• Skills Displaces Cybersecurity As Top Concern For IBM i Shops

  February 2, 2026 Alex Woodie

  Well, it was bound to happen eventually. After nine straight years as the top concern in the IBM i community, cybersecurity has finally fallen out of the number one position in Fortra’s annual IBM i Marketplace Survey. Taking its place atop the closely watched survey is IBM i skills, an issue that has been lurking in the background but now must be considered a priority for IBM i leaders.

  Fortra’s annual IBM i Marketplace Survey provides a broad barometer on what’s going on with the IBM i community. One of the most closely watched questions in the survey, …

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• Bob More Than Just A Code Assistant, IBM i Chief Architect Will Says

  December 1, 2025 Alex Woodie

  When IBM i professionals finally get their hands on Bob, the new AI-powered tool currently in development in Big Blue’s labs, they will find that it is much more than just a code assistant, IBM i chief Architect Steve Will said recently. “It has a lot of knowledge,” he said. “It knows things about IBM i.”

  While precise details about the timing of the release of Bob are slim, IBM is widely expected to release a public preview of the new AI-powered plug-in for VS Code in early 2026. The new software, which was unveiled in early October around the …

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• Beta Of MCP Server Opens Up IBM i For Agentic AI

  October 27, 2025 Alex Woodie

  When Anthropic quietly released Model Context Protocol (MCP) in November 2024, it didn’t garner a whole lot attention. But as the agentic AI wave grew in early 2025, the protocol suddenly was hailed as the new standard for integrating AI applications, tools, and data sources. A good indication of just how far MCP has come is the fact that IBM released an early version of the MCP server for IBM i this month.

  Project Bob got the big headlines at the IBM TechXchange conference, which took place the second week of October in Orlando, Florida. And for good reason, as …

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• Big Blue Boosts IBM i Support In Instana, Adds Tracing

  October 6, 2025 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops that need more insight into how their hardware and software is running may want to consider IBM’s Instana software. IBM has been investing in the observability tool, which was recently updated to support traces on IBM i systems. That’s one of several upgrades IBM has made to Instana to help its IBM i customers.

  IBM acquired Instana back in November 2020 to bolster its presence in the nascent observability arena, particularly as it related to monitoring cloud-native environments (i.e., those using Kubernetes and microservices). Big Blue had just spent $34 billion to buy Red Hat and its …

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• Rocket Celebrates 35th Anniversary As Private Equity Owner Ponders Sale

  April 28, 2025 Alex Woodie

  Rocket Software has come a long way since Andy Youniss and Johan Magnusson Gedda founded the company in Youniss’ Boston garage in 1990. Today the company counts more than 12,000 customers, including a large number of IBM i shops, and reportedly has a valuation of around $10 billion. Could the company’s 35th anniversary of its founding be a good time for its current majority owner, Bain Capital, to sell?

  Youniss started building what we now think of as Rocket Software in 2000, when he completed the first of what would become dozens of acquisitions. Over the years, there would be …

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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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• Steve Will Lifts the Curtain On “Major IBM i Announcement,” But Just A Smidge

  March 3, 2025 Alex Woodie

  If you haven’t heard yet, here it is: IBM is planning to make a major IBM i announcement soon. IBM i chief architect Steve Will said as much during his recent IBM i Guided Tour. While Will shared a general outline of what IBM has in mind for the major announcement, specifics still are few and far between.

  Will, who also holds the titles of IBM i CTO and IBM distinguished engineer, teased the IBM i community with his one-hour February 12 presentation, which is titled IBM i in 2025 – A Strategic Preview. You can access a recording …

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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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• 2025 IBM i Predictions, Part Two

  January 20, 2025 Alex Woodie

  With new wall calendars and a new (old) guy in the White House, change is in the air as we start off 2025. That much was obvious from the first installment of IBM i predictions, which ran last week. This second batch of predictions may be even bolder than the first.

  We’re in the midst of a shakeup in the tech job market, thanks to several years of elevated inflation, emergence of cloud computing, and new technologies like AI. How does that impact the IBM i job market? For insight, we turn to Bob Langieri, the owner of Excel Technical …

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• 2025 IBM i Predictions, Part One

  January 13, 2025 Alex Woodie

  The new year is shaping up to be a big one for IBM i. A new release of the operating system is expected, as is a new processor and new servers built with them. Old utilities are slated to get the axe, but no one is quite sure how far IBM will cut. And then of course there’s what will happen in the IBM i community, which is where we turn for insight into what comes next.

  We start this year’s batch of IBM i predictions with Charlie Guarino, the president of Central Park Data Systems and the resident expert …

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