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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Oracle Dips A Toe Into IBM’s EBCDIC World
August 24, 2026 Alex Woodie
IBM’s Ted Codd may have invented the relational database back at the Almaden Lab in the early 1970s, but it was Larry Ellison’s Oracle that offered the world the first wildly commercially successful RDBMs. Technically, the System/38 was announced, with its integrated relational database, before the first version of Oracle was announced.
Since then, Oracle and IBM have competed intensely to win and run transactional database workloads for some of the biggest enterprises around. But there was always one key difference between the two companies’ offerings: Oracle used an ASCI character set while the IBM midrange and mainframe systems relied …
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Inside The Security Enhancements In ACS
August 24, 2026 Alex Woodie
Keeping track of IBM i configurations and how users are using IBM i is important for security purposes. But administrators and analysts are already so overburdened with other responsibilities that it is easy to let something slip by. That is why IBM is building new SQL capabilities into Access Client Solutions, which hopefully will make it easier for IBM i shops to spot potentially damaging configs or uses before they hurt the organization.
ACS is one of the most important tools provided by IBM for IBM i professionals, as it contains a slew of facilities for interacting with the system. …
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Inside The Encryption Key Management Changes In IBM i 7.6
August 10, 2026 Alex Woodie
IBM is making significant changes to how it handles encryption keys with IBM i 7.6. The big news is that IBM i shops now have bring-your-own-key (BYOK) support via IBM Key Protect for IBM Cloud offering, which scratches a certain regulatory itch. But IBM has also bolstered how it handles master keys and save/restore keys stored on the IBM i server, which boosts security, but also makes IPLs following DR events more complicated.
Let’s start with the new bring-your-own-key (BYOK) support for IBM i in IBM Key Protect for IBM Cloud offering. IBM Key Protect is a cloud-based key management …
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Astera Makes Extracting Legacy Report Data an AI Specialty
August 10, 2026 Alex Woodie
For all that large language models (LLMs) are really good at – and they are great at a few things – understanding large reports generated by IBM i servers and System Z mainframes is not one of them. A Southern California company called Astera has identified this gap and developed its own AI-based tool for extracting information from this valuable resource.
Foundation AI models and LLMs are probabilistic systems, and they work best in the gray zones: Inputting words and images, and outputting other words and images that are similar to the originals that it was trained on but not …
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Welcoming The New IBM i Chief Architect And Other New Top Brass
August 3, 2026 Alex Woodie
As you have likely already heard, IBM i Chief Architect Steve Will retired last week after a 41-year IBM career, and was succeeded in that role by Kris Whitney, who previously was the IBM i platform’s chief engineer. But this is just one change among several in IBM i leadership in recent months.
For the past four years, Will officially had three roles at IBM, including chief architect for IBM i, IBM i chief technology officer, and IBM Distinguished Engineer. The last two titles, which Will gained in 2022, were significant at the time as they denoted Will’s position …
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How IBM Bolstered IBM i Resilience In The Summer Tech Refreshes
August 3, 2026 Alex Woodie
The capability to weather disruptions is a hallmark of the IBM i platform and a major reason why so many companies around the world rely on it to run their businesses. To that end, IBM has enhanced the platform’s resilience capabilities as part of the recent Technology Refresh announcements with updates to Migrate While Active and the BRMS facility, as well as bringing a new VTL to IBM i.
As mentioned in our first story about the 2026 Summer TRs, IBM has updated Migrate While Active, which it originally announced back in October 2024 as a variant of the …
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Does AI Mark The End Of The ERP Era?
July 27, 2026 Alex Woodie
For decades, enterprise resource planning (ERP) software has been the backbone of corporate computing. Whether running on-prem or in the cloud, millions of businesses have relied on ERP components to automate their business processes and provide a competitive advantage. But the emergence of generative and agentic AI threatens to upend our relationship with ERP software. Where will ERP end up?
There is no doubt that AI is improving in capabilities and reliability, often by the week. The top frontier models from companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, and DeepSeek feature reasoning capabilities that few people could have plausibly predicted would …
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What IBM’s Got Cooking In Db2 For i In The Summer TRs
July 27, 2026 Alex Woodie
Last week, IBM announced PTFs containing a slew of new Db2 for i features and enhancements as part of the Technology Refresh for IBM i 7.6 and 7.5. While the database is just a part of the story for IBM i 7.6 TR2 and 7.5 TR8, it’s a critical piece of the puzzle. Here’s a preview of the new stuff that you can now play with.
As part of the summer TRs that we covered last week, IBM delivered five functional enhancements to Db2 for i as part of the Summer TR, shipped one security enhancement, one enhancement for …
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Big Blue Finally Unveils First IBM i Tech Refreshes Of 2026
July 20, 2026 Alex Woodie
Well, that took a little longer than usual. Last week, IBM finally made its first IBM i Technology Refresh announcements of 2026, formally unveiling the group of updates that collectively will make up IBM i 7.6 TR2 and 7.5 TR8. With the fall TR ostensibly just three months away, the good news with the two new TRs is that the general availability date is this Friday.
Since IBM moved to the TR cycle back in 2010, it has traditionally given the IBM i community two big updates per year, one in the spring (normally April) and one in the …
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Relion Solutions Launches With A Focus On Customer Service
July 20, 2026 Alex Woodie
Customer service sure isn’t what it used to be. Instead of helpful customer service representatives who pick up the phone before the second ring, you have overgrown phone trees, unhelpful AI agents, and ticketing systems that seem designed to shield customers from companies and companies from customers. You won’t find any of this at Relion Solutions, a new IBM midrange business partner that launched earlier this month with a desire to focus relentlessly on serving the needs of its IBM i customers.
Relion Solutions was co-founded by Heather Dinho and Richie Palma, two IBM i veterans with years of experience …
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