• IBM i: Pro and Con

  August 11, 2025 Alex Woodie

  Everybody has an opinion, and it seems that many people these days feel the need to share those opinions, for better or worse. When it comes to IBM i, the volume of sentiments may be lower than, say, the activities of tech CEOs at Coldplay concerts. However, the proprietary server still elicits thoughts and feelings, both positive and negative, as evidenced by reviews recently shared by the IT marketplace known as G2.

  G2 was founded back in 2012 with a simple goal: Provide actionable, crowdsourced information on enterprise IT software and gear, without requiring customers to shell out tens of …

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• As I See It: Disruption

  August 11, 2025 Victor Rozek

  There was a time, not so long ago, that pursuing a degree in Computer Science would all but guarantee a good job and the opportunity for a thriving career. Tech was booming and hungry for talent. Like sporting franchises competing for players, some companies even offered inducements in the form of signing bonuses. Early in my career I was offered a signing bonus large enough to buy a new convertible. No negotiation necessary, it was simply part of the benefits package.

  But the industry has changed and career IT jobs are becoming hard to find and harder to keep. Tech …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 27, Number 30

  August 11, 2025 Doug Bidwell

  We are still a little bit out of phase with holidays and vacations and playing some catch up with the IBM i PTF Guide. In Number 30, which was put together on July 26, there were a slew of issues and things, starting with three security vulnerabilities.

  First, we have Security Bulletin: IBM i is affected by errors in OpenSSL as part of IBM Portable Utilities for i due to multiple vulnerabilities, which you can find out more about here. The issues can be fixed by applying PTFs to IBM i.  IBM i 7.6, 7.5, 7.4, 7.3, and …

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• The Turning Point For Power Systems Is Here, And Now

  July 28, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  CORRECTED Considering how everyone in the IBM midrange systems market knew that Power11 processors and the next generation of Power Systems servers using them were coming some time around the middle of this year, the dip in Power Systems servers based on Power10 technology did pretty well, we think, in the first quarter and now the second quarter.

  We have to infer this, of course, because Big Blue does not provide revenue figures for sales of Power Systems iron, much less give a breakdown by sales of machines running IBM i, AIX, or Linux as their primary operating system. What …

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• How IBM i Users Can Compete In The Digital Era With Composable Commerce

  July 28, 2025 Nichole Ballesteros

  The recently launched LANSA Composable Commerce offers IBM i users a way to keep pace with rapidly evolving e-commerce demands while maintaining their trusted backend systems. Read on to explore this new solution from the modernization experts at LANSA.

  IBM i has long been the backbone of critical business applications. It holds decades of proven business logic and accurate data to manage everything from inventory and pricing to order processing and fulfillment. When companies first expanded into e-commerce, LANSA made it possible to extend this stability and intelligence to the web. With LANSA Commerce Edition, storefronts are integrated seamlessly …

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• IBM Streamlines Data Migration With New Partition Mirror Tech

  July 28, 2025 Alex Woodie

  There is a brand new technology available for migrating data from one IBM i partition to another as part of IBM’s new Migrate While Active tool. It’s called partition mirror, and it gives IBM i shops a potentially less disruptive method for moving data across distances both long and short.

  IBM first unveiled its new Migrate While Active product in October 2024 as part of its announcement introducing subscriptions for the PowerHA high availability and Db2 Mirror continuous availability products. The co-mingling of the announcements made some sense when you consider that the original Migrate While Active product utilized a …

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• Profound Logic Adds MCP To IBM i AI Tool

  July 28, 2025 Alex Woodie

  The world of AI is moving extremely fast right now, with new models, techniques, and technologies emerging every week. One of the newest bits of AI tech to catch on is Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol (MCP), which has quickly become a defacto standard for connecting data sources to AI models. Profound Logic, which has been on the cutting edge of AI, is the first IBM i vendor to bring MCP support to the server and the Db2 for i database.

  Anthropic quietly launched Model Context Protocol in late November 2024 as a way to enable large language models (LLMs), such …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 27, Number 29

  July 28, 2025 Doug Bidwell

  Welcome to the IBM i PTF Guide. This week, we start out with two security vulnerabilities having to do with the WebSphere application server and an issue with the Java programming runtime.

  Let’s start with the security issues.

  First, we have Security Bulletin: IBM WebSphere Application Server and WebSphere Application Server Liberty are affected by a security bypass vulnerability (CVE-2024-56339), which you can find out more about at this link. The affected products are IBM WebSphere Application Server Liberty 17.0.0.3 through 25.0.0.7 and IBM WebSphere Application Server 9.0.

  Second, we have PH67183: IBM WebSphere Liberty is affected by …

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• Power11 Entry Machines: The Power S1124 And Power L1124

  July 21, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  For several decades, a two-socket server was the workhorse machine in most datacenters, whether they were running a database machine for transaction processing or a scale-out cluster of machines for distributed Web applications and their related back-ends. And for many OS/400 and IBM i shops, the two-socket machine was the one that provided the right balance of compute and storage expansion and density.

  But, over the years, as Power processor cores have gotten more powerful, customers have needed fewer and fewer cores to run their relatively modest (by comparison) and relatively static (they grow along with the business, but not …

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• BRMS Isn’t The Only Backup Product With A Security Problem

  July 21, 2025 Alex Woodie

  IBM last month patched a serious security flaw in BRMS, the built-in backup and recovery facility that it ships with the IBM i operating system. The flaw is the latest in a series of security flaws uncovered in backup tools, which cyber criminals appear to be now targeting.

  If you’re a regular reader of Doug Bidwell’s IBM i PTF Guide – and really, if you are responsible for managing an IBM i environment, you should be reading it regularly – then you already knew about the security flaw in BRMS. Bidwell covered the flaw and the associated emergency PTF for …

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