• Strategic Topics To Think About For 2026, Part 2

  March 9, 2026 Philippe Magne

  Last month, in the first part of this series, I presented a bunch of strategic topics that I think the IBM i community needs to think about as we figure out what needs to be done in their application estates in 2026 and beyond. I talked predominantly about pragmatism versus hype with AI and then DevSecOps transformation and AI integration into DevSecOps. You can read Part 1 at this link, and that is probably a good idea before diving into Part 2.

  In Part 2, I want to focus in on application security. This is a big theme, and …

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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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• Guru: A First Look at Bob, The IBM i Assistant That’s Closer Than You Think

  December 8, 2025 Gregory Simmons

  I recently was granted early access to IBM’s new Project Bob, and I have been putting the Bob-IDE through its paces to understand what IBM is aiming for and what IBM i developers should expect as the offering matures. Bob is IBM’s emerging AI-powered development assistant and IDE ecosystem designed to modernize how developers work on the IBM i.

  One of the first things that stands out is that the Bob-IDE is not an extension like the older WCA4i project, which was in extension form. IBM learned a lot from that experience, and those lessons led them to take a …

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• Beta Of MCP Server Opens Up IBM i For Agentic AI

  October 27, 2025 Alex Woodie

  When Anthropic quietly released Model Context Protocol (MCP) in November 2024, it didn’t garner a whole lot attention. But as the agentic AI wave grew in early 2025, the protocol suddenly was hailed as the new standard for integrating AI applications, tools, and data sources. A good indication of just how far MCP has come is the fact that IBM released an early version of the MCP server for IBM i this month.

  Project Bob got the big headlines at the IBM TechXchange conference, which took place the second week of October in Orlando, Florida. And for good reason, as …

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• Maybe Stopgap Your Legacy Data Issues And Wait for What’s Next?

  September 29, 2025 Alex Woodie

  The temptation to move off legacy systems like IBM i and System Z is overwhelming for some companies. First, there are business issues, such as enabling data integration and real-time capabilities, that older systems legitimately struggle with. Plus, the siren call from Kubernetes and microservices is getting louder. But the longer you can hold on to current systems and wait for next-gen AI-powered systems to emerge, the better off you will be.

  That’s the advice being proffered by the folks at Adeptia, a 20-year-old Chicago-based technical services firm that has worked on data integration issues with many Fortune 500 …

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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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• RPG Code Generation And The Agentic Future Of IBM i

  June 2, 2025 Alex Woodie

  IBM is making progress with Watsonx Code Assistant for i, which is on track to become available as a public preview next month. And while IBM perhaps is running into some challenges with generating RPG code, the long-term potential of agentic AI on IBM i is brighter than ever.

  As we previously reported, IBM is now taking names for the folks who will be given access to the public preview of WCA for i, which you can sign up for here. According to IBM i CTO Steve Will, the preview will deliver RPG code understanding capabilities, which is …

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• Fresche Overhauls X-Analysis With Web UI, AI Smarts

  May 19, 2025 Alex Woodie

  Fresche Solutions recently unveiled a new release of X-Analysis, its popular impact analysis tool, which it’s now selling under the Application Intelligence brand. The product has undergone a major overhaul and now sports a new Web user interface as well as hooks to popular AI models to provide code explanation and documentation capabilities for RPG applications.

  Fresche Solutions operates a large application modernization practice and provides an array of products and services to help IBM i customers take their RPG, COBOL, and Java applications from the legacy past into the modern present. However, before a single byte of legacy code …

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• Maxava Consulting Services Does More Than HA/DR Project Management – A Lot More

  May 12, 2025 Yvonne Enselman

  IT organizations have been having to do more with less for so long that it is frankly amazing that anything at all gets done some decades later. And the funny thing is that the To Do list just keeps getting longer – and wider – as the years go by.

  We know exactly how short-staffed and over-burdened IBM i shops are, and that is why Maxava is launching Maxava Consulting Services, a new arm of the high availability software maker that aims to provide a broad and deep set of strategic and tactical services to help IBM i shops get …

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• Using AI To Derive Application Intelligence And Drive Modernization

  April 23, 2025 Marc Dallas

  Everybody in the IBM i space knows that Big Blue is working on a coding assistant based on generative AI models to help developers write better and more consistent RPG applications with what everyone assumes will be a smaller and smaller programming talent pool.

  But there is more to leveraging AI as a tool for application development and modernization than this. There are those who want to be able to use GenAI tools that can analyze and convert code from one language to another – much as the same large language models were first trained to translate between two languages …

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