• 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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• Making Basic IT Services Great Again

  September 23, 2024 Alex Woodie

  The focus of the tech world has been squarely on generative AI since ChatGPT descended the golden staircase and entered our hearts and minds in late 2022. Since then, building GenAI apps and services has become the number one priority for businesses around the globe. Unfortunately, the GenAI fixation has come at the detriment of basic IT services, a recent IBM study suggests.

  The level of hype for generative AI the past two years has been off the chart. Not since the initial dot-com boom of the late 1990s has a new technology triggered such a tsunami of interest, some …

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• IBM Launches AI-Powered Security Assistant

  August 7, 2024 Alex Woodie

  IBM this week launched a new AI-based security tool that’s designed to help security professionals who are deluged by data. Dubbed the IBM Consulting Cybersecurity Assistant, the new offering is based on IBM’s watsonx technology and is available (as the name would suggest) to IBM consulting clients.

  Security professionals are constantly bombarded with alerts to the point where they are overloaded. A recent survey by CybSafe found that more than 25 percent of security professionals say they’re often or always feeling overwhelmed with information, while another 46 percent say they occasionally feel that way. A 2021 survey by Trend Micro …

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• How To Contribute To IBM’s GenAI Code Assistant For RPG

  July 15, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Back in October 2023, IBM launched its “Project Hopper” Watsonx Code Assistant for Z, which as the name suggests is a programming assistant that will eventually be built into the open source VS Code integrated development environment that was created by Microsoft and that is being explicitly trained to help programmers take applications coded in COBOL and convert them to Java. We speculated back then about how LLMs and GenAI might be used to do similar – and different – things for the IBM i platform, and back in May at the POWERUp 2024 conference Steve Will, the chief …

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• IBM Bolsters Data and App Integration with webMethods, StreamSets Acquisitions

  July 10, 2024 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops are among the customers that could benefit from IBM’s completion of its acquisition of webMethods and StreamSets, which it announced last week.

  In mid-December, IBM announced an agreement had been reached with Software AG and Silver Lake, the private equity firm that owned a majority of Software AG, to acquire webMethods and StreamSets for €2.13 billion, or $2.32 billion per the conversation rate at the time.

  The two deals significantly bolster IBM offerings in the fields of data and application integration, which are areas of growing concern due to the rising popularity of artificial intelligence and the …

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• Rocket Finally Gets Its RUMBA, And A Whole Lot More

  June 10, 2024 Alex Woodie

  Sixteen years is a long time to wait, but that’s how long it took Rocket Software to acquire the assets of what used to be NetManage, which includes the popular 5250 emulator RUMBA. Rocket failed to buy NetManage back in February 2008, but it finally completed the deal for the NetManage assets in May 2024. And it got a whole lot more in a $2.275 billion deal that netted it about half of OpenText’s Micro Focus assets and puts its revenue over the mark of $1 billion per year.

  Micro Focus, you will recall, was the company that swooped in …

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• IBM Developing AI Coding Assistant for IBM i

  May 22, 2024 Alex Woodie

  During his keynote presentation at the POWERUp 2024 conference Monday, IBM i CTO Steve Will announced that IBM is actively exploring ways to incorporate generative AI into the IBM i platform. The most promising of three individual but related projects is a plan to build a large language model (LLM)-powered coding assistant for IBM i that will initially provide three functions to support RPG development, with more expected in the future.

  The genesis of the coding assisting project for RPG, which doesn’t have a name yet, can be traced to last year’s launch of watsonx Code Assistant for Z, which …

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• It Would be Uncommon For IBM Announcements To Not Be In May

  March 11, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  For as long as we can remember, there is a general trend of spring and fall announcements for the IBM midrange. It is not a perfect correlation, of course. The original AS/400 announcement was done on the summer solstice on June 21, 1988, which does not fit the pattern we are talking about. But in general, the spring-fall pattern is something that goes back long before enterprise Linux releases and OpenStack releases all shifted to an April-October cadence.

  This being a new year and the POWERUp2024 conference being held May 20 through 23 in Fort Worth, Texas, we are …

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• 2023: An IBM i Year in Review

  December 13, 2023 Alex Woodie

  With another year nearly in the books, it’s time to take a stroll through the IT Jungle archives and reconsider some of the 728 stories we published in 2023. Here’s a look back at the biggest IBM i news stories of 2023.

  January

  The top concern of IBM i professionals, according to Fortra’s annual IBM i Marketplace Study, was once again security, a position it has held for six straight years. The latest crop of IBM Champions unveiled in January featured about 90 members from the IBM i community, out of a total of 839 for the year. Is …

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• IBM Pushes Storage Limits With Storage Scale 6000

  December 4, 2023 Alex Woodie

  IBM recently unveiled a new high-end all-flash storage array that pushes the limits of I/O. Dubbed the IBM Storage Scale System 6000, the new array gives users 1.44 PB of storage in a 4U chassis with up to an eye-watering 256 GB/sec of bandwidth and 7 million input/output operations per second (IOPS) of performance.

  Few IBM i shops have the need for that sort of performance with traditional business applications. Indeed, with its Storage Scale parallel file system (the new name given to IBM’s General Parallel File System, or GPFS, which also previously went by the name Spectrum Scale), the …

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