Talsco Weekly: The IBM i world is moving faster than people think

Welcome to another edition of Talsco Weekly

IBM i Brief: 🕰️ IBM i didn’t reinvent itself every decade. It didn’t have to.
AI: 💡 The COBOL problem sounds familiar to RPG developers.
Career: 🔑 Your IBM i interview feels harder than it should.
Development: 🔍 How long is that string, really?
ERP: 🏢 AI doesn’t replace your core system. It depends on it. 🔐 When AI touches your ERP, your data goes somewhere.
Hiring: 👥 RPG talent isn’t a hiring problem. It’s a business risk.
Leadership: 🧭 Misalignment is quietly stalling IBM i shops.
Modernization: 🏗️ IBM Bob Case Study: A Blueprint to Modernize RPG Development.
Security: 🔐 GitHub is investigating a significant internal breach claim.
Vendors: 🔧 No RPG experience? Valence’s new AI doesn’t care. 🌱 Two startups. One platform. One signal. 🖥️ AAG expands Power Systems monitoring to include AIX.

IBM i Brief

🕰️ IBM i didn’t reinvent itself every decade. It didn’t have to.

Most platforms chase relevance with rewrites. IBM i built relevance into the architecture. The Technology Independent Machine Interface, introduced in 1988, was the quiet promise that your code would survive whatever came next. It has.

Every rebrand, from AS/400 to iSeries to System i to IBM i on Power, carried the same contract forward: upgrade the hardware, keep the applications running.

What this means. Backward compatibility isn’t a footnote in IBM i’s story. It is the story. Shops running decades-old RPG today aren’t stuck. They’re drawing on a design decision made before most of their competitors had a web presence.

IBM i – 2008

The opportunity. That same architecture is now the foundation for AI adoption. Clean data, integrated database, stable codebase. The platform didn’t just survive. It prepared.

AI

💡 The COBOL problem sounds familiar to RPG developers

A recent deep-dive on dev.to walks through using Gemma 4 to modernize 40-year-old COBOL: shared global memory, database calls baked into program logic, and no modularity in sight. RPG shops know this landscape well. The article’s key insight applies directly: naive line-by-line translation produces what the author calls “JOBOL,” code that looks new but carries the same structural debt. Real modernization means decoupling. AI, run locally, is starting to make that possible without sending your source code to the cloud.

What is Gemma 4? Gemma 4 is Google’s open-source AI model that runs locally on a standard developer workstation. No cloud subscription, no data leaving your network. For IBM i environments with strict security and compliance requirements, the ability to run AI analysis air-gapped is worth paying attention to.

Career

🔑 Your IBM i interview feels harder than it should.

Here’s why.

Candidates list technologies. Managers ask vague questions. Both leave the room unsure. Nobody got what they needed.

This is not a skills problem. It is a conversation problem.

Whether you are walking into your first IBM i role or your first interview in a decade, the fix is the same: understand the problem the hiring manager is actually trying to solve.

First-timers tend to lean on tech lists. Veterans tend to let tenure speak for itself. Neither is a strategy.

When you can speak to the business problem, you stop being just another candidate and start being the answer. Your depth is your advantage. Knowing how to show it is the skill.

The takeaway. Do your homework on the business, not just the tech they use.

Not sure where to start? Book a 20-minute call with us.

Development

🔍 How long is that string, really?

Two SQL functions, and they don’t always agree. CHARACTER_LENGTH counts characters; LENGTH measures byte space, which matters with Unicode and accented characters.

Knowing which one to use, and when to add TRIM for fixed-length field padding, can save you a debugging headache.

A practical reference for IBM i developers working with string data in SQL.

ERP

🏢 AI doesn’t replace your core system. It depends on it

Constellation Research analyst Ray Wang talked to over 100 organizations in the middle of AI and ERP transitions and came back with a clear message: companies trying to modernize by layering AI on top of an unchanged core are going to rebuild from scratch. Real modernization means restructuring the foundation, not papering over it with agents.

RPA and AI share the same trap. Robotic Process Automation automates repetitive tasks by mimicking human actions on a screen. Many organizations layered it on top of broken processes expecting transformation. They got faster inefficiency instead. Wang says AI is following the same pattern now.

The IBM i platform essentially is the ERP layer for many of these organizations. The argument that core systems are an asset, not a liability, and that AI requires structural readiness rather than surface-level add-ons maps almost exactly onto the IBM i modernization conversation.

🔐 When AI touches your ERP, your data goes somewhere

The AI features arriving inside ERP platforms are useful and increasingly mature. They’re also raising a question that’s harder to answer than it first appears: when an AI feature inside your ERP produces an answer, where did the question and the data behind it actually go? Depending on how your ERP vendor routes AI queries, that data may have passed through a hyperscaler, crossed a jurisdictional boundary, or touched a model governed by foreign law. In regulated industries, that path is something auditors and regulators are starting to ask about.

