COMMON POWERUp 2025

Your IBM i applications still run the business — but what happens when the people who understand them retire, and documentation falls short? In this session, we’ll explore how companies are using Ozgar.ai to uncover and organize years of undocumented logic, system dependencies, and tribal knowledge hidden deep inside legacy code. Drawing from real use cases, we’ll walk through how Ozgar.ai helps teams build AI-ready knowledge hubs — without rewriting a line of code. You’ll see how smart automation bridges the gap between aging systems and modern understanding, making changes safer, faster, and more confident.

IT-PS as founder of TRIN[IT]Y has a very long history of using External Storage in connection with IBM i. Because of that IT-Power Services started more than 15 years ago to develop an on-premise or cloud based End-2-End Performance Monitoring solution for the entire IT-stack – from External Storage – via SAN and Virtualization Layer, till the Server OS – all of them easy viewable in ONE Performance chart including 5 different performance-metrics. Based on these possibilities it is easily possible to identify and drill down performance of configuration issues, or to size future upgrades. With the built-in predictive module performance anomalies could be detected in real time. Additionally an IT-accounting system was added, that cand be used to allocate IT costs to different services or customers.

Come and join Wayne, IBM i ACS Support Team Lead, as he presents a quick, live demo overviewing the usage and capabilities of IBM i ACS Printer Output.

Come and join Wayne, IBM i ACS Support Team Lead, as he presents a quick, live demo overviewing the usage and capabilities of the IBM i ACS Integrated File System Utility.

The entire IBM Power server family is now available with Power10 processor technology.  From the largest IBM model E1080 enterprise system, to the scale-out models S1014, S1022s, S1022 and S1024, and then last year the new model S1012.  The latest Power11 processor was announced late 2024.  IBM i customers need to know the capabilities and positioning of the entire Power server family, so attend this session to hear about the latest and greatest.

IBM i network communications has changed a lot since the AS/400 primarily communicated to workstations and printers using Twinax and to other computer systems using specialized communications lines. In some ways things are more complex because our IBM i nodes communicate to a lot of other devices in many different ways, but in other ways things are simpler today because nearly all network communications are built on top of the foundation of Ethernet and TCP/IP.

Your IBM i Networking health is very important and is how most of your data and applications are accessed. Your IBM i may be fully up and running, but if network issues prevent business units from utilizing these applications and data the IBM i will be perceived as being down.

This session will take a look at approaches to monitoring this IBM i OS Networking health and it's interaction with the network, how to collection diagnostic data and how to troubleshoot problems.

This session is designed for IBM i system administrators.  It covers real-world problems faced by system admins, and how to solve them using SQL (with some help from IBM i Services).  Don't be intimidated by SQL.  It isn't just for developers!  You can copy and paste the examples provided in this session to get started easily.  Attend this session and add a suite of new tools to your system admin toolbox!

In this followup session to "Intro to IBM i Services (SQL) for Admins" we dig deeper into the capabilities of IBM i Services.  This session will cover more complex and powerful use cases for monitoring, automation, and system administration.
 

You have a wealth of experience and expertise. Have you thought about sharing your know-how by speaking at COMMON? Speaking at COMMON is fun and a great way to get involved with other members as well as the organization at large.
Come join this session to learn how to submit a session for speaking at a COMMON event along with tips and tricks for putting together a session abstract and learning objectives, what the overall process is once you have submitted a session, how to prepare for giving your presentation, and what speaker resources that are available to you.

We no longer live in a world where we have one system of record that is used for all business functions. IT is an everchanging blend of tools, applications, and platforms. Integration is top of mind for most businesses. If there is one common way to link all these systems, it is an API layer. Your IBM i should speak the language of APIs, both consuming and hosting. In this session, let’s look at the big picture with regards to APIs and IBM i.

Peer code  review has great benefits but is often not fully formalized because it can be labor intensive. Often due to limited resources peer code review is limited to more complex changes. DevOps promises automation to reduce the overhead but how can it work on the IBM i? This session will discuss automation at a high level and dig deeper into the tools available for peer review, open source and otherwise, that can be used on IBM i source. We'll cover the use at the developer level with linting where the code can be previewed and at the workflow process level where it is automated. The automation tools discussed will be pull/merge requests and pipeline tools like SonarCube etc. We will also cover the limitations of IDEs and tools and how that impacts automation.

