• IBM i 7.6 Brings More Security Improvements Than Just MFA

  April 14, 2025 Alex Woodie

  Multi-factor authentication (MFA) is the big headliner with IBM i 7.6, which IBM begins shipping at the end of the week. This is good and right, since IBM i customers have been begging IBM to add MFA to the platform for so long. But the new IBM i release brings several other major security enhancements that customers will appreciate too, including a new command to disable non-secure connections, new encryption algorithms, streamlined regulatory compliance, and an easy way to tell what security patches have been applied, among others.

  IBM has made it clear that it is taking security seriously on …

  Read more

• z17 Mainframes Give IBM Time To Ramp AI-Accelerated Power11 Systems

  April 14, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We had been expecting for the Power11 processors and their new Power Systems servers to be announced sometime around the spring to early summer of this year and to start shipping in volume in the summer, maybe in June or July, with a nice sales bump in the second half of 2025. However, now the Power11 launch will be in the second half of the year, and IBM’s Systems group will be counting on a bump first from the System z17 mainframes that were launched last week.

  This has happened before, and more than once, and it is a good …

  Read more

• Guru: Unlocking The Power Of %CONCAT And %CONCATARR In RPG

  April 14, 2025 Gregory Simmons

  When working with strings in RPG, especially in modern free-format code, the %CONCAT and %CONCATARR built-in functions (BIFs) offer efficient and readable solutions for combining strings. These functions simplify the process of concatenating multiple string values, making your code cleaner and easier to maintain. In this article, we will explore how they work and demonstrate their practical applications.

  The %CONCAT BIF allows you to combine multiple strings. It’s a more efficient and readable alternative to traditional concatenation using the + operator.

  Here’s a simple example:

  **Free
  Ctl-Opt Main(CONCAT_1) ActGrp(*Caller);
  
  Dcl-Pr pause ExtProc('sleep');
    time_to_sleep Uns(10) Value;
  End-Pr;
  
  Dcl-Proc CONCAT_1;
  
    Dcl-S firstName 

  …

  Read more

• As I See It: Lucie, Lucie, Lucie

  April 14, 2025 Victor Rozek

  There is a school of thought that views AI as possibly being the last invention humankind will ever have to create. The theory is that AI, particularly artificial general intelligence (AGI), will assimilate so much knowledge and reasoning skill that it will out-think, out-plan, and out-create anything mere mortals can hope to achieve.

  Well, not if France has anything to do with it. There appears to be a wide disparity in the competence of AI renderings as demonstrated by the charming, but unreliable, French chatbot named Lucie. The government was recently forced to take its chatbot offline because it was …

  Read more

• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 27, Number 15

  April 14, 2025 Doug Bidwell

  There are so many announcements, and one of the big ones is ACS 1.1.9.8! We downloaded the new ACS and we have used this for a day, and so far there are no known issues at this time. We suggest treading lightly with this tool until after general availability on April 18. But it is looking good so far, though!

  There is also a new security vulnerability, which is Security Bulletin: IBM i is vulnerable to an out-of-bounds write in NTP services due to multiple vulnerabilities. More information available at this link. The issue can be addressed by applying …

  Read more

• Plotting Out Power Systems And IBM i To 2040 And Beyond

  April 8, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It may be hard to believe, but with the launch of IBM i 7.6 today, it has been 13,440 days since OS/400 V1R1 was announced on June 21, 1988, and Big Blue has delivered 27 distinct releases of the OS/400 and IBM i platform with dozens of Technology Refresh interim updates between releases in the IBM i 7.X series.

  It took nearly three years to go from OS/400 V1R1 to OS/400 V2R1, and there were no interim releases and Technology Refreshes were not going to be invented for a long time. With the V2 series, hardware and software releases in …

  Read more

• IBM i 7.6 Delivers “Massive Security Improvement” With Built-In MFA

  April 8, 2025 Alex Woodie

  Big Blue today announced IBM i 7.6, the first new release of the operating system in three years. While version 7.6 brings a range of enhancements, arguably the biggest new feature is the addition of multi-factor authentication directly into the operating system, which will make adopting MFA simple and represent a “massive security improvement” at no additional cost to IBM i shops, the IBM i security architect said.

  MFA has emerged as an industry requirement to improve security and prevent unauthorized access to applications and data. Most North American banks require customers to enter additional codes that are texted or …

  Read more

• Oft-Requested SQL Function Coming In IBM i 7.6

  April 8, 2025 Alex Woodie

  IBM i engineers and product managers have no shortage of feature requests to wade through, some of which make it into the platform and many of which do not. With the upcoming delivery of IBM i 7.6, IBM will be delivering one of the most often requested features: Support for UPDATE and DELETE statements in the data-change-table-reference clause of a SQL statement.

  While the capability to update and delete statements with data-change-table-reference may not sound like a big deal, it actually represents a significant improvement that will simplify database programming tasks for developers, according to Scott Forstie, IBM’s Db2 for …

  Read more

• IBM Buys Snowflake Expert Hakkoda To Speed Data Modernization For AI

  April 8, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The company may be best known for selling systems and software, but IBM still has a pretty large consultancy and services business even after spinning off a lot of outsource and hosting businesses as Kyndryl several years ago. Expertise is important to any consultancy, which means having the knowledge about how to solve pesky problems that can be applied to many clients, speeding up their projects and bolstering IBM’s revenues and profits.

  That, in a nutshell, is what IBM’s acquisition of Hakkoda, consultancy founded as a partner to help IT shops move to Snowflake, the cloudy data warehouse system provider, …

  Read more

• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 27, Number 14

  April 8, 2025 Doug Bidwell

  If you need a little something to wake you up, or a little night reading before you  drift off to sleep, check out the Known Issues And Fix Information database at Big Blue for the IBM platform, which you can see here. The IBM i PTF Guide is meant to save you from having to be familiar with this, of course. But it can’t hurt to be aware of this database.

  Here is the rundown of PTF Groups by IBM i release level since we last published:

  PTF Groups 7.5:

  • HIPERs (High Impact/Pervasive)
  • Java
  • Backup Recovery Solutions
  • Content Manager

  …

  Read more

Previous Articles Next Articles