• Crossroads RMC Shows Off New AI Dashboard at inPOWER 2025

  September 22, 2025 Alex Woodie

  Crossroads RMC will be showing off its new AI-powered dashboard at Infor’s inPOWER 2025 event this week in Wisconsin. The new offering, dubbed the NextTrack Analytics Dashboard, allows users to ask questions about data residing in ERP database using plain English, thereby broadening the availability of actionable information to new groups of users.

  Crossroads RMC has built a name for itself within the Infor ERP community thanks to its solutions for manufacturers. The company’s manufacturing execution systems (MES) offering sit comfortably atop ERP LX, M3, and other ERP systems, providing access to shop floor scheduling capabilities that do not exist …

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• Guru: When Attention Turns To You – Writing Your Own ATTN Program

  September 22, 2025 Gregory Simmons

  Most IBM i users press the Attention key without much thought. They’re used to the familiar system-supplied menu popping up, or maybe a command line depending on how their profile is configured. But buried in the system is a powerful customization point: you can assign your own ATTN program. Doing so gives you the ability to intercept that key and provide functionality tailored exactly to your shop’s needs. There are three main ways to establish an attention program, each with its own strengths and tradeoffs.

  The most obvious method is at the user profile level. Within the profile’s attributes is …

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• Rocket Taps IDC To Assess The Benefits Of Full Scope IT Modernization

  September 22, 2025 Alex Woodie

  It wasn’t long ago that the words “IT modernization” conjured images of old, clunky 5250 screens becoming nimble, fresh Web interfaces. That is one form of modernization, but today the phrase can refer to a gamut of upgrades across applications, infrastructure, skills, processes, and people. So what defines success with IT modernization in 2025? Rocket Software recently commissioned IDC to find out.

  To understand what modernization means today and how well organizations are pursuing it, IDC polled 822 IT modernization decision-makers at organizations in North America, Europe, and the Asia/Pacific region. The surveyed firms included companies in financial services, healthcare, …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 27, Number 38

  September 22, 2025 Doug Bidwell

  It’s another quiet week in Lake Security Vulnerabilities Be Gone, with the drought on the Eastern seaboard meeting a cold snap that is bringing autumn colors to the leaves a bit earlier than many had expected or liked. It is better than rain, mind you, except when it starts fires.

  The good news is that there were no security vulnerabilities this week. So all secure there if you are up to date.

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

  PTF Groups 7.6:

  • SAP support required PTF list for IBM i 7.6

  … Read more

• 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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• As I See It: Digital Coup

  September 15, 2025 Victor Rozek

  “If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.” Those dire words were spoken in the 17th century by Cardinal Richelieu, the perfect deadly blend of Church and State, who served as chief minister to King Louis XIII of France.

  To maintain power, Richelieu employed eerily familiar methods notably censorship, forbidding discussion of political matters in public places, suppressing dissent and, most important, data collection. Richelieu employed a vast network of spies who gathered information on dissenters and potential enemies. Those who were …

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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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