• From Green Screens To Smart Factories: Explaining DevOps To The Next Gen IBM i Developers

  June 1, 2026 Gaurav Khanna

  Over the past few years, many IBM i teams have encountered a surprising challenge when onboarding new developers. It isn’t platform complexity. It isn’t system performance. And it certainly isn’t reliability. The challenge is explaining how modern software development practices – things like CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, and centralized repositories – fit into traditional IBM i development workflows.

  This gap often shows from both directions. For developers who grew up with Git and cloud-native tools, concepts like manual object promotion and library-based deployment can feel unfamiliar. At the same time, experienced IBM i professionals often hear terms like “shift-left testing” …

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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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• 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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• NAViGATE, inPower 2025 On Tap for September 2025

  September 15, 2025 Alex Woodie

  As the summer turns to fall, IBM i professionals will be turning out to a pair of events being hosted in the Midwest, including Infor’s imPower 2025 conference in Wisconsin, and COMMON’s NAViGATE conference taking place in Pennsylvania. Both shows are expected to draw hundreds of participants.

  NAViGATE 2025 takes place this week in Pittsburgh. COMMON is hosting about 110 sessions on IBM i topics across the three-day event, including sessions on application development, security, high availability, and administering the system.

  Tim Rowe, an IBM architect for application development, and Julia Yan, the lead developer of Navigator for i, will …

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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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• Rocket CDC Tool Pushes Data Out Of IBM i

  March 10, 2025 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops that need a change data capture (CDC) tool to push Db2 data off the box onto a target system, such as an Apache Kafka stream, may want to check out the new DataEdge product that Rocket Software recently announced.

  In late January, Rocket Software unveiled DataEdge, a new suite that provides a spectrum of data integration, data discovery, and data virtualization capabilities under the specific product names Rocket Data Replicate & Sync, Rocket Data Intelligence, and Rocket Data Virtualization. Some of the components in DataEdge are preexisting, while others – such as the outbound IBM i CDC …

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• Rocket Consolidates Half a Dozen Terminal Emulators With Secure Host Access

  February 10, 2025 Alex Woodie

  Rocket Software has rolled out Secure Host Access, a new terminal emulator for utilizing the classic greenscreen interfaces of heritage IBM i, mainframe, and Unix applications. The new offering consolidates multiple emulators acquired by Rocket over the years into a single offering, while delivering much-needed security features that the previous emulators largely lacked.

  Rocket Software’s Secure Host Access is a terminal emulator that provides a full array of TN5250, TS3270, and VT connectivity from PCs, Web browsers, and mobile devices. The Java-based product offers all the features and capabilities that you would expect to find in a mature emulator, …

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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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• The Many Faces Of IT Modernization

  October 7, 2024 Alex Woodie

  The clarion call of modernization has been heard loud and clear among IBM i and System z shops for decades. Old IT is hampering your competitiveness, they’re told, and something must be done about it. In reality, there’s no single path to modernization, which is a multi-faceted phenomenon that can have wide ranging impacts on the business, Rocket Software says in a new report.

  Business transformation is separate from IT transformation, but the two are linked, according to Rocket Software’s new study, titled IT Modernization Without Disruption, which is based on a survey of 309 decision-maker at System …

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• CICS Transaction Server For IBM i Is Sunsetted

  September 16, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Way back during the Y2K crisis at the turn of the century, there were a lot of IBM mainframe shops that decided to port their COBOL applications and their related CICS transaction monitoring software to OS/400 rather than try to move to a new language and a new transaction monitor.

  Mainframe COBOL and CICS are a bit different from OS/400 – and now IBM i – COBOL and CICS, but there was enough similarity that companies with large COBOL/CICS estates could make the jump from the ES/9000 to the AS/400 and IBM i platform, and thousands of such companies – …

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