• Izzi Buys CNX, Eyes Valence Port To System Z

  July 8, 2025 Alex Woodie

  Izzi Software today announced the acquisition of CNX Corp., owner of the Valence suite of Web development tools for IBM i. The deal is the first IBM i-related acquisition for Izzi, which was founded last year with a mandate to buy smaller IBM i and mainframe vendors that typically don’t get M&A attention from bigger players.

  CNX is a Chicago-based software vendor and consulting firm founded in 1996 by Richard Milone and Robert Swanson. The two had worked with BPCS (now Infor ERP LX) customers, and developed a product that extended that ERP system to the Web. That product, then …

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• Liam Allan Shares What’s Coming Next With Code For IBM i

  June 23, 2025 Alex Woodie

  The rise of Code for IBM i arguably is the best IBM i technology story of the past few years. The VS Code development environment came out of nowhere to challenge Rational Developer for i as the pre-eminent developer tool on the platform. And according to Liam Allan, who started this whole thing, Code for i is only going to get better in the months and years to come.

  There is clear and unmistakable momentum behind VS Code and Code for IBM i, the VS Code plug-in that Liam Allan created back in 2021 while working at Seiden Group …

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• VS Code Will Be The Heart Of The Modern IBM i Platform

  June 23, 2025 Sebastien Julliand

  For application programmers, the workspace is not a place to sit with a screen, a keyboard, a chair, but rather is an integrated development environment within which code can be created, shared, compiled, and managed either inside the tool itself or through plug-in extensions that link it to other tools. IDEs have been around for decades and are not anything new. What is new is how suddenly popular one particular IDE – VS Code – has become.

  For the past several years, nearly three quarters of the programmers in the world polled for the Stack Overflow Developer Survey say that …

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• Meet The Next Gen Of IBMers Helping To Build IBM i

  June 16, 2025 Alex Woodie

  The graying of the IBM i installed base is a topic that deserves attention, as every platform must find a way to reinvent itself if it wants to survive. IBM executives have been vocal about the need for IBM i customers to hire younger people. Well, it looks like Big Blue is taking its own advice, judging from the new crop of developers working in the Rochester and Toronto labs, and beyond.

  It’s hard to believe that Liam Allan has been working on the IBM i platform for nearly a decade. Allan, who started working on IBM i when he …

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• Keep The IBM i Youth Movement Going With More Training, Better Tools

  June 9, 2025 Alex Woodie

  Nobody is going to mistake an IBM i conference for a college campus anytime soon. But if the recent POWERUp 2025 conference at Disneyland was any indication, there is a definite trend toward younger professionals working on the platform. While the IBM i youth movement is real, companies will benefit from some simple ways to attract and retain these new IBM i professionals.

  IBM is still working to get IBM i content back into four-year universities through the Power Skills Academy, which has been a struggle. Colleges are reluctant to invest in building a curriculum based on technologies that they …

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• RPG Code Generation And The Agentic Future Of IBM i

  June 2, 2025 Alex Woodie

  IBM is making progress with Watsonx Code Assistant for i, which is on track to become available as a public preview next month. And while IBM perhaps is running into some challenges with generating RPG code, the long-term potential of agentic AI on IBM i is brighter than ever.

  As we previously reported, IBM is now taking names for the folks who will be given access to the public preview of WCA for i, which you can sign up for here. According to IBM i CTO Steve Will, the preview will deliver RPG code understanding capabilities, which is …

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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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• Fresche Overhauls X-Analysis With Web UI, AI Smarts

  May 19, 2025 Alex Woodie

  Fresche Solutions recently unveiled a new release of X-Analysis, its popular impact analysis tool, which it’s now selling under the Application Intelligence brand. The product has undergone a major overhaul and now sports a new Web user interface as well as hooks to popular AI models to provide code explanation and documentation capabilities for RPG applications.

  Fresche Solutions operates a large application modernization practice and provides an array of products and services to help IBM i customers take their RPG, COBOL, and Java applications from the legacy past into the modern present. However, before a single byte of legacy code …

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• Is It Time To Add The Rust Programming Language To IBM i?

  May 19, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Back in February, IBM announced that it had brought the Rust programming language to its AIX Unix operating system variant. Rust, of course, has long since been available on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. But, thus far, it has not been supported on the IBM i platform, neither in the PASE AIX runtime (which is a common way to get Unix stuff inside of IBM i) or natively recompiled inside of IBM i itself.

  The initial release of the Rust SDK for AIX was based on the stable Rust 1.84 release, and it uses the same LLVM compiler framework that …

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• POWERUp 2025 –Your Source For IBM i 7.6 Information

  May 12, 2025 Alex Woodie

  The IBM i community is getting ready for the biggest event of the year, the COMMON Annual Conference, better known as POWERUp 2025. The event, which is being held next week at the Disneyland Hotel in Southern California, is chock full of information relating to IBM i 7.6, the latest release of the operating system.

  It seems like just yesterday the IBM i community was convening on Fort Worth, Texas, for what would be one of the largest and most positive COMMON events in recent memory. In particular, IBM and COMMON were successful in attracting a substantial contingent of …

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