Enterprise IT teams are being asked to do more than ever as technology becomes more central to how organizations operate, compete, and serve their customers. They need to keep mission-critical systems available, secure, and performant while supporting new AI initiatives, accelerating modernization, and managing increasingly distributed environments. These responsibilities now extend across infrastructure, operations, applications, data, security, and developer workflows, making the role of IT more strategic and more complex. At the same time, many teams are facing skills gaps, rising operational complexity, and pressure to reduce manual effort without compromising the reliability their businesses depend on. To meet these demands, organizations need trusted platforms that can simplify operations, support modernization, and provide a resilient foundation for AI-driven innovation.
Today, IBM is announcing a set of new capabilities across the IBM® Power® platform designed to help clients modernize infrastructure, simplify operations, and prepare for the next era of AI-driven enterprise computing. These updates include IBM Power Autonomous Operations, the new IBM Power S1112 server, the IBM Bob Premium Package for i, IBM i 7.6 Technology Refresh 2, and IBM i 7.5 Technology Refresh 8. Each announcement addresses a different layer of the enterprise technology stack, from how infrastructure is deployed and managed to how applications are developed, modernized, and optimized. Together, they reinforce a broader direction for IBM Power of helping clients move from manually operated infrastructure toward intelligent, resilient, and AI-assisted systems that are easier to manage, easier to modernize, and ready for new workloads. For organizations running mission-critical applications, this means a stronger foundation for operational resilience, AI adoption, application modernization, and long-term business growth.
IBM Power Autonomous Operations: AI-Powered Operations for Mission-Critical Infrastructure
IBM Power has long been trusted for running some of the most critical workloads in the world. IBM Power Autonomous Operations extends that trust into the operational model itself by bringing AI-driven insights, automation, and agentic operations to Power processor-based environments. IBM Power Autonomous Operations is designed to continuously monitor, optimize, protect, and manage Power environments. It combines deep Power telemetry, AI-powered analytics, automation, and operational workflows into a unified experience that helps IT teams reduce complexity, improve resiliency, and increase productivity.
Rather than simply showing operators what is happening, Power Autonomous Operations is designed to help teams decide what to do next. The platform analyzes system telemetry, identifies risks and optimization opportunities, and provides intelligent recommendations or automated actions to improve performance, resiliency, and operational efficiency. At launch, Power Autonomous Operations introduces a foundation for progressive autonomy across the Power stack through capabilities such as:
Infrastructure Lifecycle Intelligence
Helps maintain consistent system configuration, real-time inventory visibility, and infrastructure health awareness across Power processor-based environments.
Resilience and Recovery Automation
Detects emerging issues earlier, accelerates diagnostics, guides or automates recovery workflows, and helps reduce the impact of incidents on business-critical workloads.
Performance and Capacity Optimization
Continuously analyzes workload behavior and system utilization to identify emerging bottlenecks, improve performance stability, and optimize infrastructure efficiency.
A key design principle of Power Autonomous Operations is control. Organizations can begin with visibility and guided recommendations, using the platform to better understand system health, operational risks, and optimization opportunities before enabling automated action. As teams build confidence, they can progressively enable higher levels of autonomy for routine tasks, recurring operational workflows, and trusted remediation scenarios. Human approval, policy-based guardrails, explainability, and action transparency remain essential to helping clients adopt autonomous operations safely in mission-critical environments. This approach allows Power clients to gain the benefits of AI-driven automation while keeping people in control of the decisions that matter most.
IBM Power S1112: Power11 Performance for Core and Edge Workloads
The new IBM Power S1112 brings Power11 technology to an entry-level, one-socket system designed for IBM® AIX®, IBM i, and Linux workloads. It is built for organizations modernizing older one-socket systems, extending secure infrastructure to remote or branch locations, and preparing for AI inferencing and data-local workloads closer to where data is created. Power S1112 is designed to deliver enterprise-class Power capabilities in a compact footprint. It supports rack-mounted and deskside configurations, making it well suited for space-constrained environments such as retail locations, manufacturing sites, branch offices, and smaller data center deployments.
For IBM i clients, Power S1112 is especially important because it expands what entry IBM i environments can do. IBM i P05 clients can run IBM i partitions within the P05 software tier while also using additional system resources for AIX, Linux, VIOS, AI, or open source workloads on the same server. This creates a flexible path to consolidate workloads, improve utilization, and support modernization without forcing clients into a larger platform than they need. Learn more about the Power S1112 by going to the product page here.
