• GenAI Is The Death Of Deterministic Project Budgeting

  June 15, 2026 Dan Darnell and Eric Whitcomb

  Like many of you in the IBM i community, we have been treading the AI waters for a couple of years now, starting with small proof-of-concept applications such as chatbots but progressing to far more advanced and complex code-to-AI interfaces.

  One such project leveraged AI for recurring Jaccard similarity index processing over large sets of business data. The small projects fool a person into thinking that the large projects are just more of the same but, in reality, large projects take you into the world of proprietary AI APIs and can be complex engineering efforts.

  We mostly use ChatGPT because …

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• PTC Adds Support For VS Code With Implementer 12.7

  June 15, 2026 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops that rely on PTC’s Implementer software to manage their RPG development will soon be able to use the tool within the VS Code development environment. The upcoming release of Implementer 12.7 will introduce several other important features as PTC begins the process of modernizing the tool.

  Implementer is a well-established change management system targeting the IBM i environment. The software traces its roots to 1987, when four Pansophic (creators of the PRMS ERP system now owned by Infor) employees founded Silvon Software in Chicago. One of their first products was a tool to manage source code …

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• Midrange Dynamics Sees Solid Git Adoption On IBM i

  June 1, 2026 Alex Woodie

  The arrival of AI tools to the IBM i community is helping to drive Git adoption, according to Michael Morgan, the chief executive officer of Midrange Dynamics, a provider of application management software for IBM i. But even without the AI push, the IBM i community is moving solidly toward modern development techniques and tools, Morgan said in an interview.

  “We’re seeing the management expectations that shops use Git as the bigger driver for our customers versus AI,” Morgan told IT Jungle. “AI is a smaller driver of those wanting to get to Git. Even without AI, the movement …

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• CNX Adds AI To Valence Development Tool

  May 18, 2026 Alex Woodie

  CNX is adding a new AI assistant to Valence, its no-code development environment for IBM i. The AI will provide a range of enhancements to the Valence experience, from helping with modernizing existing greenscreen applications to providing the ability for executives to “chat” with their Db2 for i data.

  Valence is a collection of tools for creating new Web and mobile applications that run on IBM i. The software features RPG procedures for integrating with existing IBM i logic, and generates JavaScript front-ends that are served by IBM i’s native HTTP Server (the one powered by Apache). Popular add-ons include …

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• The Big Easy: Connecting The Dots On Big Blue’s AI Strategy For IBM i

  May 4, 2026 Alex Woodie

  IBM has not yet formally announced the new AI products that it is building for IBM i. We know about Bob and the MCP server, but there is a lot more AI stuff coming to IBM i. IBM shared details of what is coming in closed sessions at POWERUp in New Orleans last week, but hints about where it is going and what is coming were there, if you knew where to look.

  IBM i, as we all know, is a business platform. It runs enterprise applications and it runs them extremely well. If you want to model a nuclear …

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• COMMON Dances To A Fresh New Tune In New Orleans

  May 4, 2026 Alex Woodie

  This wasn’t the first COMMON conference held in New Orleans, but it may have been the best, considering where the IBM i platform is at this particular time and what happened down on the bayou last week.

  For starters, the four-day event attracted about 1,300 attendees, which is a solid increase from the 1,200 that attended last year’s conference in Anaheim, California. But here’s the kicker: About one-third of the COMMON POWERUp 2026 attendees were attending the conference for the first time. In other words, around 400 folks decided that IBM i education and community were important enough for them …

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• Brace Yourself: Another Power Systems Price Hike Coming May 1

  April 20, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  A few weeks ago, when we talked about the price increases on main memory and flash for Power Systems machines as well as some other price increases, we told you that this would probably not be the end of it. The market for DRAM and flash is so crazy right now that demand is well exceeding supply and that is driving up prices almost continuously. That’s because supply cannot be increased for either.

  To that end, Sam Werner, general manager of IBM Storage, and Ivo Körner, vice president of worldwide sales for IBM Power, Cloud, and Storage, sent out a …

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• AI Will Be Front And Center At POWERUp 2026 Next Week

  April 20, 2026 Alex Woodie

  Had enough of AI? Well, if you are headed to New Orleans, Louisiana, for the POWERUp 2026 conference next week, get ready to hear a lot more about the emerging technology, which is upending not only how we play but also how we work – and the IBM i platform is not immune from this change.

  If recent POWERUp events are any indication, COMMON will be expecting 1,100 to 1,200 people for its annual conference, which is taking place April 27 through 30 at the New Orleans Marriott, just around the corner from Bourbon Street in the historic French Quarter. …

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• Counting The Cost Of AI Inference – And Projecting It Far Out

  March 30, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It is probably a good thing that most IBM i shops did not spend a lot of money trying to figure out AI in the past decade. It was enormously expensive to develop first generation machine learning algorithms, and they had limited applicability. With large language models and their generative capabilities, the use cases for AI have skyrocketed, but the costs for training have been crazy expensive since the end of 2022, when the chattybot eureka moment – some might say emergent behavior – happened.

  The cost of training what are called foundation models – very large models with hundreds …

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• What Is Threatening IBM i Security Now

  March 16, 2026 Alex Woodie

  The nature of cybersecurity threats is always changing, which requires constant vigilance by those who value security. IBM i is just as exposed to threats as any other networked operating system on the planet, but it’s also unique in certain ways, which actually makes security harder. To get the lowdown on how these phenomena interrelate in the first quarter of 2026, we turn to renown IBM i security expert Carol Woodbury from Kisco.

  Woodbury recently sat down with Justin Loeber, the Kisco owner and head of business development, to present a webinar titled IBM i Threat Landscape 2026: A Fireside …

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