THE FOUR HUNDRED - Power Systems & IBM i Insights

1. What IBM i Ideas Are Cooking In IBM’s Ideas Portal?

   It is early spring, which means we are getting close to Technology Refresh (TR) time. What new functionality will IBM add to the IBM i operating system and related products? Nobody knows except IBM and its closest business partners, but we can get an idea of what might be cooking in the next IBM i TR by checking out the IBM Ideas Portal.

   The IBM Ideas Portal was implemented back in 2022 to replace the IBM Request for Enhancement (RFE) process, which IBM formalized with a Web-based voting and ranking system back in 2016. The Ideas Portal works as …

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2. Early Bob Excels In Medhost IBM i Tryout

   One of the early testers of the IBM Bob AI tool is Medhost, the longtime developer of an integrated IBM i-based healthcare applications for community and rural hospitals. According to a joint presentation between IBM and the software vendor last week, the beta test was a success, as Bob assisted Medhost in not only understanding its RPG and SQL codebases, but modernizing and enhancing them.

   IBM i chief architect Steve Will was joined by Michael Bowen, the senior vice president of technology at Medhost, in a webinar last week to discuss how the provider of electronic health records (EHR) …

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3. Counting The Cost Of AI Inference – And Projecting It Far Out

   It is probably a good thing that most IBM i shops did not spend a lot of money trying to figure out AI in the past decade. It was enormously expensive to develop first generation machine learning algorithms, and they had limited applicability. With large language models and their generative capabilities, the use cases for AI have skyrocketed, but the costs for training have been crazy expensive since the end of 2022, when the chattybot eureka moment – some might say emergent behavior – happened.

   The cost of training what are called foundation models – very large models with hundreds …

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4. IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 28, Number 13

   Welcome to Monday and a whole new batch of security vulnerabilities with the IBM i platform, all thanks to the open source variant of the venerable Apache Web server embedded in the WebSphere Application Server Liberty edition.

   That’s the good thing about open source software: When there are problems, people find them and they fix them. The bad thing is that a lot of really smart people are constantly looking at the code for issues, and they are always find them. Think of it as Continuous Vulnerability/Continuous Patching, I guess.

   Let’s go through them, and all of the vulnerabilities affect …

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5. The Next Generation Of IBM i Talent in GenAI Action

   The future of IBM i is not just being imagined – it is actively being built by the next generation of IT professionals.

   The IBM i Agentic iMPACT AI Student Project provided Pennsylvania School of Technology network and technology students with a unique opportunity to participate in a real-world, industry-sponsored innovation challenge. This hands-on initiative focuses on implementing agentic artificial intelligence (AI) within the IBM i environment, giving students exposure to cutting-edge integration and automation technologies while building valuable, real-world experience.

   The project was offered as an extracurricular component of the curriculum; the project launched its first challenge with participation …

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