IBM Bob Premium Package for i: AI-Powered Modernization for IBM i Developers
Infrastructure modernization is only part of the story. Many IBM i clients are also modernizing applications that contain decades of trusted business logic. These applications are often written in RPG, CL, COBOL, and SQL, and they continue to run essential business processes every day. For development teams, the challenge is not simply changing code, but understanding complex application logic, preserving reliability, and reducing risk while delivering new capabilities faster. That is why AI-assisted development and modernization tools purpose-built for IBM i are becoming increasingly important to help teams moved forward with greater speed, confidence, and control.
The IBM Bob Premium Package for i brings AI-powered development and modernization capabilities directly to IBM i teams. IBM Bob is an AI-first development partner for enterprise developers, and the Premium Package for i extends that experience with IBM i-specific capabilities designed for RPG applications, IBM i development workflows, and the real-world modernization needs of enterprise teams. Unlike generic AI coding assistants, the IBM Bob Premium Package for i is designed to work with IBM i context. It helps developers understand complex code, generate and refactor applications, create documentation, support testing, and modernize incrementally while preserving the business logic organizations depend on. Three areas are especially important:
Native Connection to IBM i
The IBM Bob Premium Package for i is designed to connect directly to IBM i environments, source members, and application context. Developers can read, write, and compile code as part of their workflow, reducing the need to copy source into disconnected tools or switch between fragmented development experiences. Because Bob works with IBM i context, AI assistance can be grounded in real application structure and platform conventions. This helps developers receive more accurate explanations, cleaner outputs, and modernization guidance aligned with IBM i development practices.
Skills and Agentic Workflows
The IBM Bob Premium Package for i introduces curated skills and agentic workflows optimized for common IBM i development and modernization tasks. These capabilities help developers explain complex RPG and COBOL programs, convert Fixed-Format RPG to modern Free-Format RPG, refactor monolithic applications into modular structures, generate RPG, CL, COBOL and DDS code, create technical documentation, and produce unit tests to support validation. Rather than relying on generic prompts and inconsistent results, IBM i teams can use expert-built skills that deliver more predictable, repeatable and higher-quality outcomes. Agentic workflows help guide multi-step development tasks from understanding and planning through implementation and validation, allowing developers to modernize incrementally without losing control.
IBM i Database Mode
IBM i Database Mode within the IBM Bob Premium Package for i equips Bob with skills and agentic workflows designed to help IBM i development teams analyze, optimize, and troubleshoot database queries with greater confidence. This mode provides deeper assistance across SQL and legacy DDS, helping developers better understand database structures, access paths, query behavior, and performance considerations in the context of IBM i applications. By guiding teams through common database engineering tasks, Bob can help identify potential issues, explain complex query logic, and recommend improvements that support more efficient and reliable applications. We believe this mode can help fill the skills gap many IBM i development teams face when they do not have access to an experienced database engineer. With IBM i Database Mode, teams can bring more database expertise into everyday development workflows, helping them modernize and optimize applications while continuing to rely on the trusted data foundation of IBM i.
IBM i 7.6 Technology Refresh 2 and IBM i 7.5 Technology Refresh 8
IBM i continues to evolve as a modern enterprise platform for secure, resilient, and integrated business applications. IBM i 7.6 Technology Refresh 2 and IBM i 7.5 Technology Refresh 8 introduce enhancements across security, resiliency, application development, database, system management, and performance. These Technology Refreshes also introduce support for the new IBM Power S1112 server, expanding capabilities for IBM i P05 clients. With Power S1112, entry IBM i environments can run IBM i alongside Linux, VIOS, or AIX workloads on the same system, enabling more flexible modernization and workload consolidation.
Security and Resiliency Enhancements
Security remains a major focus for both IBM i 7.6 TR2 and IBM i 7.5 TR8 as organizations continue to strengthen their environments against evolving cyber threats and compliance requirements. Enhancements include SMTP support for OAuth 2.0, helping clients modernize email authentication by moving away from traditional username and password approaches. These Technology Refreshes also include secure access enforcement for Virtual Partition Manager configurations, integration with IBM Cloud Key Protect for Bring Your Own Key (BYOK) use cases, and additional capabilities that help clients better protect sensitive data and system access. IBM i 7.6 TR2 further expands these security enhancements with support for Multi-Factor Authentication in clustering, helping improve authentication consistency across clustered environments. IBM i 7.6 TR2 also includes additional IBM i Cryptographic Services enhancements, including capabilities related to external key management and master key protection, giving clients more flexibility and control over how encryption keys are managed.
