• Will Power Chips Get A Converged Arm Instruction Set Like Z Mainframe CPUs?

  August 31, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  One a decade for the past six decades, Big Blue launches an effort to converge its diverse system architectures. It almost never works, with the exception of the launch of the System/360 mainframes in April 1964 and the AS/400 minicomputers in June 1988. And to be fair, the AS/400 was itself based in part on technologies created in a failed convergence effort.

  Back in 1986, the “Fort Knox” project sought to converge the System/4300 air-cooled, entry mainframe lines with the System/38 (from 1978) and the System/36 (from 1983), and it failed. But in the failure, the Rochester Labs took some …

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• Oracle Dips A Toe Into IBM’s EBCDIC World

  August 24, 2026 Alex Woodie

  IBM’s Ted Codd may have invented the relational database back at the Almaden Lab in the early 1970s, but it was Larry Ellison’s Oracle that offered the world the first wildly commercially successful RDBMs. Technically, the System/38 was announced, with its integrated relational database, before the first version of Oracle was announced.

  Since then, Oracle and IBM have competed intensely to win and run transactional database workloads for some of the biggest enterprises around. But there was always one key difference between the two companies’ offerings: Oracle used an ASCI character set while the IBM midrange and mainframe systems relied …

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• How IBM Bolstered IBM i Resilience In The Summer Tech Refreshes

  August 3, 2026 Alex Woodie

  The capability to weather disruptions is a hallmark of the IBM i platform and a major reason why so many companies around the world rely on it to run their businesses. To that end, IBM has enhanced the platform’s resilience capabilities as part of the recent Technology Refresh announcements with updates to Migrate While Active and the BRMS facility, as well as bringing a new VTL to IBM i.

  As mentioned in our first story about the 2026 Summer TRs, IBM has updated Migrate While Active, which it originally announced back in October 2024 as a variant of the …

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• Power Systems Has A Great Quarter; System Z, Not So Much

  July 27, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We have been waiting for a long time for Big Blue’s Power Systems business to get a big bump, and it looks like it has finally happened. And a handful of Fortune 100-level companies deferred their System z17 mainframe purchases as they allocated budget to buying servers for AI and generic – generally X86 machines, and certainly not from IBM – as CPU, GPU, DRAM memory, and flash storage prices are all skyrocketing. And last week, when IBM warned about this push out of System z sales, Wall Street predictably freaked all the way out, sending IBM’s stock down 25 …

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• Big Blue Ships Bob 2.0 And Premium Package For IBM i

  July 13, 2026 Alex Woodie

  IBM’s push into the world of agentic coding continues, as Big Blue officially started selling and supporting major updates to its Bob agentic AI software. There are two separate but related pieces of news to cover, including the release of IBM Bob Premium Package for i and the release of Bob 2.0.

  As it is wont to do, IBM generated some confusion with its Bob launches, as both Bob 2.0 and the Bob premium packages became available on the same day, June 24. However, Bob 2.0 and the Bob premium packages are not the same thing, and their announcements were …

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• Former IBMer’s New Book Puts The Midrange In The Spotlight

  June 22, 2026 Alex Woodie

  Over the years, there have been an untold number of books written about IBM and its computing legacy. (Our founding editor, TPM, has most of them in his library.) But very few, if any, of them focus much time on the line of midrange servers that came out of Rochester, Minnesota, including the AS/400, which turned 38 years young yesterday. That void is what drove former IBMer Bill Shaffer, who spent his entire career in the midrange, to write the book IBM & Computing.

  Shaffer spent 40 years at IBM, beginning as a programmer working out of the Miami, …

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• Power Systems Still Waiting For The GenAI Bump

  April 27, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  With the Power11 systems upgrade cycle only nine months old and with price increases that have been happening monthly since early April 1 and possibly continuing through the end of the year, we expect for the Power Systems business to be up in 2026 for the full year.

  In the first quarter of 2026 ended in March, IBM’s Infrastructure group, which includes sales of servers, storage, operating systems, and used gear, posted sales of $3.33 billion, up 15.3 percent. Gross profits rose by 24.2 percent for the Infrastructure group, to just a tad under $1.9 billion, and pre-tax income for …

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• What Can IBM Do To Make The Future Power S1112 Mini System Compelling?

  April 13, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The Power11-based Power Systems lineup remains incomplete, with the single-socket, half-width “Bonnell” system that debuted back in May 2024 still only available with Power10 processors and not yet upgraded to Power11. We know such a machine is in the works, because Big Blue has been clear about the need to ship a machine in the IBM i P05 software tier, the lowest rung on the IBM i ladder.

  We have not heard anything precise about the Bonnell kicker, and we would have thought it would have been launched in February or March. It has not. It is reasonable to expect …

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• Here Come The AI-Based Code Modernization Offerings

  April 6, 2026 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops that are stuck with old code but don’t have the manpower to modernize it themselves are now considering the use of AI to handle much work. This new era of AI-assisted application modernization that we are now entering has the potential to be a boon for understaffed IBM i shops, but it raises new questions and concerns that IBM i professionals should keep in mind.

  The capability of AI to understand, document, and generate computer code has increased significantly over the past year. Thanks to fundamental improvements in large language models (LLMs), we’re now at the point …

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• What Is Threatening IBM i Security Now

  March 16, 2026 Alex Woodie

  The nature of cybersecurity threats is always changing, which requires constant vigilance by those who value security. IBM i is just as exposed to threats as any other networked operating system on the planet, but it’s also unique in certain ways, which actually makes security harder. To get the lowdown on how these phenomena interrelate in the first quarter of 2026, we turn to renown IBM i security expert Carol Woodbury from Kisco.

  Woodbury recently sat down with Justin Loeber, the Kisco owner and head of business development, to present a webinar titled IBM i Threat Landscape 2026: A Fireside …

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