THE FOUR HUNDRED - Power Systems & IBM i Insights

1. 2025: An IBM i Year In Review

   The calendar has flipped over into the new year, bringing with it hope that the next twelve months will unfold in a positive way. It’s also a good time to reflect on what 2025 brought to the IBM i community, and to remember the big news events that occurred in our little sector of the IT market.

   January

   IBM hired a new vice president of product management for the Power Systems business. Bargav Balakrishnan was promoted to the position, which was previously held by Steve Sibley. Balakrishnan, who has a master’s degree in electrical engineering from the University of Michigan, …

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2. A Tale Of Two Server Markets

   Happy New Year! It is hard to imagine what might happen next. But what I can tell you for sure is that until the gas comes out of the GenAI expansion, infrastructure spending in the datacenter in the aggregate will continue to be increasingly dominated by AI systems even if this is not the case at most IBM i shops.

   Before the Dot Com Boom, the market researchers at Gartner and IDC put out competing reports on sales of servers and external storage arrays, which we found very useful and you no doubt did, too. In 2022, both companies stopped …

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3. Guru: CRTSRVPGM Parameters That Can Save or Sink You

   It was 2 a.m., and the phone wouldn’t stop ringing. A production job had failed, and the error logs weren’t making any sense. After an hour of digging, the culprit finally revealed itself: the wrong procedure had been bound in a service program. Somehow, a silent duplicate had snuck through, and everything downstream was broken. If you’ve ever been in that situation, you know that “it compiles, it runs” is the worst mindset you can have when creating service programs. The parameters on CRTSRVPGM exist for a reason, and ignoring them can turn a simple build into a nightmare at …

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4. As I See It: What’s Past is Prologue

   Imagine working as a sailmaker in the 1830s. You apprenticed as a young boy and now, in your mid-40s, you work with dozens of highly skilled tradesmen to produce the motive power for fleets of whalers, fishing boats, coastal and global trading vessels, and naval frigates.

   Your work is considered essential. It fuels trade, exploration, transport and defense. To outfit a single large ship, the amount of canvass required could span three-quarters of an acre. The lives of sailors depend on the quality and craftsmanship of your labor. Since the mid-16th century your profession has been secure, respected and – …

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5. IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 27, Numbers 49 Through 52

   Welcome to 2026! And to start the year off for the IBM i PTF Guide, we will wrap up four weeks of patches for and notes about the IBM i platform from 2025.

   So, let’s start with Volume 27, Number 49 and then roll forward. Here, we have one security vulnerability and one notice. First, we have Security Bulletin: IBM WebSphere Application Server and WebSphere Application Server Liberty are affected by SMTP injection due to Jakarta Mail (CVE-2025-7962), which you can read more about here. There is a vulnerability in the Jakarta Mail library which affects IBM WebSphere …

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