IBM i Migrate While Active also continues to advance. The latest enhancements help clients reduce planned downtime for system maintenance and upgrades by enabling a synchronized target copy of a production IBM i system while applications continue running. Clients can perform maintenance activities, including operating system upgrades, on the target system and then execute a controlled role swap with minimal outage. In IBM i 7.6 TR2, Migrate While Active is further enhanced with Partition Mirroring, which allows clients to create a copy of a running source partition over a TCP/IP network without requiring storage-based replication. This can be especially useful for migrations to a different data center or to a new Power processor-based server where direct storage migration is not possible.
Modern Development and Data Innovation
Both Technology Refreshes continue IBM i investment in modern development and data workflows. Enhancements include Java 21 support, continued improvements to Code for IBM i, updates for Visual Studio Code integration, expanded Db2 for i capabilities, and enhancements to Rational Development Studio for RPG developers. Db2 for i continues to provide new and enhanced SQL capabilities for application development, security management, and systems management. One particularly useful enhancement is the ability to view journal entry data in a relational table. This helps turn journal data that was traditionally difficult to consume into structured information that can be used for analytics, automation, and AI-ready workflows.
Simplified Management and User Experience
IBM Navigator for i and IBM i Access Client Solutions continue to evolve as important management and development interfaces for IBM i users. Enhancements include release-level CVE visibility, improvements to IBM Electronic Service Agent connectivity through secure REST API endpoints for IBM Cloud Call Home support, continued evolution of Navigator for i, enhancements to ACS, and better tooling for monitoring, configuration, and automation. IBM i Access Client Solutions version 1.1.9.12 includes updates across IFS usage, Run SQL Scripts, Visual Explain, SQL Performance Center, Data Transfer, and the emulator. These improvements are designed to provide value for everyday users, database engineers, and administrators who rely on SQL and graphical tooling for daily work.
Performance and Efficiency Without Application Disruption
Both IBM i 7.6 TR2 and IBM i 7.5 TR8 include infrastructure improvements designed to enhance performance and scalability without requiring application changes. Virtual Ethernet multi-queue support allows the Virtual Ethernet driver to distribute network traffic processing across multiple CPU cores rather than being constrained to a single processor. This can improve throughput, scalability, and CPU utilization in high-traffic environments. IBM i networking infrastructure has also been adjusted to increase concurrency for TCP configurations, potentially improving throughput and reducing latency for high-performance network traffic. Existing TCP configurations can benefit without requiring configuration changes.
Agentic Engine for IBM i
We are announcing a private preview of the Agentic Engine for IBM i, a new enablement layer designed to make it easier to adopt native and integrated AI agents into IBM i workloads and business processes. The engine provides the runtime, IBM i Knowledge Pack, observability, extensibility, MCP server, and foundational agents that help teams build trusted agents for IBM i without starting from scratch. Developers can build agents using their preferred coding tools, run them close to Db2 for i data under native IBM i object-level authority, and extend them into broader enterprise workflows through APIs and agent-to-agent integration. With security, governance, and instrumentation built in, the Agentic Engine for IBM i helps organizations manage agent behavior, monitor activity, and support responsible adoption across mission-critical environments. Sign up for the waitlist here to get early access and learn how the Agentic Engine for IBM i can help accelerate how developers build, deploy, and operationalize AI on IBM i while preserving the control and reliability clients expect from the platform.
A Unified Direction for IBM Power
Viewed together, these announcements show how IBM Power is evolving across the full lifecycle of enterprise computing. IBM Power Autonomous Operations helps simplify how environments are monitored, managed, optimized, and recovered. IBM Power S11112 brings Power11 performance, security, and AI readiness to entry and edge environments. IBM Bob Premium Package for i helps development teams modernize IBM i applications with AI-powered assistance grounded in IBM i context. IBM i 7.6 TR2 and IBM i 7.5 TR8 advance the operating system with enhancements across security, resiliency, development, data, management, and performance.
This matters because modernization is no longer limited to one layer of the stack. Clients need to modernize infrastructure, operations, applications, and developer workflows together. They need platforms that can support core business workloads while also enabling AI, automation, and new digital capabilities. IBM Power is built for that reality, helping clients move toward a future where mission-critical infrastructure is more autonomous, IBM i development is more AI-assisted, entry systems are more powerful and flexible, and operations teams can manage complexity with greater confidence. To see how these capabilities come together, join our webcast on July 16th at 9:00AM EDT where IBM Power experts will share the latest developers designed to help teams move from reactive operations to autonomous and optimized environments.