. or the ViTL software running on an X86 server – into the IBM i server using those …
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Precisely To Add Ransomware Protection In MIMIX 11
August 31, 2026 Alex Woodie
Traditional high availability software that relies on real-time replication of journals is great at protecting against conventional threats, such as natural disasters or server failures. However, HA software is not so good at protecting against emerging threats, such as ransomware. That’s a weakness that Precisely is looking to address with the upcoming launch of MIMIX 11, which adds a new continuous data protection (CDP) capability.
While the IBM i operating system is generally protected from malware designed for Windows and Linux-based systems, it’s not immune from all attacks, including ransomware attacks. If left exposed on the Internet, the Integrated File …
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It’s D-Day For Cybersecurity, AI Firms Warn
August 31, 2026 Alex Woodie
The idea of sophisticated AI agents coordinating among themselves to launch a cyberattack on a major corporation sounds like something out of a science fiction novel. But it actually occurred earlier this year, and the agentic attacks will get more sophisticated soon if we don’t act swiftly to shore up defenses in legacy systems (like IBM i), a group of AI firms warned this month.
In an open letter, the leaders of 100 AI companies, including IBM, Google, Anthropic, and OpenAI, warned that the recent episodes of AI agents going rogue and launching sophisticated attacks on …
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