THE FOUR HUNDRED - Power Systems & IBM i Insights

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

   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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2. Does AI Mark The End Of The ERP Era?

   For decades, enterprise resource planning (ERP) software has been the backbone of corporate computing. Whether running on-prem or in the cloud, millions of businesses have relied on ERP components to automate their business processes and provide a competitive advantage. But the emergence of generative and agentic AI threatens to upend our relationship with ERP software. Where will ERP end up?

   There is no doubt that AI is improving in capabilities and reliability, often by the week. The top frontier models from companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, and DeepSeek feature reasoning capabilities that few people could have plausibly predicted would …

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3. Guru: Deterministic Application Development With AI

   Perhaps the key feature of AI is the way answers are obtained by virtue of a conversation with the AI. Contrast this with using a search engine where each “ask” is an independent request with a response.

   An AI conversation has context while search engine interactions do not. More and more, we use AI to create applications through the contextual, iterative, conversational process. As we have ideas we add these to the conversation and our application changes accordingly. Our customers are getting in on the action too. They are providing us with AI generated prototypes for new software or new …

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4. What IBM’s Got Cooking In Db2 For i In The Summer TRs

   Last week, IBM announced PTFs containing a slew of new Db2 for i features and enhancements as part of the Technology Refresh for IBM i 7.6 and 7.5. While the database is just a part of the story for IBM i 7.6 TR2 and 7.5 TR8, it’s a critical piece of the puzzle. Here’s a preview of the new stuff that you can now play with.

   As part of the summer TRs that we covered last week, IBM delivered five functional enhancements to Db2 for i as part of the Summer TR, shipped one security enhancement, one enhancement for …

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5. IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 28, Number 25

   Brace yourself, there is a lot of IBM i Technology Refreshes, patches, security vulnerabilities, and other stuff you need to deal with this week.

   Let’s start by pointing you to the Technology Refreshes. You can get more detailed information on the IBM i 7.6 Technology Refresh 2 enhancements at https://www.ibm.com/support/pages/ibm-i-76-tr2-enhancements and on the IBM i 7.5 Technology Refresh 8 enhancements at https://www.ibm.com/support/pages/ibm-i-75-tr8-enhancements.

   There are also cumulative packages for the currently supported IBM i releases, as follows:

   • The latest cumulative package for 7.6 is C6190760
   • The latest cumulative package for 7.5 is C6197750
   • The latest cumulative package for 7.4 is

   …

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