• Here Come The AI-Based Code Modernization Offerings

  April 6, 2026 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops that are stuck with old code but don’t have the manpower to modernize it themselves are now considering the use of AI to handle much work. This new era of AI-assisted application modernization that we are now entering has the potential to be a boon for understaffed IBM i shops, but it raises new questions and concerns that IBM i professionals should keep in mind.

  The capability of AI to understand, document, and generate computer code has increased significantly over the past year. Thanks to fundamental improvements in large language models (LLMs), we’re now at the point …

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• Shield Gooses Performance Of Nagios Monitoring Tool, Adds AI Reporting

  February 9, 2026 Alex Woodie

  Large IBM i installations that experienced performance issues with older versions of Shield Advanced Solutions’ Nagios monitoring tool will be happy to hear that version 3.0 delivers a 2X to 3X performance boost. The new version, which Shield announced last month, also includes an early release of an integration with ChatGPT that automatically generates reports based on the real-time IBM i server metrics gathered by Nagios.

  Nagios is a very popular open source IT infrastructure monitoring tool that’s been deployed millions of times around the world. It works by constantly pinging targets, which could be anything from server or storage …

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• Beta For RPG Coding Assistant On Track for 2Q25

  January 20, 2025 Alex Woodie

  IBM is ramping up development of the AI-based RPG Code Assist and expects to have a working prototype ready for testing by the end of the first quarter, IBM i chief technology officer Steve Will said in a webinar last month. The goal is to have a beta ready for during the second quarter and general availability hopefully in the second half of the year, he added.

  Large language models (LLMs) such as OpenAI’s GPT and Google’s Gemini have taken the world by storm, and companies are investing tens of billions of dollars in the nascent tech to gain …

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• Another GenAI-Powered Testing Tool Comes to IBM i

  November 6, 2024 Alex Woodie

  IBM says it’s bringing a new AI accelerator to the Power line to drive compute-hungry generative AI workloads, such as the new RPG coding assistant that it’s also developing. But IBM won’t be the only source of such GenAI-powered coding assistants, as a company called Abstracta recently announced another one.

  There’s a lot of interest in the Spyre accelerators that IBM announced earlier this year for the System z mainframe and which IBM announced last month during its TechExchange conference will be coming to Power. Considering the massive demand for Nvidia GPUs, which could plug into past generations of Power …

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• 2023: An IBM i Year in Review

  December 13, 2023 Alex Woodie

  With another year nearly in the books, it’s time to take a stroll through the IT Jungle archives and reconsider some of the 728 stories we published in 2023. Here’s a look back at the biggest IBM i news stories of 2023.

  January

  The top concern of IBM i professionals, according to Fortra’s annual IBM i Marketplace Study, was once again security, a position it has held for six straight years. The latest crop of IBM Champions unveiled in January featured about 90 members from the IBM i community, out of a total of 839 for the year. Is …

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• Thoroughly Modern: Practical Ways IBM i Developers Can Use AI Today

  December 4, 2023 Scott Gingerysty

  This October at COMMON’s NAViGATE Conference, I presented a session about practical ways that IBM i developers can use AI in their day-to-day development practices. We discussed how you can streamline and optimize the development process, improve coding velocity, enhance code hygiene, testing and documentation, and we also looked at some of the caveats. After connecting with the folks at COMMON – and seeing their enthusiasm – I felt inspired to share these examples with the IT Jungle community.

  So, why AI for developers? AI offers a transformative toolkit that streamlines learning and amplifies creative problem-solving. Through machine learning algorithms, …

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• IBM Pushes Storage Limits With Storage Scale 6000

  December 4, 2023 Alex Woodie

  IBM recently unveiled a new high-end all-flash storage array that pushes the limits of I/O. Dubbed the IBM Storage Scale System 6000, the new array gives users 1.44 PB of storage in a 4U chassis with up to an eye-watering 256 GB/sec of bandwidth and 7 million input/output operations per second (IOPS) of performance.

  Few IBM i shops have the need for that sort of performance with traditional business applications. Indeed, with its Storage Scale parallel file system (the new name given to IBM’s General Parallel File System, or GPFS, which also previously went by the name Spectrum Scale), the …

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• Four Cybercrime Trends for Security Pros to Watch Now

  October 25, 2023 Alex Woodie

  If you’re a cybercriminal, congratulations! You’ve selected a high-growth field that’s expected to generate $14 trillion in criminal value by 2028. But that growth in digital criminality is a problem for the rest of us, who must cope with increasingly sophisticated schemes.

  Cybercrime was relatively slow-growing industry, generating a mere $1.2 trillion in costs to society globally in 2019, according to Statista. But something snapped in the collective criminal mind in 2020, and cybercrime has been riding an elevated growth curve ever since. Between 2017 and 2028, Statista projects cybercrime will enjoy a 28 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR). …

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• How Long Before Big Blue Brings Code Assist To IBM i?

  August 23, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  IBM Research and Big Blue’s Software group have been collaborating to bring generative AI capabilities to market through the Watsonx stack of large language models and related tools. Watsonx is a basis for customers to create customized LLMs based on data from their own businesses and to integrate the quasi-cognitive capabilities of LLMs into their applications.

  Watsonx is also being used by IBM to augment some tools of its own, and the most recent one that will be in tech preview in September and generally available sometime in the fourth quarter is called Watsonx Code Assistant for Z, which as …

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• Profound Logic Explores AI Paths for IBM i

  August 23, 2023 Alex Woodie

  The burgeoning world of artificial intelligence may seem far away to IBM i shops, but in fact, the technology is quite accessible to the users. One vendor that’s helping to guide IBM i users through the growing AI jungle is Profound Logic.

  Profound Logic is best known as an application modernization vendor, and one that provides tools for developing Web and mobile interfaces for IBM i applications, as well as working with APIs on the platform.

  In a series of YouTube videos, Profound Logic co-founder and CEO Alex Roytman provides a rundown on the latest developments in the world …

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