Talsco Weekly: One End Goal. Two Starting Points.

Welcome to another edition of Talsco Weekly

IBM i Brief: ☁️ Lightedge is now selling IBM PowerVS to its IBM i customer base. 🤝 IBM teams up with Google Cloud on AI.
AI: 🛠️ Same playbook, different language.
Career: 👤 The manager is not trying to trick you. They are trying to solve a problem.
Development: 🎙️ A developer let AI write an entire app backend. It held up.
ERP: 💰 A new trend to watch: ERP pricing is shifting from seats to outcomes. ⚖️ Even IBM is talking AI trade-offs.
Hiring: 🧭 You can’t lead an IBM i transition without IBM i expertise.
Learning: 🎓 Did You Miss POWERUp 2026? The recordings are now available.
Modernization: 🔀 Before you migrate, ask the honest question.
Security: 🔐 IBM execs flag a major AI blind spot.
Vendor: ⚙️ The IBM i shop of today runs a lot more than IBM i.

IBM i Brief

☁️ Lightedge is now selling IBM PowerVS to its IBM i customer base

One of the largest IBM i private cloud providers is adding IBM’s public cloud offering, Power Virtual Server, to its portfolio. Lightedge, which became the community’s biggest managed IBM i provider after acquiring Connectria in 2024, is responding to solid PowerVS growth and increasing competition in private cloud.

For IBM i shops, this means a familiar managed services partner now offers a path to IBM’s public cloud, with a single vendor relationship spanning both options.

🤝 IBM teams up with Google Cloud on AI

IBM has partnered with Google Cloud to launch a new Google Cloud Practice within IBM Consulting, pairing IBM Consulting Advantage with Gemini Enterprise AI.

Thousands of Google Cloud-certified consultants will help businesses modernize legacy systems and deploy industry-specific AI agents across banking, retail, insurance, and more.

Despite the AI push, IBM shares are up just 4.7% over the past year, trailing the industry’s 218.9% growth.

AI

🛠️ Same playbook, different language

IBM Bob just helped Blue Pearl complete a Java modernization 90% faster than traditional timelines, with zero defects and measurable performance gains.

The story is framed around COBOL and Java, but Bob explicitly supports RPG as well.

For IBM i shops sitting on decades of business logic, this is proof of concept. The bottleneck was never desire to modernize. It was capacity. Bob changes that equation.

Career

👤 The manager is not trying to trick you. They are trying to solve a problem.

Whether you are walking into your first IBM i interview or your first one in a decade, the fears on the other side of the table are the same:

Turnover: they have trained someone who left. It was expensive.
Hand-holding: they need someone who figures things out.
Ripple effects: one change breaking fifteen other processes.

That is it. They are not quizzing you on tool versions. They are not expecting perfection.

If you are early in your career, show curiosity and ownership. Those signals matter more than experience.

If you have not interviewed in years, do not assume your resume removes these concerns. A long tenure can raise its own questions. Address them directly. Show you are invested in the outcome, not just the role.

The takeaway. Tools are secondary signals. Mindset and approach are the primary signals. Address the fears before they ask. Book a 20-minute call.

Development

🎙️ A developer let AI write an entire app backend. It held up

On a recent PHP podcast, a developer described building the full PHP Tek conference app backend in Laravel using AI-generated code throughout, which she reviewed and approved. It passed peer review at the conference with only minor style nits.

The panel’s theory: AI models write good modern PHP because of the volume of open source PHP in their training data.

Our Take: IBM i shops watching IBM Bob, Claude Code, and other AI coding tools mature should keep that caveat in mind. AI code quality depends on what the model has seen. The more variations of RPG that gets fed into these tools, the better they get.

ERP

💰 A new trend to watch: ERP pricing is shifting from seats to outcomes

Oracle is moving toward outcome-based pricing models, where customers pay based on results like reduced wait times or improved throughput, rather than flat per-user fees. This marks a shift in how ERP vendors charge:

Per-seat licensing: the old model. A flat fee per named user, regardless of usage.
Token-based pricing: pay for AI usage. The more an AI agent reads, writes, or analyzes, the more it costs.
Outcome-based pricing: pay for results. Cost ties to what the AI accomplished, not how it got there.

