Talsco Weekly: Empowering RPG Developers to Access Any Datasource

Welcome to another edition of Talsco Weekly

IBM i Brief: 🏎️IBM’s Spyre accelerator: A Power Systems revenue play. 🔭 IBM beats Q3 expectations, raises outlook.
AI: 🚪 IBM reveals more about Project Bob. 🏃 IBM and Groq partner for faster AI.
Career: 💼 Should I take this job or not?
Development: ⚰️ IBM discontinues Merlin development tool. 🔗 How IBM i tracks software changes—explained.
Database: 🔐 IBM i SQL function simplifies certificate expiration monitoring. 🔲 Empowering RPG Developers to Access Any Datasource.
Hiring: 🎯 Looking for top-tier IBM i talent? Let Talsco help.
Open Source: 🚀 **Node.js 25 brings major performance upgrades**.
Security: ☁️ Amazon AWS outage fell short of catastrophic threshold. ☁️ AWS outage exposes cloud fragility risks. ⛓️‍💥IBM i: A false sense of security.

IBM i Brief

🏎️IBM’s Spyre accelerator: A Power Systems revenue play

Nvidia and TSMC dominate the GenAI hardware market, but IBM’s Power Systems business needs its own revenue opportunity.

For IBM i shops, code assistants for RPG and COBOL modernization represent the killer GenAI application—potentially doubling Power Systems revenue while increasing profits through both software (homegrown transformer models) and hardware (matrix math units in Power10/Power11 and Spyre cards) rather than routing money to expensive, hard-to-get Nvidia GPUs.

IBM sees a dual play — software (code assistants) + hardware (AI accelerator) — to boost its Power/i ecosystem and not “just pass the money to Nvidia.”

Interested in learning more? Dive in here.

🔭 IBM beats Q3 expectations, raises outlook

IBM reported strong third-quarter results with revenue of $16.3 billion, up 9% year-over-year. Software revenue jumped 10%, Infrastructure surged 17%, and Consulting grew 3%.

The company’s AI book of business reached $9.5 billion. All in all, IBM raised its full-year outlook for revenue growth to over 5% and free cash flow to approximately $14 billion.

AI

🚪 IBM reveals more about Project Bob

IBM’s new AI coding assistant, Project Bob, replaces Watson Code Assistant for IBM i and offers expanded capabilities across IBM platforms.

Bob will support code understanding, explanation, generation, refactoring, and test case creation for RPG, CL, DDS, and SQL. Already used by 3,000 IBM'ers daily, Bob runs on multiple foundation models including IBM’s Granite, Claude, Llama, and Mistral. A limited customer preview is now available.

🏃 IBM and Groq partner for faster AI

IBM partnered with Groq to integrate GroqCloud’s inference technology into watsonx Orchestrate, delivering 5X faster and more cost-efficient AI inference than traditional GPU systems.

What is AI inference technology? The process of using trained models to make real-time predictions or decisions from new data.

The collaboration enables enterprises in healthcare, finance, and retail to deploy agentic AI at scale with high-speed, low-latency performance.

IBM Granite models will be supported on GroqCloud, while Groq’s LPU architecture will integrate with Red Hat’s open source vLLM technology for streamlined AI deployment.

Career

💼 Should I take this job or not?

Career fulfillment doesn’t always come from doing what you love—sometimes it comes from leveraging what you’re uniquely capable of to create meaningful change. When your skills align with opportunity, impact becomes the reward.

Since when is life is about happiness, its about impact. Daniel Ek, CEO of Spotify

Optimize for “impact” over happiness, because when you do, you get happiness.

Happiness is the trailing indicator of impact. It’s not that you can’t have happiness, but truly sustained happiness is about impact.

Think about it. So many people are content, but they are not happy. They are just coasting. And most don’t even realize it.

What has given me the biggest joys is overcoming the biggest adversities. This is what true impact is all about. Daniel Ek, CEO of Spotify

When have you, as an IBM i Developer, been the most happy in your career?

Development

⚰️ IBM discontinues Merlin development tool IBM officially withdrew its Modernization Engine for Lifecycle Integration (Merlin) on October 7, citing market consolidation around VS Code. Launched in 2022 as a browser-based IDE for IBM i development, Merlin struggled with adoption due to its complex architecture requiring Kubernetes/OpenShift and reaching only 2% market share. Meanwhile, the open-source Code for IBM i extension has surged to 60,000+ installs, matching RDi’s popularity and becoming IBM’s primary modernization vehicle. 🔗 How IBM i tracks software changes—explained

As an IBM i developer or administrator, have you ever dealt with the challenge of managing evolving codebases across multiple environments, ensuring that a bug fix in development doesn’t unravel production, or that dependencies are synchronized without manual chaos?

If so, then you will surely appreciate this. 😉

Database

🔐 IBM i SQL function simplifies certificate expiration monitoring IBM i’s built-in SQL Table Function enables simple certificate store monitoring across partitions to identify expiring certificates before they disrupt system functions. 🔲 Empowering RPG Developers to Access Any Datasource

As IBM i shops modernize, one truth stands out: data lives everywhere — in DB2, SQL Server, Oracle, cloud apps, FTP servers, spreadsheets, and legacy systems. For organizations running on IBM i, the challenge isn’t the lack of power; it’s seamless connectivity and integration.

