• Oracle Dips A Toe Into IBM’s EBCDIC World

  August 24, 2026 Alex Woodie

  IBM’s Ted Codd may have invented the relational database back at the Almaden Lab in the early 1970s, but it was Larry Ellison’s Oracle that offered the world the first wildly commercially successful RDBMs. Technically, the System/38 was announced, with its integrated relational database, before the first version of Oracle was announced.

  Since then, Oracle and IBM have competed intensely to win and run transactional database workloads for some of the biggest enterprises around. But there was always one key difference between the two companies’ offerings: Oracle used an ASCI character set while the IBM midrange and mainframe systems relied …

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• Big Blue Ships Bob 2.0 And Premium Package For IBM i

  July 13, 2026 Alex Woodie

  IBM’s push into the world of agentic coding continues, as Big Blue officially started selling and supporting major updates to its Bob agentic AI software. There are two separate but related pieces of news to cover, including the release of IBM Bob Premium Package for i and the release of Bob 2.0.

  As it is wont to do, IBM generated some confusion with its Bob launches, as both Bob 2.0 and the Bob premium packages became available on the same day, June 24. However, Bob 2.0 and the Bob premium packages are not the same thing, and their announcements were …

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• Talking Git On IBM i With A Bunch Of IBM i Gits

  July 13, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If there is someone on planet Earth who is most definitely not a git, it is Linux operating system kernel and Git version control system creator Linus Torvalds. The term git was absolutely meant to be pejorative, but it has softened over the years in part because Torvalds chose the name for his version control system precisely to mock himself. The meaning of git is shifting from incompetent senile fool toward curmudgeon and is heading toward old fart.

  Torvalds manages one of the largest software projects in the world, and in the early 2000s chose BitKeeper, a proprietary source …

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• Former IBMer’s New Book Puts The Midrange In The Spotlight

  June 22, 2026 Alex Woodie

  Over the years, there have been an untold number of books written about IBM and its computing legacy. (Our founding editor, TPM, has most of them in his library.) But very few, if any, of them focus much time on the line of midrange servers that came out of Rochester, Minnesota, including the AS/400, which turned 38 years young yesterday. That void is what drove former IBMer Bill Shaffer, who spent his entire career in the midrange, to write the book IBM & Computing.

  Shaffer spent 40 years at IBM, beginning as a programmer working out of the Miami, …

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• Big Blue Unveils Bob Premium Pack For IBM i

  June 1, 2026 Alex Woodie

  Early Bob users who were frustrated with the inability to work with source code residing on IBM i will be happy to hear that the functionality will soon be available in the Bob Premium Package, which IBM announced in May and will start shipping in June. The Premium Pack also includes some other new capabilities that will be useful for IBM i developers, including new modes, skills, and tools.

  The first version of IBM’s Bob, the AI tool that help developers understand, document, and generate code in RPG and other IBM i languages, generally has been well-received by the IBM …

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• Bob 1.0 Users Bugged By Lack Of One Feature

  April 6, 2026 Alex Woodie

  The launch of the Bob AI coding tool in late March has been met with considerable amount of hoopla by IBM, as well as anticipation by the IBM i community. The early reception to Bob has been mixed, due in part to the lack of one particular feature.

  Bob is a new AI tool from IBM that’s designed to help developers understand, document, and generate code in a variety of languages and platforms. On the IBM i server, Bob supports RPG, as well as CL, SQL, DDS, and COBOL, while it supports other languages on other platforms. IBM introduced Bob …

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• Early Bob Excels In Medhost IBM i Tryout

  March 30, 2026 Alex Woodie

  One of the early testers of the IBM Bob AI tool is Medhost, the longtime developer of an integrated IBM i-based healthcare applications for community and rural hospitals. According to a joint presentation between IBM and the software vendor last week, the beta test was a success, as Bob assisted Medhost in not only understanding its RPG and SQL codebases, but modernizing and enhancing them.

  IBM i chief architect Steve Will was joined by Michael Bowen, the senior vice president of technology at Medhost, in a webinar last week to discuss how the provider of electronic health records (EHR) …

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• Izzi Partners With Capricorn For IBM i Services And Bluehouse For Software Peddling

  March 23, 2026 Alex Woodie

  UPDATED: Izzi Software has partnered with a pair of companies with connections to IBM midrange and mainframe systems, including Capricorn Information Systems, a New York provider of IBM i technical services, and Bluehouse, a software distributor with a global network of sellers.

  Izzi emerged in early 2025 with a goal to buy smaller, founder-led software companies with revenues in the range of $2 million to $10 million who play in the IBM i and System Z markets. The Minneapolis, Minnesota-based company has made a handful of acquisitions to date, including System Z development tool provider Colesoft in 2025, …

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• IBM Gets Bob 1.0 Off The Ground

  March 2, 2026 Alex Woodie

  IBM this month finally will get a coding co-pilot into the hands of its IBM i installed base with the launch of Bob. The general availability of Bob 1.0.0 on March 24 will mark the end of the long wait for IBM i customers – and in particular, the large population of RPG developers – to start using IBM-branded AI software to maintain and develop IBM i software.

  The world of generative AI moves quickly, as the large language models (LLMs) from frontier providers improve on a weekly, if not daily, basis. This is both exciting, as the capabilities of …

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• Strategic Topics To Think About For 2026, Part 1

  February 9, 2026 Philippe Magne

  Longevity is an amazing thing. ARCAD Software has now amassed more than 34 years of expertise centered around everything related to DevSecOps transformations. To start off the new year, I would like to share six strategic ideas that will help shape 2026 in the IBM i market, and beyond it.

  The big new development for ARCAD is our fourth brand, called DISCOVER, which is focused on application intelligence. It’s the newest addition, and it’s very promising. We’re delighted to have convinced more than 25 customers by year 2025, and I think this will evolve significantly this year.

  DISCOVER is all …

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