• COMMON Dances To A Fresh New Tune In New Orleans

  May 4, 2026 Alex Woodie

  This wasn’t the first COMMON conference held in New Orleans, but it may have been the best, considering where the IBM i platform is at this particular time and what happened down on the bayou last week.

  For starters, the four-day event attracted about 1,300 attendees, which is a solid increase from the 1,200 that attended last year’s conference in Anaheim, California. But here’s the kicker: About one-third of the COMMON POWERUp 2026 attendees were attending the conference for the first time. In other words, around 400 folks decided that IBM i education and community were important enough for them …

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• CData Adds Db2 for i Support to CDC Tool

  April 27, 2026 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops that need to quickly move data from their database to other systems for AI, analytics, or operational uses may be interested in recent news out of CData. The company announced that it’s now supporting Db2 for i with Sync, its real-time change data capture (CDC) product.

  CData Software is a Cherry Hill, North Carolina-based company that has been building data integration software since it was founded in 2010. In addition to database drivers (ODBC, JDBC, OLE DB), database connectors, and embedded solutions, the company develops a data integration platform dubbed Sync that provides a range of CDC, …

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• IBM Taps Nvidia GPUs For AI-Turbocharged Data Mart

  March 23, 2026 Alex Woodie

  Nvidia became the world’s most valuable company thanks to its powerful GPUs, which can be used to train massive AI models containing trillions of parameters. But those GPUs can also be used to accelerate traditional SQL analytics on structured data sitting in a data lake, as IBM’s customer Nestlé found out in a recent deployment.

  Nestlé is the world’s largest food manufacturer, with more than 2,000 brands and operations spanning 186 countries. The Swiss company, which recorded revenues of CHF 89.5 billion ($113.5 billion at current exchange rates), operates 335 factories and employs about 271,000 people.

  The company, which is …

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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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• 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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• Guru: Access Client Solutions 1.1.9.11 – Security First, With Continued Investment In SQL Tooling

  January 26, 2026 Gregory Simmons

  Big Blue has released IBM i Access Client Solutions (ACS) version 1.1.9.11, and while the release is anchored by an important security fix, it also reflects IBM’s continued investment in the SQL tooling that has become central to day-to-day IBM i development and administration. This is not a feature-heavy update on its own, but it arrives after a series of releases that have steadily expanded the usefulness of both Run SQL Scripts and SQL Performance Center.

  The primary driver for upgrading to ACS 1.1.9.11 is the remediation of CVE-2025-66516, an XML External Entity vulnerability related to how ACS processes certain …

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• Learning And Laughing With Scott Forstie And Tim Rowe

  December 8, 2025 Alex Woodie

  In the darkest days of the 2020 pandemic, with COVID lockdowns in full force, IBM i business architects Tim Rowe and Scott Forstie decided to try something new: start a video blog. Dubbed iSee, the short videos blend serious technical content around ACS and SQL services with goofy puns and silly drawings. Fast forward to fall 2025, and iSee is going strong, as the pair recently aired their 100th iSee episode.

  “Scott and I have been thinking about some fun things that we want to talk about to help you in your every day job,” Rowe said in the very …

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• Fresche Taps AI For New RPG-To-Java Conversion Tool

  November 10, 2025 Alex Woodie

  Fresche Solutions has launched X-Modernize AI, a new offering that uses generative AI technology to convert legacy RPG and Synon code to modern Java. The software, which is based on large language models and its X-Analysis cross-reference and code understanding tool, will speed up code conversion projects by a significant amount, the company claims.

  Fresche Solutions is no stranger to legacy modernization projects and tools that convert RPG code into languages like Java, PHP, and .NET. In fact, the company’s very first announcement after it changed its name from Speedware to Fresche Legacy way back in 2012 was the acquisition …

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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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