• IBM Starts Winding Down Power10 System Sales

  February 9, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It may be hard to believe it, but the big, bad Power E1080, which is based on the Power10 processor, has been selling since September 2021. The remainder of the Power10 line, including entry and midrange machines, was announced in July 2022. And now, with the Power11 machines announced last July shipping in volume from top to bottom excepting the Power S1112 Mini, which should be coming out soon, and IBM doing build to order for all of its Power11 machines, it only stands to reason that Big Blue would stop selling Power10 iron as soon as …

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• Guru: Service Programs And Activation Groups – Design Decisions That Matter

  February 9, 2026 Gregory Simmons

  If you have been writing service programs for a while, you might treat binding like flipping a light switch: write some code, compile it, bind it, done. It works – until it doesn’t. Behind the scenes, IBM i is doing a lot more than just connecting your program to a library of procedures. And if you’re not paying attention to activation groups and how you structure your service programs, you might be setting yourself up for sluggish performance or debugging nightmares down the road.

  Let’s demystify what is really happening when you bind and why activation groups deserve more of …

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• Strategic Topics To Think About For 2026, Part 1

  February 9, 2026 Philippe Magne

  Longevity is an amazing thing. ARCAD Software has now amassed more than 34 years of expertise centered around everything related to DevSecOps transformations. To start off the new year, I would like to share six strategic ideas that will help shape 2026 in the IBM i market, and beyond it.

  The big new development for ARCAD is our fourth brand, called DISCOVER, which is focused on application intelligence. It’s the newest addition, and it’s very promising. We’re delighted to have convinced more than 25 customers by year 2025, and I think this will evolve significantly this year.

  DISCOVER is all …

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• Shield Gooses Performance Of Nagios Monitoring Tool, Adds AI Reporting

  February 9, 2026 Alex Woodie

  Large IBM i installations that experienced performance issues with older versions of Shield Advanced Solutions’ Nagios monitoring tool will be happy to hear that version 3.0 delivers a 2X to 3X performance boost. The new version, which Shield announced last month, also includes an early release of an integration with ChatGPT that automatically generates reports based on the real-time IBM i server metrics gathered by Nagios.

  Nagios is a very popular open source IT infrastructure monitoring tool that’s been deployed millions of times around the world. It works by constantly pinging targets, which could be anything from server or storage …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 28, Number 6

  February 9, 2026 Doug Bidwell

  Here is something handy if you are contemplating moving to IBM i 7.6: A comparison of IBM i 7.5 to IBM i 7.6, from IBM Support and available at this link. If you are moving from releases earlier than IBM i 7.5 to IBM i 7.6, then you should definitely take a gander at this as well. We have added a link in the Guide tab “Links” for this should you need to get to it later and to keep it top of mind.

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

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• Rolling The Die In 2026: IBM i Predictions, Take Two

  February 2, 2026 Alex Woodie

  A traditional Chinese curse states “May you live in interesting times.” That curse may apply to IBM i shops in 2026, which opens with equal parts uncertainty and anticipation. Artificial intelligence looms large, not only over information technology, but life as we know it. Add in the other variables impacting the midrange in the second year of the second quarter of the 21st century Anno Domini, and what you get is…well, interesting.

  We start our second and final compilation of 2026 predictions with Bargav Balakrishnan, IBM’s vice president of product management for infrastructure. Balakrishnan took over the post …

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• Perhaps 2026 Is The Year For Power Systems To Boom A Little

  February 2, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In wrapping up IBM’s call with Wall Street analysts in the wake of Big Blue reporting its financial results for the fourth quarter of 2025 – which was a very good one for the most part, by the way – chief executive officer Arvind Krishna referred to the IBM Company as a “software-led, platform-centric company.”

  This is no news to any of us who have been using or programming or analyzing the business of IBM over the many decades. Of course this is true. But for IBM, the main platform that is driving the big bucks at the top and …

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• Guru: Binder Source Is Your Service Program’s Owner’s Manual

  February 2, 2026 Gregory Simmons

  If service programs are the backbone of modular RPG development, then binder source is the owner’s manual you didn’t know you needed. It’s not glamorous, but it’s the piece that ties everything together: Controlling what you export, defining your public API, and managing change over time. Yet, far too many shops treat binder source as optional – if they use it at all. That’s a mistake.

  Let’s start with what binder source actually does. When you create a service program, you need to tell the system which procedures should be visible to callers. You could just use EXPORT(*ALL) and call …

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• Skills Displaces Cybersecurity As Top Concern For IBM i Shops

  February 2, 2026 Alex Woodie

  Well, it was bound to happen eventually. After nine straight years as the top concern in the IBM i community, cybersecurity has finally fallen out of the number one position in Fortra’s annual IBM i Marketplace Survey. Taking its place atop the closely watched survey is IBM i skills, an issue that has been lurking in the background but now must be considered a priority for IBM i leaders.

  Fortra’s annual IBM i Marketplace Survey provides a broad barometer on what’s going on with the IBM i community. One of the most closely watched questions in the survey, …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 28, Number 5

  February 2, 2026 Doug Bidwell

  This week there’s another winter storm whacking the eastern half of the United States, and we are also putting together the IBM i PTF Guide a little early in case some of the people working on The Four Hundred lose power. If all goes well, and you are reading this on Monday, then we got it all done before anything bad happened.

  This week, we start off with two security vulnerabilities.

  First, we have Security Bulletin: Multiple Vulnerabilities in IBM Java SDK affect IBM WebSphere Application Server and WebSphere Application Server Liberty due to the January 2026 CPU, which you …

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