• Strategic Topics To Think About For 2026, Part 2

  March 9, 2026 Philippe Magne

  Last month, in the first part of this series, I presented a bunch of strategic topics that I think the IBM i community needs to think about as we figure out what needs to be done in their application estates in 2026 and beyond. I talked predominantly about pragmatism versus hype with AI and then DevSecOps transformation and AI integration into DevSecOps. You can read Part 1 at this link, and that is probably a good idea before diving into Part 2.

  In Part 2, I want to focus in on application security. This is a big theme, and …

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• After A Few Short Years, VS Code Passes Rational Developer for i

  February 23, 2026 Alex Woodie

  It has finally happened: Visual Studio Code has passed Rational Developer for i in usage, according to the 2026 version of Fortra’s IBM i Marketplace Survey. The survey also shows lower adoption of greenscreen ADTS and increased use of DevOps tools, demonstrating some positive trends in IBM i application development.

  It’s been barely two years since Fortra started asking IBM i customers about their use of Visual Studio Code, the free, Web-based integrated development environment (IDE) originally developed by Microsoft and set free as an open source project in November 2015. The 2024 survey (which was conducted in late 2023) …

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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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• 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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