• Does AI Mark The End Of The ERP Era?

  July 27, 2026 Alex Woodie

  For decades, enterprise resource planning (ERP) software has been the backbone of corporate computing. Whether running on-prem or in the cloud, millions of businesses have relied on ERP components to automate their business processes and provide a competitive advantage. But the emergence of generative and agentic AI threatens to upend our relationship with ERP software. Where will ERP end up?

  There is no doubt that AI is improving in capabilities and reliability, often by the week. The top frontier models from companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, and DeepSeek feature reasoning capabilities that few people could have plausibly predicted would …

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• IBM Gets Bob 1.0 Off The Ground

  March 2, 2026 Alex Woodie

  IBM this month finally will get a coding co-pilot into the hands of its IBM i installed base with the launch of Bob. The general availability of Bob 1.0.0 on March 24 will mark the end of the long wait for IBM i customers – and in particular, the large population of RPG developers – to start using IBM-branded AI software to maintain and develop IBM i software.

  The world of generative AI moves quickly, as the large language models (LLMs) from frontier providers improve on a weekly, if not daily, basis. This is both exciting, as the capabilities of …

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• What The Marketplace Study Says About IBM i Migrations And Outlook

  March 10, 2025 Alex Woodie

  One of the values that Fortra’s annual IBM i Marketplace Survey brings to the table is to function as a forward-looking indicator. If something is stirring in the IBM i installed base – say, that a large chunk is looking to mosey off the platform – then it likely will appear in the data. So when we analyze the data from the 2025 report, that’s something worth looking for.

  The good news from the 2025 IBM i Marketplace Survey results is that there’s nothing to indicate any mass migrations are under way. Companies will always come and go on IBM …

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• Izzi Throws Retiring IBM i Software Company Founders A Lifeline

  February 3, 2025 Alex Woodie

  Founders of smaller IBM i and System z software vendors who are looking to sell their companies before they retire may want to check out a new venture called Izzi Software. In an interview with IT Jungle, the executives heading the startup explain that it has a mandate to spend millions of private equity dollars on acquiring midrange and mainframe ISVs that have solid products and businesses, but may not be big enough to attract M&A attention from bigger firms.

  It’s no secret that the IBM i and System z communities tend toward the older side of the age …

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• IBM Clarifies Where It’s Going with IBM i Subscriptions, Product Realignment

  September 11, 2024 Alex Woodie

  As an avid IT Jungle reader, you’re probably aware that IBM is moving its IBM i software stack from a traditional licensing scheme to one based on subscriptions. The company is in the middle of the move at the moment, and it’s also in the middle of a product realignment, which has been the source of some confusion. IBM hosted a webinar recently that helped to clarify where it’s at now with the shift to subscriptions and the product realignment, and where it’s going in the future.

  IBM first announced back in May 2022 that it was shifting to subscription-based …

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• Rocket DevOps Gets Update for Free Format RPG, VS Code, and DORA

  April 24, 2024 Alex Woodie

  The latest release of Rocket’s change management tool for IBM i brings several new capabilities, including improved support for VS Code and Free Form RPG. Rocket DevOps version 10.3.1 also brings better code testing capabilities and will help companies comply with new regulations, such as the EU’s Digital Operations Resilience Act (DORA).

  Rocket Software added support for the browser-based development environment VS Code last fall with the launch of Rocket DevOps version 10.2.2. Customers will find the new release of Rocket DevOps improves on that initial VS Code support, says Puneet Kohli, the president of the Rocket’s Application Modernization Business …

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• Many Different Kinds Of Cloud, Very Big Piles Of Money

  December 11, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  From the very beginning, there have been many kinds of clouds. Yes, Amazon Web Services started out with the Simple Storage Service (S3) object storage service in March 2006, and quickly followed it up with the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service, and even though it cannot decide if service is part of a product name or not, AWS set the stage for how infrastructure services (IaaS) and then platform (PaaS) and application software (SaaS) services would be layered on top of raw, virtualized iron.

  Many observers thought that in the end, everything would go PaaS and SaaS and IaaS would …

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• The Science Of Lifting And Shifting To The Cloud

  October 11, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Companies in Japan have a long and deep history with IBM computing systems, both its mainframe and its midrange platforms. And in some cases, they have moved from one to the other to maintain the IBM style of integrated systems while attaining the benefits of what many customers still consider the more integrated, less expensive, and easier to use platform that Big Blue offers: Namely, the AS/400 launched in 1988 and its progeny up through the current IBM i generation.

  Such is the case with Kosei Securities Co Ltd, which was founded way back in 1961 in Osaka, a …

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• Is The Cloud On Your IBM i Horizon?

  September 20, 2023 Alex Woodie

  It’s almost impossible to ignore the enormous pull that the cloud is exerting on the software industry today. Companies that run the IBM i server are also subject to that gravity, although it has different ramifications for their technological future, as well as the decisions they’ll make if they want to run their operations in the cloud.

  IBM i shops, almost by definition, are not running on the cloud today, at least not in the public cloud the way it is normally defined. While there are a handful of managed service providers (MSPs) offering private cloud IBM i runtimes, and …

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• With Fresche’s New CEO, There Are No Problems, Just Solutions

  August 16, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Joe Zarrehparvar was just finishing up his first 100 days as president and chief executive officer at Fresche Solutions when the company has begun its transition to a new subscription licensing model and when he finally had enough time in the job to sit down and talk with us about where IBM i customers, and therefore Fresche Solutions, would be going under his stewardship.

  Zarrehparvar has a long and varied career in the IT industry, which started with a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering and electronics from the Manchester College in England and a master’s degree in engineering management from …

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