• Bob Code Assistant Gets Better Understanding Of IBM i Applications

  November 9, 2026 Alex Woodie

  It has been barely six months since the Bob code assistant became generally available, and just four months since Big Blue shipped the Premium Package for i, which introduced new modes and tools that make Bob useful for IBM i users. But IBM and the open community have not slowed down the pace of development one iota, with two releases of Bob Premium Pack for i in the past two months, including new features to helps IBM i developers understand their applications.

  If you are an IBM i developer who is serious about being productive with Bob, you are going …

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• Start Where the Data Lives: Best Practices for Taking IBM i Into AI

  October 5, 2026 Doug McMaster Ron Venzin and Gregg Rohaly

  The AI conversation has arrived at the IBM i shop, and in most cases, it did not come in through the computer room door. It came down from the boardroom, or over from finance, or sideways from a sales vice president who watched a demo at a conference and wants to know why the company cannot ask its own order history a question in plain English. The IBM i manager is then handed a question that sounds technical but is strategic: can our core platform play in this, or do we need to replace it to get there?

  That is …

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• Izzi Taps Virtutem To Modernize Infor LX Environments With Valence

  January 19, 2026 Alex Woodie

  Izzi Software entered the IBM i market in 2025 with cash for acquisitions, and promptly landed CNX and its Valence application modernization tool. Fast forward to 2026, and Izzi has formed a strategic partnership with longtime Infor partner Virtutem to sell and support Valence to users of Infor LX and other IBM i-based ERP systems.

  Virtutem founder and chief executive officer Alwyn Francis has a long history with the IBM i platform and the BPCS product from Infor. He was an RPG II programmer working on System/3, System/34, and System/36 before joining an SSA partner based in the United …

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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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• Public Preview For Watson Code Assistant for i Available Soon

  May 21, 2025 Alex Woodie

  At the COMMON POWERUp 2025 conference this week, IBM pulled the covers back a bit on Watson Code Assistant for IBM i, the new name for the AI-powered coding assistant that IBM first started talking about one year ago. A public preview of WCA for i is becoming available to a limited number of testers, with general availability expected in the second half of the year.

  There has been quite a bit of development in the IBM i coding co-pilot this month. On May 7, during the IBM Think conference, two IBM executives wrote a blog post announcing WCA for …

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• IBM Begins the Purge of Old Greenscreen Utilities

  July 10, 2024 Alex Woodie

  IBM is prepping the IBM i community to prepare to adapt to some substantial changes that are coming with the next release of IBM i, including the end of support for a large swath of the Application Development ToolSet (ADTS) that ships with Rational Development Studio (RDS). Source Entry Utility (SEU) and Programming Development Manager (PDM) are not among the ADTS tools getting the boot, but that’s not stopping midrange professionals from speculating that their time in IBM i is limited, too.

  As part of its May 7 Technology Refresh for IBM i 7.4 and 7.5, IBM issued a “software …

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• Getting [Stuff] Done Done With Briteskies

  December 4, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The IBM i ecosystem is big enough, and changes enough with the times, that we are still finding companies who are relatively new to the base but who have been around for a bit of time who are doing interesting things and who are not quite on our radar. Part of what we do is seek these companies out so we can tell you about them, what they are doing, what they see in the market, and how they can help you.

  Such is the case with Briteskies, a consultancy based in Cleveland, Ohio, that we have written about …

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• It Is Time To Have A Group Chat About AI

  January 23, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The first rule of any technology is that is can be used for good or evil, but generally it is used for something vaguely in between. The second rule, rarely used, is that some technologies need to be tightly controlled because of the global-scale damage they can cause. Nuclear fission and nuclear fusion come immediately to mind. And so does the special branch of machine learning called deep learning, which most people call AI training these days.

  I can’t remember precisely when I first started writing about AI training and the neural networks and frameworks underneath them, but I wrote …

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• A Frank Solstice

  June 20, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  When you are born in Minnesota, the seasons matter. Unfortunately, as Frank Soltis, the former chief architect of the AS/400 system and the creator of the single-level storage architecture of the System/38 and the AS/400 that is still a marvel, once quipped to us: “There are only two seasons in Minnesota: Winter, and Getting Ready For Winter.”

  And so, you have two options: Play hockey when you aren’t farming, or design excellent computer systems. That’s how supercomputer genius Seymour Cray did it from nearby Wisconsin.

  The AS/400 for which this publication was founded 33 years ago was born on the …

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• Reader Feedback On State Of The IBM i Base, IBM i Salaries

  April 11, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Hey, TPM:

  I have been enjoying your series on the state of the IBM i environment. Those and other recent IT Jungle articles have helped me better understand some of the things that I am seeing as a training vendor.

  As you and I have often discussed, the IBM i market has divided into two groups: the roughly 30,000 active customers and 120,000 others. My company, Manta Technologies, has customers among both groups.

  As a former math professor, I tend to think in Venn diagrams. I had to fight the urge to pull out the colored pencils when I read …

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