• What You Will Find In IBM i 7.6 TR1 and IBM i 7.5 TR7

  October 13, 2025 Alex Woodie

  It’s early October, which means leaves are changing colors, nights are getting colder, and IBM developers in southern Minnesota and elsewhere are gearing up the autumnal Technology Refreshes for the IBM i operating system.

  With last week’s announcements of TR1 for IBM i 7.6 and TR7 for IBM i 7.5, which ship November 21, IBM has committed to delivering a slew of updates and new functionality across the range of IBM i system software, from application development to administration.

  Before we get into the specific areas of IBM i, let’s cover the general enhancements it made with I/O handling. For …

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• Three Things For IBM i Shops To Consider About DevSecOps

  October 13, 2025 Michel Mouchon

  Way back in the Great Recession, when money was getting tight and the technical debt was getting high, the concept of agile infrastructure evolved into DevOps, the synchronization and coordination of application development, which likes to move fast, with IT operations, which likes to have things running in a stable fashion. The idea runs counter to half of the philosophy of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, who has espoused the principle to “move fast and break things.”

  DevOps wants to move fast, but it most assuredly does not want to break things, and many millions of programmers and operations staff …

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• Big Blue Converges IBM i RPG And System Z COBOL Code Assistants Into “Project Bob”

  October 13, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We have been anticipating the rollout of the Watsonx Code Assistant for RPG on the IBM i platform ever since IBM previewed a code assistant for the System z mainframe platform in August 2023 to help COBOL shops port their applications to Java on the mainframe. And lo and behold, the Rochester team followed suit, but with a slightly different approach, creating a Watsonx Code Assistant for RPG, which was also created using IBM’s homegrown “Granite” large language models.

  Well, apparently, forget all of that. At the TechExchange 2025 developer conference last week, IBM was showing off a new, unified …

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• As I See It: Retirement Challenges

  October 13, 2025 Victor Rozek

  If you work long enough, eventually you’ll earn the right not to work. Well, maybe. Retirement has become an increasingly tricky proposition. The three-legged stool designed to support the financial weight of life beyond employment is collapsing. For millions of workers approaching retirement, the support once provided by pensions, personal savings, and social security is no longer reliable. Once thought to be constructed of sturdy oak, the stool now resembles something patched together with balsa wood and duct tape.

  For most workers, pensions are either a distant memory or an abstraction. According to figures compiled by everyone’s “favorite” research assistant, …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 27, Number 41

  October 13, 2025 Doug Bidwell

  I don’t know about you, but we figured there were Technology Refreshes coming, especially with IBM’s TechExchange 2025 developer conference going on last week. However, unlike in past years, we didn’t get any advanced warning. So check out the initial coverage of the new TRs for IBM i 7.5 and IBM i 7.6 and keep an eye out for the coming weeks of detailed drill-downs.

  There is also a pretty serious set of vulnerabilities in the IBM i platform that you need to deal with. Check out Security Bulletin: IBM i is affected by Remote Code Execution, Deserialization of Untrusted …

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• Stacking Up Power11 Entry Server Performance To Older Iron

  October 6, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Here we are heading into the fall and if you have budget set aside for a new system or an upgrade, now is the time to start thinking about spending it. For customers buying mainstream P10-class and P20-class systems, the Power11 machines that have been out for a few months now and are the machines you will need to consider. And if you have older Power8 or Power9 iron, you might even be considering an upgrade to a Power10.

  With all of this in mind, we have put together the mother of all performance tables to compare the current and …

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• Big Blue Boosts IBM i Support In Instana, Adds Tracing

  October 6, 2025 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops that need more insight into how their hardware and software is running may want to consider IBM’s Instana software. IBM has been investing in the observability tool, which was recently updated to support traces on IBM i systems. That’s one of several upgrades IBM has made to Instana to help its IBM i customers.

  IBM acquired Instana back in November 2020 to bolster its presence in the nascent observability arena, particularly as it related to monitoring cloud-native environments (i.e., those using Kubernetes and microservices). Big Blue had just spent $34 billion to buy Red Hat and its …

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• It Is Time To Tell Us What You Are Thinking And Doing

  October 6, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It is the beginning of fall, or autumn if you are in Europe, and you know what that means. No, it is not the deciduous woods turning to the colors of fire. Not it is not football (or soccer for that matter), or harvest time. But it is the time when Fortra opens up its annual IBM i Marketplace Survey, which has been running for more than a decade now.

  The annual survey, which is in its 13^th year, opened on September 15. You can give back to the IBM i community and help nudge IBM and ISVs in …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 27, Number 40

  October 6, 2025 Doug Bidwell

  Welcome to another edition of the IBM i PTF Guide. Let’s get right to it.

  This week we start off with new microcode for Firmware 1050. . . specifically for 1050.52 and 1050.60 levels. These service packs include the following Security/HIPER issues: A security problem was fixed for CVE-2025-52497 and CVE-2025-49087 and a security problem was fixed for CVE-2025-38556. This applies to IBM Power S1022s (9105-22B), Power S1022 (9105-22A), and Power S1014 (9105-41B) machines.

  There is also another security vulnerability in the integrated Apache Web server embedded in IBM i. See Security Bulletin: IBM WebSphere Application Server is affected …

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• The GenAI Boom Is Only Slightly Louder Than The Dot Com Boom

  September 29, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In most markets, revenues and hopefully profits go from exponential growth to log growth to linear growth in the fullness of time. We are living in the exponential phase of AI, and for GenAI in particular, where the x in y=a^x is a pretty big number and the resulting revenue growth looks like the proverbial hockey stick.

  The numbers can be a bit surreal, as they seemed back in the Dot Com boom, where we turned on mainstream stores into warehouses with delivery services. With AI, we are turning the digital data of our lives into data warehouses and …

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