• Will The Turbulent Economy Downdraft IBM Systems Or Lift It?

  April 28, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We have always contended that recessions accelerate technology trends rather than slow them down. And if we start heading into a recession either in the United States or around the globe – it is hard to imagine one without the other – it is reasonable to assume that companies will be looking very aggressively to take automation up another level to cut costs further, to generate new lines of business, and to push profits as hard as they can in what will probably be a deflationary environment.

  There are a lot of assumptions in that paragraph, so let’s pick it …

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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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• Need Data Off An Old Tape? The Backup Crackers Can Help

  March 3, 2025 Alex Woodie

  What happens when you need data from an old backup tape, but no longer have the vintage IBM hardware it was backed up from, let alone a subscription to the application it was created from nor the backup software it was created with? If you find yourself in such a predicament, the folks at S2|Data would like to hear from you.

  “We are backup software format crackers,” says Brendan Sullivan, the founder and chief executive officer of S2|Data. “What we do is we look at the media, which might be tape or it might be disk, and we figure …

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• A Year From Now, Most Power9 Systems Bite The Rust

  January 27, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  For whatever reason, there are lots of IBM announcements that are not released through IBM’s normal announcement channels. While participating in the 2025 IBM i Marketplace Survey webinar, I came to find out that an announcement for the sunsetting of technical support for selected Power9 systems was actually released last year. We had been expecting it around now, and it doesn’t take effect until a year from now, so whew! No harm, no foul.

  As it turns out, this announcement was made back on September 12, 2024, through a PDF posting on Big Blue’s Systems support portal. You have to …

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• 2025 IBM i Predictions, Part Three

  January 27, 2025 Alex Woodie

  What will happen this year in the little neck of the IT wood that we call the IBM i community? It’s hard to say for sure, but one thing is certain: It sure a lot of fun guessing what might happen or what could happen! And who knows? Some of these predictions may actually come true.

  After 20 years with IBM i software vendor PKS Software, Heidi Schmidt has seen a thing or two in the midrange. There have been many ups and downs over the years, and a wide array of names. But Schmidt is bullish that the …

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• Talking Power Systems And IBM i With Bargav Balakrishnan

  January 20, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In last week’s issue of The Four Hundred, we told you about how the Power Systems division had a new vice president of product management – to be specific, Bargav Balakrishnan, who has spent decades in various technical and management roles within Big Blue. Balakrishnan takes over from Steve Sibley, who has been steering Power Systems hardware development since July 2007 and who was the longest serving executive in that role since the launch of the AS/400 back in 1988.

  This week, we had a chat with Balakrishnan about the Power Systems business and the IBM i platform, and …

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• Dell And Big Blue Call It Quits On Storage Driver Support For IBM i

  December 9, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It looks like IBM and sometime rival Dell Technologies are having a tiff over the licensing of technology that allows disk arrays descended from the venerable Symmetrix arrays created by EMC more than three decades ago to link to descendants of the AS/400 platform and OS/400 operating systems created three and a half decades ago.

  The fallout from what we presume is that a technology licensing fee agreement between Dell and IBM is similar, we think, to the one between IBM and the company that owns Information Builders. In October 2023, out of the blue, IBM announced that it was …

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• Fresche Nabs Redbourn Business Systems For Synon Expertise

  November 11, 2024 Alex Woodie

  Fresche Solutions last week acquired Redbourn Business Systems, a UK-based provider of Synon and CA 2E development and consulting services. The move bolsters Fresche’s previous efforts to cater to the needs of IBM i shops that adopted the Synon/2E development language, and also bolsters the company’s European presence.

  Redbourn Business Systems was founded in 1994 by Steve Cast, a longtime RPG programmer and IBM midrange professional who was among the first to port applications from the System/38 to the AS/400 back in the 1980s. The company, which is based in the English village of Redbourn, provides a range of services …

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• Shield Revs HA Software for IBM i

  September 25, 2024 Alex Woodie

  Companies protecting their IBM i servers with Shield Advanced Solutions’ HA4i will enjoy several new capabilities when they upgrade to the latest release, including faster save while active processing, improved object compression, and new Nagios monitoring functions, among other enhancements.

  Shield Advanced Solutions has been developing and selling an IBM i high availability solution since 2007, when it rolled out Receiver Apply Program/400 (RAP/400), which it dubbed “DR for the masses.” In 2010, the Toronto-area company overhauled that product and debuted its replacement, HA4i at version 6.1. Over the ensuing years, Shield steadily added new features to the …

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• CICS Transaction Server For IBM i Is Sunsetted

  September 16, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Way back during the Y2K crisis at the turn of the century, there were a lot of IBM mainframe shops that decided to port their COBOL applications and their related CICS transaction monitoring software to OS/400 rather than try to move to a new language and a new transaction monitor.

  Mainframe COBOL and CICS are a bit different from OS/400 – and now IBM i – COBOL and CICS, but there was enough similarity that companies with large COBOL/CICS estates could make the jump from the ES/9000 to the AS/400 and IBM i platform, and thousands of such companies – …

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