• 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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• If It Ain’t Broke, Don’t Fix It

  March 13, 2024 Alex Woodie

  The information technology industry has a “newness” bias. It always has, and probably always will. But when it comes to the systems for processing business transactions, decision makers need to think carefully about what they’re doing, as ditching “legacy technology” for a shiny new one doesn’t always deliver the promised upgrade.

  The cloud is currently the hot new thing in IT. Even though it’s not necessarily “new,” and not necessarily “a technology” (it is a collection of technologies and a platform and a business model…), business owners are under tremendous pressure to “get to the cloud” by whatever means necessary. …

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• AWS Inks Deal With Connectria To Have a Power Play

  November 15, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The long road of history has not been made impassible by the charred marketing tanks and flaming sales assault vehicles of those who have tried to breach Fortress Rochester, but there are a whole lot of rusting machines off on the horizon cluttering the road and more than a few smoking machines nearby as well as some sizable holes in the ramparts out on that cornfield in Minnesota.

  While the proprietary minicomputer businesses and the Unix server businesses of the competition of the AS/400 and IBM i platform have all been destroyed and that IBM is indeed the last bastion …

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• Jack Henry Reiterates IBM i Support “For The Foreseeable Future”

  July 31, 2023 Alex Woodie

  Jack Henry & Associates has been tied to the IBM i and its predecessor platforms for its entire life. The company’s flagship RPG-based product for community banks, Silverlake, is the same name IBM used for its AS/400 development project. And while Jack Henry is developing applications in other technologies and other platforms, the IBM i will be supported for the foreseeable future, the company says.

  Like many companies in the IBM i ecosystem today, Jack Henry has a modernization strategy, and that modernization strategy involves several, interrelated components.

  For starters, the company wants to move away from the old style …

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• Entry Servers: IBM i Versus Windows Server, Redux

  April 10, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  No comparison between similar but different things is ever perfect. It is the nature of language, constructed of similes and metaphors, as well as science, which speaks in generalities but craves ever-finer precision. It is no different when trying to compare different system platforms, which we do quite often around here at The Four Hundred and have for three and a half decades.

  The comparison between the Power S1022s running IBM i and a Dell PowerEdge R7515 running Windows Server and SQL Server, which we did last week, needed some refinement, I learned from an intrepid reader who reminded …

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• More IBM i Security Flaws Revealed

  July 13, 2022 Alex Woodie

  The summer slowdown might have started in your particular business, but things are just getting warmed up IBM security researchers, who disclosed a series of new vulnerabilities across IBM i products over the past couple of weeks, including IBM i Merlin, WAS Liberty, OpenSSL, the Digital Certificate Manager, and Zlib.

  On June 27, IBM disclosed that the collection of open source and proprietary tools and technology it’s brought together as IBM i Modernization Engine for Lifecycle Integration (Merlin) suffers from no fewer than 16 separate security flaws.

  Among the most series of these flaws is a CVE-2022-22965, a data binding …

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• Beware The Hype Of Modern Tech

  April 25, 2022 Alex Woodie

  Many IBM i shops are under the gun to modernize their applications as part of a digital transformation initiative. If the app is more than 10 or 15 years old and doesn’t use the latest technology and techniques, it’s considered a legacy system that must be torn down and rebuilt according to current code. But there are substantial risks associated with these efforts – not the least of which that the modern method is essentially incompatible with the IBM i architecture as it currently exists. IBM i shops should be careful when evaluating these new directions.

  Amy Anderson, a modernization …

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• Infor CM3 to Provide On-Prem Alternative to Cloudy M3

  April 20, 2022 Alex Woodie

  For years, Infor has been leading with the cloud when it comes to M3, the ERP system formerly known as Movex. But now, the software giant is readying a new hybrid deployment option called CM3 that will run in a Linux or Windows container and IBM i.

  Long before Infor completed its Lawson acquisition in April 2012 — even before Lawson finished its acquisition of Intentia in 2006 — plans were solidly in place to migrate the core RPG code underpinning the Movex suite to Java, thereby opening the software to run on platforms besides just IBM i, its historical …

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• What The Open Source Roadmap Holds For IBM i In 2021

  March 15, 2021 Alex Woodie

  2020 was whirlwind of a year when it comes to open source on IBM i, with many major new open source products coming to the platform. The roadmap for open source software in 2021 may not be quite as active as last year, but there will be some compelling new technology to play with, coming from IBM and the community, IBM’s open source guru Jesse Gorzinski tells us.

  “Last year was a pretty big year for open source,” says Gorzinski, whose official IBM title is senior business architect for open source software on IBM i. “In 2021, we’re going to …

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• MariaDB Now Available Via RPM

  December 7, 2020 Alex Woodie

  When it comes to databases for the IBM i community, Db2 for i is, and always be, number one. But there’s no reason to limit yourself to just one database, and now IBM is making it easier for IBM i shops to get their hands on MariaDB, which could be the number two database on the platform.

  MariaDB is an open source relational database that is a fork of MySQL. MySQL, of course, has been supported on the IBM i server for many years. But following Oracle’s acquisition of Sun Microsystems, which had acquired the company that developed MySQL, …

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