• EvolveWare Makes Progress With RPG Code Modernization Using AI

  November 3, 2025 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops that are looking for a partner to help them modernize RPG using AI have a number of companies to choose from, including IBM, which unveiled Project Bob last month. Another company to keep in mind is EvolveWare, which recently released its RPG code understanding tool and has plans to release a code generation product for RPG based on large language models (LLMs) in 2026.

  EvolveWare has been treading the code modernization waters since it was founded by chief executive officer Miten Marfatia in Santa Clara, California, back in 2001. The company has primarily been involved in COBOL …

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• IBM Just Killed Merlin. Here’s Why

  October 20, 2025 Alex Woodie

  The writing had been on the wall for some time, and IBM finally made it official as part of the Technology Refresh for IBM i on October 7. That was when Big Blue announced the immediate withdrawal from marketing and service for its Modernization Engine for Lifecycle Integration product, commonly called Merlin. It will likely go down in IBM i history as a well-intentioned product that got some things right, but which ultimately could not overcome its flaws.

  The introduction of Merlin back in May 2022 represented a sizable shift in IBM’s approach to application development on IBM i. Prior …

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• A Bit More Insight Into IBM’s “Spyre” AI Accelerator For Power

  October 20, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If anything is clear right now, it is that Nvidia does not need to get any richer in the GenAI revolution, and neither does its foundry partner, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. But everyone else, including IBM and specifically its Power Systems business, desperately needs to do something to catch the GenAI wave and make some money in this once-in-a-millennia opportunity.

  Our thesis, as you well know, is that for IBM i shops, code assistants that can help document, update, modernize, or port RPG and COBOL application code to newer languages and modular programming techniques is the killer app for GenAI, …

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• What You Will Find In IBM i 7.6 TR1 and IBM i 7.5 TR7

  October 13, 2025 Alex Woodie

  It’s early October, which means leaves are changing colors, nights are getting colder, and IBM developers in southern Minnesota and elsewhere are gearing up the autumnal Technology Refreshes for the IBM i operating system.

  With last week’s announcements of TR1 for IBM i 7.6 and TR7 for IBM i 7.5, which ship November 21, IBM has committed to delivering a slew of updates and new functionality across the range of IBM i system software, from application development to administration.

  Before we get into the specific areas of IBM i, let’s cover the general enhancements it made with I/O handling. For …

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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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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 27, Number 41

  October 13, 2025 Doug Bidwell

  I don’t know about you, but we figured there were Technology Refreshes coming, especially with IBM’s TechExchange 2025 developer conference going on last week. However, unlike in past years, we didn’t get any advanced warning. So check out the initial coverage of the new TRs for IBM i 7.5 and IBM i 7.6 and keep an eye out for the coming weeks of detailed drill-downs.

  There is also a pretty serious set of vulnerabilities in the IBM i platform that you need to deal with. Check out Security Bulletin: IBM i is affected by Remote Code Execution, Deserialization of Untrusted …

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• AI Is Coming for ERP. How Will IBM i Respond?

  September 8, 2025 Alex Woodie

  A wave of artificial intelligence is beginning to wash over the enterprise resource planning software market, changing the nature of how businesses process automation gets done. IBM i has been a solid platform for running ERP systems for decades. But how will the new generation of AI-enabled enterprise apps get to IBM i?

  When it comes to automating business processes, ERP packages have been the primary means for achieving it for the past four decades. The big monolithic apps from SAP, Oracle, Infor, and dozens of others have driven trillions of dollars in value by providing a …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 27, Number 29

  July 28, 2025 Doug Bidwell

  Welcome to the IBM i PTF Guide. This week, we start out with two security vulnerabilities having to do with the WebSphere application server and an issue with the Java programming runtime.

  Let’s start with the security issues.

  First, we have Security Bulletin: IBM WebSphere Application Server and WebSphere Application Server Liberty are affected by a security bypass vulnerability (CVE-2024-56339), which you can find out more about at this link. The affected products are IBM WebSphere Application Server Liberty 17.0.0.3 through 25.0.0.7 and IBM WebSphere Application Server 9.0.

  Second, we have PH67183: IBM WebSphere Liberty is affected by …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 27, Number 28

  July 21, 2025 Doug Bidwell

  We are still playing a “game of ketchup” after the Independence Day holiday in the United States. This week, we learn that IBM i Java Development Kit 11 64-bit VMs Fail with UnsatisfiedLinkError After IBM i Java Group PTF Apply. You can find out more about this issue at this link. The affected IBM i Java Group PTF levels are as follows:

  • IBM i 7.6: N/A – Java 11 64 bit not available.
  • IBM i 7.5: SF99955 level 15
  • IBM i 7.4: SF99665 level 28
  • IBM i 7.3: Not affected

  As of July 9, IBM i JDK development is …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 27, Number 23

  June 9, 2025 Doug Bidwell

  It’s pretty quiet this week, which is good. We gave you a lot of stuff to do last week anyway, so now you can really get caught up.

  The important thing is a new security vulnerability, which is in Security Bulletin: IBM Rational Developer for i is affected by an unspecified Java runtime encryption vulnerability (CVE-2025-21587). You can find out more about this issue with RDi at this link. The affected releases include Rational Developer for i 9.8.0.0 through 9.8.0.4, and the recommended fix is to install the RDi 9.8.0.5 update.

  Here is the rundown of PTF Groups by …

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