• Rocket Delivers More DevOps Capabilities For IBM i

  November 17, 2025 Alex Woodie

  Rocket Software recently put the finishing touches on a range of updates for Rocket DevOps, its suite of automation, change management, and testing solutions for IBM i. The top enhancements customers will find are two-way Git integration, AI-powered anomaly detection, unit testing enhancements, and support for IBM i DevOps workflows in Microsoft Azure Pipelines.

  It’s been a 2.5 years now that Rocket Software completed the rebrand from the old Aldon change management products, which it obtained with its 2011 acquisition, to Rocket DevOps. That Rocket DevOps rebrand involved taking the old Aldon Lifecycle Manager products – which helped automate …

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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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• Three Things For IBM i Shops To Consider About DevSecOps

  October 13, 2025 Michel Mouchon

  Way back in the Great Recession, when money was getting tight and the technical debt was getting high, the concept of agile infrastructure evolved into DevOps, the synchronization and coordination of application development, which likes to move fast, with IT operations, which likes to have things running in a stable fashion. The idea runs counter to half of the philosophy of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, who has espoused the principle to “move fast and break things.”

  DevOps wants to move fast, but it most assuredly does not want to break things, and many millions of programmers and operations staff …

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• Big Blue Converges IBM i RPG And System Z COBOL Code Assistants Into “Project Bob”

  October 13, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We have been anticipating the rollout of the Watsonx Code Assistant for RPG on the IBM i platform ever since IBM previewed a code assistant for the System z mainframe platform in August 2023 to help COBOL shops port their applications to Java on the mainframe. And lo and behold, the Rochester team followed suit, but with a slightly different approach, creating a Watsonx Code Assistant for RPG, which was also created using IBM’s homegrown “Granite” large language models.

  Well, apparently, forget all of that. At the TechExchange 2025 developer conference last week, IBM was showing off a new, unified …

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• Rocket Taps IDC To Assess The Benefits Of Full Scope IT Modernization

  September 22, 2025 Alex Woodie

  It wasn’t long ago that the words “IT modernization” conjured images of old, clunky 5250 screens becoming nimble, fresh Web interfaces. That is one form of modernization, but today the phrase can refer to a gamut of upgrades across applications, infrastructure, skills, processes, and people. So what defines success with IT modernization in 2025? Rocket Software recently commissioned IDC to find out.

  To understand what modernization means today and how well organizations are pursuing it, IDC polled 822 IT modernization decision-makers at organizations in North America, Europe, and the Asia/Pacific region. The surveyed firms included companies in financial services, healthcare, …

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• Tool Aims To Streamline Git Integration For Old School IBM i Devs

  August 18, 2025 Alex Woodie

  There’s one school of thought that says IBM i developers should embrace the DevOps revolution and start using mainstream tools like Git and Jira for managing and deploying code. But there’s also a pool of old school programmers who are reluctant to give up their established ways and means. Richard Schoen hopes to bring these worlds together with an update to the iForGit tool from his company MobiGoGo’s that streamlines Git integration for old school IBM i devs who still use PDM and SEU.

  Schoen launched his iForGit tool about seven years ago to provide some degree of Git integration …

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• VS Code Will Be The Heart Of The Modern IBM i Platform

  June 23, 2025 Sebastien Julliand

  For application programmers, the workspace is not a place to sit with a screen, a keyboard, a chair, but rather is an integrated development environment within which code can be created, shared, compiled, and managed either inside the tool itself or through plug-in extensions that link it to other tools. IDEs have been around for decades and are not anything new. What is new is how suddenly popular one particular IDE – VS Code – has become.

  For the past several years, nearly three quarters of the programmers in the world polled for the Stack Overflow Developer Survey say that …

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• Is IBM i Ready for the Agentic AI Revolution?

  March 24, 2025 Alex Woodie

  The AI world moves fast. Just when you get your head around large language models (LLMs) and the chatbots and coding co-pilots they enable, the AI world has moved onto something new. In 2025, that something new is the reasoning model, which is enabling autonomous AI agents and the world of agentic AI.

  Is IBM i ready for the revolution that’s about to unfold?

  By now you have undoubtedly read about LLMs such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, and Meta’s Llama. These LLMs are popular ways to power text-based generative AI applications, such as chatbots, coding co-pilots, and question-and-answer …

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• ARCAD Discover: Global Application Analysis With An AI Interface

  February 10, 2025 Michel Mouchon

  Here is a simple test to reckon the value of the applications that run your company. Walk down to the datacenter, or over to the datacloset, or SSH out to the cloud, and turn the physical or logical machine running those applications off. What happens next?

  Aside from a lot of animated conversations and possibly some cursing, not much until you turn the machine back on and the system, databases, and applications reboot. You already knew this, but now everyone else has discovered, rather suddenly, how the very existence of the business and the livelihoods of the employees is dependent …

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• What Do IBM i Shops Use To Write Applications These Days?

  February 3, 2025 Alex Woodie

  When it comes to languages and tools for developing applications on IBM i, there are a ton of options available for customers. Thanks to the PASE runtime, a variety of open source languages and runtimes have been brought to the platform, not to mention the time-tested ILE technologies from IBM. But what do IBM i shops actually use to write new apps? For answers, we look to Fortra’s 2025 IBM i Marketplace Survey results.

  Fortra recently released the results for the 11th installment of its IBM i Marketplace Survey, which is based on surveys it conducted in late 2025 …

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