• Positive News From The Kyndryl Mainframe Modernization Report

  September 15, 2025 Alex Woodie

  After a week of bad news, here’s something good to start your week: The costs of mainframe modernization projects are dropping while the return on investment (ROI) is rising, in large part due to AI. That’s according to Kyndryl’s 2025 State of Mainframe Modernization Survey, which documented “a degree of agility” the company wasn’t expecting in the massive projects.

  As it has for the past two years, Kyndryl commissioned Coleman Parkes Research to conduct a global survey of about 500 senior leaders at mainframe-using enterprises. By mainframe, the former IBM consulting business refers to System Z systems, IBM i …

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• NAViGATE, inPower 2025 On Tap for September 2025

  September 15, 2025 Alex Woodie

  As the summer turns to fall, IBM i professionals will be turning out to a pair of events being hosted in the Midwest, including Infor’s imPower 2025 conference in Wisconsin, and COMMON’s NAViGATE conference taking place in Pennsylvania. Both shows are expected to draw hundreds of participants.

  NAViGATE 2025 takes place this week in Pittsburgh. COMMON is hosting about 110 sessions on IBM i topics across the three-day event, including sessions on application development, security, high availability, and administering the system.

  Tim Rowe, an IBM architect for application development, and Julia Yan, the lead developer of Navigator for i, will …

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• Guru: WCA4i And Granite – Because You’ve Got Bigger Things To Build

  September 15, 2025 Gregory Simmons

  They said AI would change everything. Then most of it turned into chatbot demos and marketing decks. But watsonX Code Assistant for i (WCA4i for short), backed by IBM’s own Granite large language model, is doing something IBM i developers might actually care about: Helping you understand, transform, and evolve legacy code without tossing decades of business logic into the fire.

  WCA4i isn’t trying to slap a web UI over your green screens or auto-generate JavaScript for the sake of buzzwords. It’s aimed at something deeper – leveraging an AI foundation model that’s actually trained on IBM i code and …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 27, Number 37

  September 15, 2025 Doug Bidwell

  This week in IBM i Land, we have two security bulletins, and new System Planning Tool adding the Power11 machines, and a bunch of new microcode. Let’s start with the security vulnerabilities as we always do.

  First, we have Security Bulletin: IBM WebSphere Application Server and WebSphere Application Server Liberty are affected by a denial of service due to Apache Commons FileUpload (CVE-2025-48976). The affected products are:

  Affected Product(s)				Version(s)
  IBM WebSphere Application Server		9.0
  IBM WebSphere Application Server		8.5
  IBM WebSphere Application Server Liberty		17.0.0.3 - 25.0.0.8
  

  Second, we have Security Bulletin: IBM WebSphere Application Server Liberty could provide …

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• AI Is Coming for ERP. How Will IBM i Respond?

  September 8, 2025 Alex Woodie

  A wave of artificial intelligence is beginning to wash over the enterprise resource planning software market, changing the nature of how businesses process automation gets done. IBM i has been a solid platform for running ERP systems for decades. But how will the new generation of AI-enabled enterprise apps get to IBM i?

  When it comes to automating business processes, ERP packages have been the primary means for achieving it for the past four decades. The big monolithic apps from SAP, Oracle, Infor, and dozens of others have driven trillions of dollars in value by providing a …

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• The Power And Storage Price Wiggling Continues – Again

  September 8, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Here we go again . . . again. The people in charge of setting global prices for Power Systems and Storage products are rejiggering prices. In announcement letter AD25-1477, dated September 1 and effective on October 1, prices are changing in global markets due to changes in the foreign exchange rates between the United States and those countries.

  To be specific, the following countries are seeing the following price changes:

  • Japan, 3.5 percent
  • India, 2.1 percent
  • Philippines, 1.4 percent
  • Hong Kong, 1.2 percent
  • New Zealand, 0.6 percent

  The interesting bit is that back in early July, IBM had cut prices …

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• LaserVault Adds Multi-Path Support To ViTL

  September 8, 2025 Alex Woodie

  LaserVault is shipping a new release of its virtual tape library software that is likely to find a warm reception among customers who need different retention periods for their IBM i backups. By enabling ViTL 4.0 to support multiple storage paths to backend storage appliances, it’s allowing customers to reduce the amount of data they store and giving them an overall more efficient backup environment.

  ViTL is the name of LaserVault’s flagship virtual tape library (VLT) for IBM i, which the company (also known as known as Electronic Storage Corp) launched back in 2018. The product, which emulates …

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• As I See It: Spacing Out

  September 8, 2025 Victor Rozek

  Computer rooms have always been somewhat problematic to build and maintain: Raised floors, 24/7 air conditioning, a reliable power supply, and, for larger installations, a backup power source. These requirements were spendy but manageable at least until the rise of AI. To put it bluntly, AI is a resource hog, addicted to excess. Its drugs of choice are land and energy.

  The future of datacenters is unfolding in Abilene, Texas. There, Project Stargate is under construction, and the mega-scale OpenAI datacenter can hardly be called affordable. Its estimated cost is $500 billion. The facility includes a whopping eight million square …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 27, Numbers 34, 35, And 36

  September 8, 2025 Doug Bidwell

  We are determined to get back in synch with the publication schedule of The Four Hundred and the IBM i PTF Guide, so this week you get three issues of the latter inside of one issue of the former, a necessity because PTFs never rest even if publications do take a breather every once in a while.

  In Number 34, this was the rundown of PTF Groups by IBM i release level we did on August 23:

  PTF Groups 7.6:

  • HIPERs – High Impact Pervasive
  • Group Security

  PTF Groups 7.5:

  • HIPERs (High Impact/Pervasive)
  • Group Security

  PTF Groups 7.4:

  • HIPERs

  …

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• The Power11 Transistor Count Discrepancies Explained – Sort Of

  August 25, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  One of the perplexing things about the Power11 announcement is that we know that the differences in the logic and cache designs of the Power10 and the Power11 server chips are not huge, and yet the transistor count jumped by almost a power of two from the Power10 to the Power11.

  This didn’t make sense to us, and we said as much during the Power11 launch back in early July. (Our observations about transistor count discrepancies were made after our initial story ran and once we got our hands on the drafts for Power11 Redbooks. In those Redbooks, …

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