• You Have To Speak IBM’s Language If You Want To Be Heard

  May 11, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Like many of you, I had been expecting for Big Blue to deliver the kicker to the entry level “Bonnell” Power10-based Power S1012 that was announced a few years back during the PowerUP 2026 conference. This long-awaited machine will be the only Power11 system that is offered for those many, many IBM i customers in the P05 software tier, and will presumably have a beefier hardware configuration that crosses over into the P10 IBM i software tier.

  POWERUp 2026 came and went, and there was no Bonnell+ kicker and there also was not the expected Technology Refreshes for the IBM …

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• Raz-Lee Revs iSecurity Suite With 2026 Updates

  May 11, 2026 Alex Woodie

  Raz-Lee Security used the recent POWERUp conference in New Orleans as the launch pad for a major new release of its iSecurity Suite. As CEO Shmuel Zailer tells us, the company made substantial changes to ensure that all of the products within the suite work in a more integrated fashion.

  Raz-Lee is one of just a handful of independent IBM i security software vendors left in the market following a period of consolidation by larger firms. However, Raz-Lee’s iSecurity Suite is arguably one of the most complete, with around two dozen point products across seven suites, spanning authentication/authorization; auditing and …

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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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• Power Systems Still Waiting For The GenAI Bump

  April 27, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  With the Power11 systems upgrade cycle only nine months old and with price increases that have been happening monthly since early April 1 and possibly continuing through the end of the year, we expect for the Power Systems business to be up in 2026 for the full year.

  In the first quarter of 2026 ended in March, IBM’s Infrastructure group, which includes sales of servers, storage, operating systems, and used gear, posted sales of $3.33 billion, up 15.3 percent. Gross profits rose by 24.2 percent for the Infrastructure group, to just a tad under $1.9 billion, and pre-tax income for …

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• You Are Much More Than Power Systems, And So Are We

  April 13, 2026 Doug McMaster

  The AS/400 was born in the age of minicomputers, but that was also when the rise of the personal computer started and eventually led to the revolution of client/server distributed computing. Not only was computing shifted to the PCs on our desks, but also out to file servers, print servers, and application servers that ran all kinds of different platforms, including NetWare, SCO Unix, OS/2 Server, rarely a variant of Unix, what would become Windows Server, and more recently Linux.

  Eventually, Windows Server and Linux became not only Web infrastructure and application serving platforms but ran relational databases and sometimes …

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• What Can IBM Do To Make The Future Power S1112 Mini System Compelling?

  April 13, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The Power11-based Power Systems lineup remains incomplete, with the single-socket, half-width “Bonnell” system that debuted back in May 2024 still only available with Power10 processors and not yet upgraded to Power11. We know such a machine is in the works, because Big Blue has been clear about the need to ship a machine in the IBM i P05 software tier, the lowest rung on the IBM i ladder.

  We have not heard anything precise about the Bonnell kicker, and we would have thought it would have been launched in February or March. It has not. It is reasonable to expect …

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• No Joke: Big Memory And Flash Price Hikes Coming April 1

  March 9, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As I told you about last week, price increases for Power Systems and Storage products have indeed come to pass. We were poo-pooing the idea that IBM would have a 25 percent across-the-board price increase, saying this would be unprecedented and unjustified. But the price increases that go into effect in three weeks (just after the first financial quarter of 2026 ends) are jaw dropping even if they are mainly for main memory and flash drives.

  We would love to show you the link to the announcement letter, but as far as we know there is no customer announcement …

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• IBM Launches Hybrid Cloud Backup Product With Cobalt Iron

  March 9, 2026 Alex Woodie

  IBM and its business partner Cobalt Iron last week announced the launch of a new cloud backup product. Dubbed Secure Automated Backup with Compass for IBM Cloud, the new SaaS offering can protect data residing across customers’ landscape, including IBM Cloud, other clouds, and on-prem systems like IBM i.

  Cobalt Iron was founded in 2013 with the goal of modernizing backup and recovery. Founder Richard Spurlock saw that companies were spending too much time with platform-specific backup products, so he decided to build a centralized virtual tape library (VTL) solution that could back up and recover data across a range …

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• You Store The Crown Jewels In A Safe, Not In A Bucket

  March 2, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  All petabytes are not equal. A petabyte of unstructured data that may have a few nuggets of informational gold veins running through it, for instance, is definitely a lot more valuable than a petabyte of cat videos. But it is not anywhere nearly as valuable as the database and application code backups of thousands of customers running IBM i systems.

  And that, in a nutshell, is why Fresche Solutions, which is perhaps best known as a provider of application and database modernization tools in the IBM i market, but which is also a cloud in its own right as well …

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• IBM Unveils Expert Query To Replace Db2 Web Query

  February 16, 2026 Alex Woodie

  IBM’s Technology Expert Labs is launching IBM Database Expert Query for i, a new tool that allows users to create and run reports against the integrated Db2 for i database from the comfort of a Web browser. IBM is positioning Expert Query as a replacement for Db2 Web Query, the business intelligence and analytics tool that it abruptly killed more than two years ago.

  Expert Query was developed over the past year by Technology Expert Labs (formerly Lab Services). We have heard rumblings that Big Blue was gearing up a replacement for the well-liked Db2 Web Query product, and it …

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