• 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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• Where We Are And Where We Are Headed With AI On IBM i

  February 16, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Here we are in 2026, and we have gotten used to GenAI like we did the coronavirus pandemic after it largely ran its course after three years. The difference, of course, is that there is no vaccine for GenAI, especially when a substantial part of the growth in the global economy is coming from enormous capital spending on GenAI hardware and software.

  I have spent a large portion of my career as an IT journalist and analyst tracking high end, large scale, distributed computing in its many forms and have been fascinated by the clever and creative advances in the …

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• Perhaps 2026 Is The Year For Power Systems To Boom A Little

  February 2, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In wrapping up IBM’s call with Wall Street analysts in the wake of Big Blue reporting its financial results for the fourth quarter of 2025 – which was a very good one for the most part, by the way – chief executive officer Arvind Krishna referred to the IBM Company as a “software-led, platform-centric company.”

  This is no news to any of us who have been using or programming or analyzing the business of IBM over the many decades. Of course this is true. But for IBM, the main platform that is driving the big bucks at the top and …

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• IBM Brings AI-Enhanced OpenShift Container Platform To Power Systems

  December 1, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Given that Big Blue owns Red Hat, any Red Hat software that runs on X86 or Arm machinery should eventually make its way onto IBM’s own Power processors and their Power Systems servers. But, it takes time to do this, of course, and some Red Hat software is more important to the Power Systems based than other systems software.

  In announcement letter AD25-1628, dated November 25 when IT Jungle was, like many of you, getting ready for the Thanksgiving holiday, IBM said that it had Red Hat OpenShift Platform Plus ready to go on its Power Systems iron. The …

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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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• Cloud Revenues Saved By The GenAI Boom

  November 3, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Growth in spending by end users on the clouds was slowing and slowing even more as time went by as we expect in a mature and competitive market from the end of 2021 through the end of 2022. And based on the trends that were happening at that time, about this time growth would have probably slowed to maybe 2X to 3X of the growth in global gross domestic product, which is how you know (in my opinion) how a subset of the IT market is mature.

  IT markets tend to always grow faster than GDP, unless something weird is …

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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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• Maybe Stopgap Your Legacy Data Issues And Wait for What’s Next?

  September 29, 2025 Alex Woodie

  The temptation to move off legacy systems like IBM i and System Z is overwhelming for some companies. First, there are business issues, such as enabling data integration and real-time capabilities, that older systems legitimately struggle with. Plus, the siren call from Kubernetes and microservices is getting louder. But the longer you can hold on to current systems and wait for next-gen AI-powered systems to emerge, the better off you will be.

  That’s the advice being proffered by the folks at Adeptia, a 20-year-old Chicago-based technical services firm that has worked on data integration issues with many Fortune 500 …

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• Positive News From The Kyndryl Mainframe Modernization Report

  September 15, 2025 Alex Woodie

  After a week of bad news, here’s something good to start your week: The costs of mainframe modernization projects are dropping while the return on investment (ROI) is rising, in large part due to AI. That’s according to Kyndryl’s 2025 State of Mainframe Modernization Survey, which documented “a degree of agility” the company wasn’t expecting in the massive projects.

  As it has for the past two years, Kyndryl commissioned Coleman Parkes Research to conduct a global survey of about 500 senior leaders at mainframe-using enterprises. By mainframe, the former IBM consulting business refers to System Z systems, IBM i …

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• The Turning Point For Power Systems Is Here, And Now

  July 28, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  CORRECTED Considering how everyone in the IBM midrange systems market knew that Power11 processors and the next generation of Power Systems servers using them were coming some time around the middle of this year, the dip in Power Systems servers based on Power10 technology did pretty well, we think, in the first quarter and now the second quarter.

  We have to infer this, of course, because Big Blue does not provide revenue figures for sales of Power Systems iron, much less give a breakdown by sales of machines running IBM i, AIX, or Linux as their primary operating system. What …

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