COMMON POWERUp 2025

In this session Steve will show examples of talking to external (alien) systems using open source software all from the comfort of your IBM i server.

• Accessing data on a cloud hosted Microsoft SQL Server
• Accessing data held in a Google Docs spreadsheet

Coming out of this session Steve hopes you'll be inspired to use open source software in your next "proof of concept" project.

This session was created by Richard Moulton of RMsoftwareServices.co.uk, its content available for you to use yourself and GitHub and Steve hopes he can do this great presentation justice.
https://github.com/richardm90/rmaliens 

Jack Woehr, an IBM Qiskit Advocate since 2019 and the Secretary of the OpenQASM Technical Steering Committee, will offer a user-friendly explanation of Quantum Computing, an overview of where its implementation stands today, observations as to its relevance and timeliness, as well as suggestions for your own personal exploration and familiarization with this emerging computational model.

Ai, its all the buzz, but what if you really could start to leverage AI in the automated management of your IBM i systems ? With the latest support from IBM and the Instana product, combined with tools like Prometheus and Ansible, you now have options for monitoring virtual any metric you can dream up, combined with powerful alerting capabilities and AI to help determine the best corrective action via Ansible. In this session we will review these technologies, as well as show demos of this in action.

There is so much buzz in the community about AI developer tools and I think we should talk about terminology and examples of how AI agents work. We'll look at how prompt work, how context is built, what tools are and how they all come together to build an agent. Let's find out if WatsonX is in the game, what GitHub Copilot can and cannot do, alternative tools, and of course self-hosted models with Continue. Plus, a sneak peak at the AI integration for the Db2 for IBM i database extension.

• Talk about the multiple ways to use or host a model
• Will demo multiple tools
• How RPGLE and SQL can be written, plus debugged, with the help of an AI model

Using Rocketgraph xGT, we will

• pull data from IBM i Db2 into graph format
• use natural language to generate a cypher query
• execute the cypher query

Using a graphical user interface. Queries can be natural language questions such as, "Show me money that has moved five times and is over $5000". Using this technology in banking is dramatic, but it is applicable in any industries where you want to draw inferences from patterns in large data quickly. 

Prestart server jobs are used to handle requests from clients in the network. There are many uses of prestart jobs on IBM i, the most common is the database server. Prestart jobs present many challenges for how to understand what is happening on the system, what work requests these jobs are handling, and generally how to manage them. This session will review all the key characteristics of prestart jobs, provide many tips to better understand what is happening on your system, and review how you can use subsystem configuration to better manage your prestart jobs. 

If your company is doing classic .NET programming alongside IBM i development, then it is important to be conversant about providing Db2 for i data to Microsoft environments using the Db2 for i .NET Provider.  The Db2 for i .NET Provider enables real time data access from a compiled Microsoft or 3rd party OO language, in a manner very similar to SQL Server.
 
This session seeks to enable you to demonstrate (on your PC) that it is no big deal to get current Db2 for i data without interim data extract steps.  The Db2 for i .NET Provider is available in the ACS Windows Application Package for no additional charge for companies who have ACS license(s).

There are many ways and some good reasons to consume and even update Db2 for i data from classic .NET (.NET Framework 2.0 through 4.8), for the betterment of your company, especially in cases where the applications and data continue to reside primarily on IBM i.  For our company, we chose the web forms style project types to solve our needs for a website strategy, but the Db2 for i .NET Provider can be used in quite a few other project types and applications or to feed external data stores. This provider can’t be used in the new/latest Microsoft framework known simply as .NET (originally named .NET Core), however there might be more parallels with traditional IBM i development with the older 4.8 Framework and many, if not most, Azure cloud offerings are compatible with classic .NET.

In this 2-hour session, we will also hit upon several admin functions including installation of the Visual Studio Community Edition 2022 as the IDE (some via video on the Tegratecs website).  Same thing for installing the provider on Windows Server (again to show how it is no big deal…), in order to help reduce hurdles hindering implementation at a production level.

Integrating legacy systems with modern CRM solutions is an essential step toward digital transformation. Integrating any data between a robust ERP system and a CRM like HubSpot allows for enabling seamless data flow for various components, but most importantly Companies, Contacts, and Companies to Contacts Associations. In a real-world case study, see how we created the integration using HubSpot’s API ensuring real-time synchronization of companies, contacts, and their associations.

In this talk we’ll discuss the challenges we faced, how we solved them and the results and benefits of the project.

Learning Objectives:

1.  The advantages of connecting a CRM like Hubspot with your IBM I
2. Learn the power of bridging legacy systems with modern platforms and the overwhelmingly positive effect it can have on various aspects of your business.
3. Key tips to keep in mind when using APIs for integration including sandbox environments and monitoring API rate limits
4. Understand the decisions about when to use middleware and which tool to choose depending on the project

Instana is a product which helps you achieve both monitoring and observability. Instana has agent which runs on IBMi and can monitor other IBMi lpars using remote monitoring.
Configuration of the monitors is done using yaml file:



Key metrics which Instana is capturing:

Active jobs
Threads
Auxiliary storage pool consumption
Temporary storage
Total spool space



Events and Alerting feature of Instana
Instana has the capability to generate an alert whenever user defined message ID, queue library and queue name combination matches for any of the incoming messages in the message queue within the specified time (like last 10 minutes). These alerts will enable you to take any necessary action sooner.

Whenever a message is produced which is being monitored using yaml file is picked up by instana and corresponding alert is generated.