The ERP value chain is being rebuilt around AI, and pricing is one of the first places that shows up.

Our Take: This kind of shift tends to start with the largest vendors and work its way down.

IBM i shops should watch for licensing plus consumption or outcome-based pricing language showing up from ERP and modernization vendors in this space, if it has not already.

The conversation may shift from “what does this software cost” to “what is this software worth to your business.” That’s a different negotiation and a different relationship with vendors.

⚖️ Even IBM is talking AI trade-offs

As a follow up to the above, IBM CHRO Nickle LaMoreaux said organizations will soon need to weigh AI’s value against its cost, as token usage bills pile up. Some firms, like Uber, have already exhausted entire annual AI budgets. For IBM i shops exploring Bob-style modernization tools, it’s a reminder: efficient, targeted AI use beats blanket adoption. Cost discipline will separate the winners.

Hiring

🧭 You can’t lead an IBM i transition without IBM i expertise

Some IT directors are managing AS/400-era systems they inherited. Others were hired to replace them.

The platform looks different from each chair, but the need is the same: someone on your team who genuinely understands what you have, what it does, and what moving away from it actually involves.

That knowledge is rare. We spend every day finding it.

Whether you are modernizing in place or planning a full migration, we connect you with professionals who know the platform from both sides.

If you are navigating an IBM i transition and need the right person in the room, let’s talk. Schedule a conversation with us.

Learning

🎓 Did You Miss POWERUp 2026? The recordings are now available

COMMON has released Part 1 of the POWERUp 2026 session recordings, giving IBM i professionals on-demand access to one of the community’s strongest conference lineups in recent memory.

AI dominated the agenda, with nearly 50 sessions covering LLMs, agentic AI, IBM Bob, and modernization.

Whether your team couldn’t make New Orleans or just wants a second pass at the content, this is a practical way to keep skills current without waiting for next year.

Modernization

🔀 Before you migrate, ask the honest question

We hear it directly from clients and IBM i professionals in the trenches, including CIOs who made the call to move to a new platform and are now living with the consequences.

The migration decision comes second. The foundation work comes first.

IBM i shops in transition share a familiar pattern: the migration or modernization is harder than expected because the underlying foundation wasn’t ready. ERP migrations can succeed when organizations are willing to fully embrace the new platform’s model.

They struggle when the intent is a modern look built on top of old habits. Whatever direction you choose, the prerequisite is the same: clean your data, document your processes, and understand what your existing system actually does before you touch anything.

Key Takeaway: Migrate or modernize. The foundational work is the same either way.

Security

🔐 IBM execs flag a major AI blind spot

At IBM Think 2026, storage leaders Sam Werner and Christopher Vollmar said AI resiliency is lagging badly.

Vector databases, data lakes, and large object repositories powering RAG and AI applications are often left unprotected, since AI teams haven’t prioritized data protection.

As these systems become mission-critical, Werner warned they’ll need far higher availability and recovery planning than most organizations have considered so far.

Vendor

⚙️ The IBM i shop of today runs a lot more than IBM i

JAMS Software is betting its growth on that fact. CEO Peter Hegland tells IT Jungle that the company’s sweet spot is shops with IBM i alongside Windows, Linux, ERPs, and cloud applications where native schedulers don’t connect the dots. Spun out of Fortra a year ago, JAMS is growing in the high teens to low twenties with roughly 1,000 customers. Compliance and silent job failures are the two biggest doors the company walks through.

Breaking It Down

The same self-sufficiency that made IBM i shops resilient for decades is now creating invisible risk. Hegland points out that north of 65% of IBM i shops still run custom applications with hand-rolled job scheduling. No alerting. No monitoring. No audit trail. Jobs fail and no one knows. That works until a compliance audit arrives, or until the one person who understands how everything connects together walks out the door.

The modernization conversation isn’t just about web front ends and AI anymore. It includes the operational layer underneath.

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