RPG developers are now expected to integrate and leverage data from multiple sources quickly and securely. Yet without the right tools, connecting IBM i to the broader enterprise ecosystem often means complex code, duplicate data, and wasted time.

“True modernization happens when IBM i applications can talk to any data source — effortlessly.”

That’s where RDB Connect changes the game.

Purpose-built for IBM i, RDB Connect enables RPG, COBOL, and CL programs to directly access data from multiple sources effortlessly, whether it’s databases, FTP File Servers, APIs, spreadsheets, cloud services, or legacy systems. No middleware. No complex configuration. Just clean, reliable data movement across platforms.

For the business, it’s a faster path to modernization and integration. For developers, it’s a productivity boost that extends IBM i’s value far beyond DB2.

In short: RDB Connect bridges IBM i with the modern enterprise — helping businesses modernize without disruption.

👉 Discover how to simplify data integration across platforms.

Hiring

🎯 Looking for top-tier IBM i talent? Let Talsco help

Finding skilled RPG developers, system administrators, and IBM i architects is harder than ever. At Talsco, we specialize in connecting businesses with experienced IBM i professionals who can drive your modernization initiatives forward.

Whether you need contract resources for a specific project or full-time team members to strengthen your operations, we understand the unique skill sets required in the IBM i ecosystem — from legacy system maintenance to modern API development and cloud integration.

Open Source

🚀 **Node.js 25 brings major performance upgrades** The release upgrades V8 to 14.1, delivering significant JSON.stringify improvements, built-in Uint8Array base64/hex conversion, and WebAssembly optimizations. It introduces secure-by-default features including –allow-net permission model, enables Web Storage by default, and adds ErrorEvent as a global. The update removes deprecated APIs like SlowBuffer while adding quality-of-life enhancements such as portable compile cache and JSPI for WebAssembly.

Security

☁️ Amazon AWS outage fell short of catastrophic threshold

Monday’s 15-hour AWS disruption affected thousands of companies but didn’t trigger Hannover Re’s $20M Cumulus Re cyber cat bond, which requires 24-hour outages plus severity thresholds.

While complete unavailability lasted just 2.5 hours, some customers experienced 12+ hours of downtime—enough to activate conventional cyber insurance policies but insufficient for catastrophic classification. The incident highlighted systemic risks from concentrated cloud dependencies.

What is a Cumulus Re cyber cat bond?

Cumulus Re is a catastrophe bond program sponsored by Swiss Re that transfers insurance risks—such as natural disasters or cyber events—from Swiss Re to capital market investors. It allows investors to earn returns in exchange for covering specific “catastrophic” losses if predefined triggers (like hurricanes or cloud outages) occur.

💥 AWS Outages and Cat Bonds: A New Way to Insure Downtime

When AWS goes down, so do thousands of businesses that rely on it — directly, indirectly or through connected platforms that might be linked to your IBM i. The result? Lost revenue, stalled operations, and unhappy customers.

While most enterprises don’t realize it, there’s a new kind of protection emerging: parametric cyber insurance, backed by catastrophe (cat) bonds. Unlike traditional insurance, these products don’t require proof of financial loss. Instead, payouts are triggered automatically by measurable events — like a specific AWS region being offline for a set number of hours.

These cat bonds, such as Cumulus Re, allow investors to shoulder digital risk much like they do for hurricanes or earthquakes. For enterprises, it’s a glimpse into the future of IT risk management — where cloud outages become quantifiable, insurable, and tradable financial events.

Most companies aren’t covered yet, but this shift signals a growing convergence between cyber resilience, insurance, and capital markets — something every CIO should keep an eye on.

☁️ AWS outage exposes cloud fragility risks

The recent AWS disruption affected banks, streaming platforms, and websites globally, highlighting the dangers of single-cloud dependence. Financial institutions relying solely on cloud services faced critical interruptions, underscoring the need for resilient architecture and redundancy.

IBM i systems proved their worth, maintaining stability when cloud-dependent platforms failed. The incident reinforces that blending proven legacy infrastructure with modern cloud technology creates more resilient enterprise operations than cloud-only strategies.

“But vigilance is essential — security by design only works when paired with security by practice.”

⛓️‍💥IBM i: A false sense of security

While IBM i is architected with security at its core — featuring built-in object-level security, role-based access controls, and integrated auditing — this inherent strength can breed a dangerous false sense of invulnerability.

The platform’s robust security foundation doesn’t eliminate risk; it shifts responsibility. Organizations must actively maintain security patches, monitor access controls, enforce authentication policies, and stay current with emerging threats. Recent industry discussions underscore that even the most secure platforms require vigilant governance.

Complacency transforms strength into weakness. The same stability that makes IBM i reliable can lull teams into neglecting routine security hygiene — outdated user profiles, unpatched systems, overly permissive authorities, or inadequate monitoring of exit points and network access.

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