• Will The Turbulent Economy Downdraft IBM Systems Or Lift It?

  April 28, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We have always contended that recessions accelerate technology trends rather than slow them down. And if we start heading into a recession either in the United States or around the globe – it is hard to imagine one without the other – it is reasonable to assume that companies will be looking very aggressively to take automation up another level to cut costs further, to generate new lines of business, and to push profits as hard as they can in what will probably be a deflationary environment.

  There are a lot of assumptions in that paragraph, so let’s pick it …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 27, Number 17

  April 28, 2025 Doug Bidwell

  Just a reminder that as part of the April 8 announcements, IBM Software Support content is changing to require entitlement check for software patches. See more at this link, but the gist of it is that IBM Software Support Troubleshooting, Question & Answer, and How To documents are changing to require entitlement. This means that you will be required to log on with an IBMid that has proper entitlement before viewing the entire document.

  Also this week, there is Security Bulletin: IBM WebSphere Application Server is vulnerable to server-side request forgery (CVE-2025-27907), which you can find out more about …

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• Sundry Interesting IBM i Announcements For You To Ponder

  April 23, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We are still picking though the latest tweaks and changes to the IBM i platform that came with the April 8 announcements. We are still also working through our disappointment that there was not one single interesting hardware announcement from Big Blue relating to the Power Systems platform. We are having a bit of iron deficiency, it seems.

  First thing first, we noticed this week that the official Redbook for IBM i 7.6, which naturally enough is called IBM i 7.6 Features And Functions, has been published, and is jam packed with 215 pages of more details about …

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• z17 Mainframes Give IBM Time To Ramp AI-Accelerated Power11 Systems

  April 14, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We had been expecting for the Power11 processors and their new Power Systems servers to be announced sometime around the spring to early summer of this year and to start shipping in volume in the summer, maybe in June or July, with a nice sales bump in the second half of 2025. However, now the Power11 launch will be in the second half of the year, and IBM’s Systems group will be counting on a bump first from the System z17 mainframes that were launched last week.

  This has happened before, and more than once, and it is a good …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 27, Number 14

  April 8, 2025 Doug Bidwell

  If you need a little something to wake you up, or a little night reading before you  drift off to sleep, check out the Known Issues And Fix Information database at Big Blue for the IBM platform, which you can see here. The IBM i PTF Guide is meant to save you from having to be familiar with this, of course. But it can’t hurt to be aware of this database.

  Here is the rundown of PTF Groups by IBM i release level since we last published:

  PTF Groups 7.5:

  • HIPERs (High Impact/Pervasive)
  • Java
  • Backup Recovery Solutions
  • Content Manager

  …

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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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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 27, Number 6

  February 10, 2025 Doug Bidwell

  It is a quiet week as far as security vulnerabilities go, so if you are in North America, or you like American football, we hope you enjoyed Super Bowl LIX and know that there is nothing too serious you need to handle right now with your IBM i system. There are some new HIPERs and patches to Java and the Apace Web server.

  Here is the rundown of PTF Groups by IBM i release level since we last published:

  PTF Groups 7.5:

  • HIPERs (High Impact/Pervasive)
  • Java
  • IBM HTTP Server for i

  PTF Groups 7.4:

  • HIPERs (High Impact/Pervasive)
  • Java
  • IBM HTTP

  …

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• IBM Power On Track To Get Above $2 Billion A Year

  February 3, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  IBM’s stock price is kissing $260 a share, and this is a level that, adjusted for stock splits, the company has not seen since before it ran up on the rocks in the early 1990s as its mainframe business and AS/400 business all shrank at the same time that RISC/Unix systems and X86 gear in the datacenter took off. What’s going on?

  Well, here is the deal: IBM has customers using its Power and z servers for mission-critical back office systems, and a lot of the customers using its IBM i, AIX, Linux, and z/OS platforms are going to be …

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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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• IBM Announcement Roundup: A Little Bit Of Everything

  January 13, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Welcome to 2025, everybody. Nothing too big has happened on the IBM i front as far as we know, excepting the appointment of a new vice president for product management for the Power Systems line, which we report on elsewhere in this issue. But a lot of little thing have happened in recent weeks that bear pointing out, including a whole lot of patching that you can get caught up on in the IBM i PTF Guide also elsewhere in this issue.

  Let’s go through the IBM announcements relative to the Power Systems and IBM i customer base that we …

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