• Talking Power Systems And IBM i With Bargav Balakrishnan

  January 20, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In last week’s issue of The Four Hundred, we told you about how the Power Systems division had a new vice president of product management – to be specific, Bargav Balakrishnan, who has spent decades in various technical and management roles within Big Blue. Balakrishnan takes over from Steve Sibley, who has been steering Power Systems hardware development since July 2007 and who was the longest serving executive in that role since the launch of the AS/400 back in 1988.

  This week, we had a chat with Balakrishnan about the Power Systems business and the IBM i platform, and …

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• 2025 IBM i Predictions, Part Two

  January 20, 2025 Alex Woodie

  With new wall calendars and a new (old) guy in the White House, change is in the air as we start off 2025. That much was obvious from the first installment of IBM i predictions, which ran last week. This second batch of predictions may be even bolder than the first.

  We’re in the midst of a shakeup in the tech job market, thanks to several years of elevated inflation, emergence of cloud computing, and new technologies like AI. How does that impact the IBM i job market? For insight, we turn to Bob Langieri, the owner of Excel Technical …

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• Guru: Creating An RPG Stored Procedure With Parameters

  January 20, 2025 Mike Larsen

  There are times we need to build processes that will be used across different platforms. An example is a pricing routine. When a system needs to get pricing, we need to make sure the price the customer pays is the same regardless of how the order was created in our system.

  One way to create this functionality is using web services. Another way we can provide this functionality is through stored procedures. This series of tips will focus on different ways we can build stored procedures on IBM i.

  For the first part, I created an RPG program (Figure 1) …

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• Beta For RPG Coding Assistant On Track for 2Q25

  January 20, 2025 Alex Woodie

  IBM is ramping up development of the AI-based RPG Code Assist and expects to have a working prototype ready for testing by the end of the first quarter, IBM i chief technology officer Steve Will said in a webinar last month. The goal is to have a beta ready for during the second quarter and general availability hopefully in the second half of the year, he added.

  Large language models (LLMs) such as OpenAI’s GPT and Google’s Gemini have taken the world by storm, and companies are investing tens of billions of dollars in the nascent tech to gain …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 27, Numbers 1 And 2

  January 20, 2025 Doug Bidwell

  With these two first editions of the IBM i PTF Guide, we start the patching of the venerable descendant of the OS/400 operating systems for 2025. And so, it still being January, we can wish you all a happy and prosperous New Year and, for those of you who are struggling because of natural disasters, medical issues, or economic woes, we feel your pain. It is hard for a lot of us right now.

  With that, let us dive into the first and second of the Guides for 2025.

  With Numero Uno, there was not a whole lot going …

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• Power Systems Has A New Vice President Of Product Management

  January 13, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Throughout the history of IBM systems, there are executives who steer the development of hardware and those that steer the development of microcode, operating systems, and other software. Still others at Big Blue manage the processor roadmaps as well as the evolution of the systems that make use of them, including all of the peripherals that go into turning central processing units into systems.

  We have always liked these software and hardware people, as well as the multitudes who work with them and for them. They have given us valuable time and insight over the many decades that The Four …

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• 2025 IBM i Predictions, Part One

  January 13, 2025 Alex Woodie

  The new year is shaping up to be a big one for IBM i. A new release of the operating system is expected, as is a new processor and new servers built with them. Old utilities are slated to get the axe, but no one is quite sure how far IBM will cut. And then of course there’s what will happen in the IBM i community, which is where we turn for insight into what comes next.

  We start this year’s batch of IBM i predictions with Charlie Guarino, the president of Central Park Data Systems and the resident expert …

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• IBM Pulls Back The Covers On Migrate While Active

  January 13, 2025 Alex Woodie

  Last month, IBM began selling subscriptions to Migrate While Active, a new offering designed to speed and simplify the migrations of IBM i workloads from customers’ on-prem installations to Power Virtual Server running in IBM Cloud. Big Blue also last month hosted an online Guided Tour webinar that provided some much-needed answers to questions about the new offering.

  IBM launched the Migrate While Active in late October, a couple of weeks after unveiling the latest Technology Refreshes for IBM i 7.4 and 7.5. IBM didn’t provide a lot of initial information on the new offering, which was designed to …

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• IBM Announcement Roundup: A Little Bit Of Everything

  January 13, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Welcome to 2025, everybody. Nothing too big has happened on the IBM i front as far as we know, excepting the appointment of a new vice president for product management for the Power Systems line, which we report on elsewhere in this issue. But a lot of little thing have happened in recent weeks that bear pointing out, including a whole lot of patching that you can get caught up on in the IBM i PTF Guide also elsewhere in this issue.

  Let’s go through the IBM announcements relative to the Power Systems and IBM i customer base that we …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 26, Numbers 48 Through 50

  January 13, 2025 Doug Bidwell

  With The Four Hundred on hiatus for the holidays in late December and early January, we are playing catch up with editions of the IBM i PTF Guide. This week, we will close out 2024 with the final three editions put together in December.

  Let’s start with Volume 26, Number 48, which came out December 7. It starts with Security Bulletin: Vulnerability in IBM Java SDK affect IBM WebSphere Application Server and IBM WebSphere Application Server Liberty due to October 2024 CPU, which you can learn more about here. The affected products include WebSphere Application Server 8.5 and …

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