Our Take: IBM i shops running financial, manufacturing, or distribution workloads need to ask the same questions. The platform’s integrated architecture keeps data close. But as AI tooling gets layered on top, whether that’s agentic workflows or third-party AI assistants, knowing where your data goes at inference time is no longer optional. The question isn’t whether to use AI. It’s whether you can explain what happened to your data when you did.

Hiring

👥 RPG talent isn’t a hiring problem. It’s a business risk.

When the developer who knows your order management system retires, that knowledge walks out the door. IBM i shops that treat talent as a staffing line item are missing the bigger picture.

Retaining and attracting the right RPG developers is continuity planning. It is institutional knowledge protection. It is a security posture. It is operational resilience.

The shops that get this right aren’t just filling seats.

They are protecting the systems that run their business.

Let’s talk about your IBM i talent strategy.

Leadership

🧭 Misalignment is quietly stalling IBM i shops

Your IBM i team may have the right talent and the right platform, but if leadership isn’t aligned, it doesn’t matter.

Alignment means clarity, a shared commitment, and coordinated actions that support the vision and goals of the organization.

A piece in Entrepreneur makes the case that most business underperformance isn’t a strategy problem, it’s a people-operating-together problem.

In IBM i environments, that shows up as competing departmental priorities, siloed decisions on modernization, and technical leaders whose expertise never reaches the business conversation. Alignment isn’t consensus. It’s shared direction and coordinated action.

Modernization

🏗️ IBM Bob Case Study: A Blueprint to Modernize RPG Development

Jack Henry, a core banking platform provider, deployed IBM Bob to tackle a growing RPG codebase that had outpaced its documentation. Developers are now generating programs in hours instead of a week, with a projected 25% productivity gain. Bob’s RPG-specific depth set it apart from general AI tools tested earlier, delivering value across code generation, documentation, and secure coding analysis.

Our take: For IBM i vendors, this matters. Multiple versions, years of custom modifications, and documentation gaps have made modernization feel out of reach. IBM Bob may be the first tool that actually changes that equation.

Security

🔐 GitHub is investigating a significant internal breach claim

TeamPCP claims it stole ~4,000 GitHub internal repos and is selling them for $50,000. GitHub says it hasn’t seen evidence of customer data impact, but its monitoring. The group is also tied to malware that compromised open-source packages to steal credentials and spread in cloud environments.

What this means for IBM i shops: GitHub is where most modern software development teams store and share code. Think of it as a central vault for source code. If your shop is using GitHub for any development work, including AI tools, open-source utilities, or integration projects, this breach is worth watching. More broadly, it’s a reminder that the tools wrapping your IBM i environment carry their own security risks. The platform is solid. The ecosystem around it requires the same scrutiny.

Vendor

🔧 No RPG experience? Valence’s new AI doesn’t care

CNX debuted Valence 6.4 at POWERUp, featuring an AI assistant that builds complete IBM i applications from a simple prompt, handling RPG, SQL, and JavaScript automatically. A new Data Chat Widget gives business users direct access to Db2 for i data without developer involvement. The update targets two persistent IBM i pain points: green screen modernization and the widening skills gap.

What is Valence? A collection of tools for creating new web and mobile applications that run on IBM i.

Why will it fast track development on the IBM i?

“They don’t have to understand the tool. They just need to describe what they want, and it will actually configure the application for them, including backend logic.” — Robert Swanson, CNX

The bar just dropped.

Another incredible opportunity for IBM i shops to modernize.

No excuses.

🌱 Two startups. One platform. One signal.

In the last month, I have spoken with two individuals in the process of launching startups built around IBM i.

Details are still early. But the signal is clear.

Companies are recognizing what the platform actually is: a deeply integrated business system where the database, the operating system, and the application layer work as one. That is not legacy. That is architecture most modern stacks are still trying to replicate.

Two things have quietly pushed this to a tipping point.

First, years of failed migrations. Lift and shift projects that stalled. Conversions that cost more than they saved. Rewrites that never finished. The lesson has compounded: leaving IBM i is harder than it looks, and if you truly understand it’s capabilities, it does not always make sense.

Second, AI. Not as a threat to the platform, but as an accelerant for it. The data is clean. The integration is tight. The foundation is already there.

Here is what most organizations miss, and it applies whether you are modernizing what you have, migrating some applications to a third-party package, or moving to another platform entirely. The starting point is the same.

Clean up your data. Update your OS. Update your hardware. Modernize your RPG applications. Move from DDS to DDL.

That foundation work does not change based on your destination. It is the thing that gets skipped, and it is the reason so many projects stall before they ever get started.

Startups do not build on platforms they are betting against. They build on platforms they believe in.

The IBM i space is not winding down. For the people paying attention, it is opening up.

🖥️ AAG expands Power Systems monitoring to include AIX

The latest release of AAG adds 15 new monitoring checks for AIX, extending its unified visibility across IBM i, Power HMC, VIOS, and now AIX.

Setup runs through the existing Nagios XI HMC wizard in minutes, pushing AIX resource data directly into a centralized dashboard.

The update helps admins catch performance and configuration issues before they impact operations. More AIX capabilities are already planned.

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