Valence 6.3, the popular web and mobile framework for IBM i, includes a browser-based low-code development utility called Nitro App Builder (NAB), through which anyone with a solid understanding of their IBM i database can build and deploy dazzling web or mobile apps in a matter of minutes.

With newly integrated IBM i-centric AI functionality, developers can use NAB to very quickly create a broad range of applications — from simple dashboard and inquiry apps, complete with download-to-Excel functionality, to highly intricate and intuitive data entry apps.

All of this can be achieved with no coding, though IBM i developers can easily extend functionality with RPG or SQL code to handle business logic as needed. Advanced programmers comfortable with HTML5 and JavaScript code can take things even further, creating super elaborate apps that work hand-in-hand with server-side RPG logic through the Valence Portal. And as of this latest release, you can use the integrated AI assistant to write much of the code for you!

The bottom line: With Valence, whether you're a seasoned RPG developer or a super user with intimate knowledge of your system's physical files, you can crank out highly functional web and mobile apps on IBM i in no time — no prior experience in web or mobile development required. Come to this quick demo session to see the latest release of the Valence framework, and how easy it is to quickly build and deploy web apps on your IBM i system.

If time permits, some actual deployed IBM i customer applications from various industries will be demonstrated as well.

Business-critical applications must be up and running reliably without failure. When something unexpected occurs, you must identify the cause and correct it quickly. The relentless push to do more with less is only going to intensify while the tolerance for failure keeps dropping. Yet identifying points of failure can be tricky as complexities scale. 

The IBM Administration Runtime Expert for i (ARE) can be used to define attributes of a healthy environment and use those defined attributes to validate that the environment is as expected.

This session will everything you need to know to get started with ARE: 
- Overview of what ARE is and example use cases
- Creating and editing templates
- Setting up system groups, verification options, and verifying systems
- Understanding the reports

Have you considered or even already moved your IBMi workloads to PowerVS but wonder how move forward with future OS releases?  Learn the tips and techniques of performing upgrades once inside PowerVS compared to traditional approaches.  In this session, we will also learn about new features or enhancements for IBMi to come to PowerVS.  

Often, trying out something new in DevOps means messing with the stuff that’s already working well. Or asking a vendor to build a custom improvement to your DevOps environment, which could take months. But trying something new quickly and keeping the tried-and-true running don’t have to be mutually exclusive.

This session explores the historical importance of Power's memory architecture, reviews recent developments in Power's memory roadmap, and highlights the strengths of Power's memory architecture going forward versus developments in industry memory architectures.

There is more than one way to skin a cat - so it is with creating a modern, graphical User Interface for IBM I Applications (and of course for all the other platforms as well).
My Team and I are using multiple ways like Angular, ExtJs, React, .Net (XAML with MAUI), Serverbased Web Applications, IceCap, Swift, Kotlin AND Flutter. 
It always depends what you want to achieve and - of course - what kind of resources (human as well as time and money) you have.

One way, which is a very good one from our perspective, is the DART Framework Flutter.

In this Session you will see how you can create platform independent Apps with one codebase using the Flutter Framework and RPG Microservices with JSON as the backend on IBM i with DB2 for i.

Learning Objectives:
Learn about the advantages of the Flutter Framework and how you can use one codebase to run on mobile, Desktop and Browser in combination with RPG Microservices in the backend running on IBM i with DB2 for i.
Quick Look on what a RPG Microservice is, how you can easily create them and why it is a great idea to use it as a backend for any modern Frontend.

In this talk, we’ll look at everything from development tools, build systems, to deployment methods. Finally there is a complete open source stack from IBM to use git and easily deploy ILE code (RPG, COBOL, you name it!) and this will cover them. We will look at the end-to-end lifecycle for IBM i applications when stored in git - all the way from the developers, to the end users machine automatically.

Celebrating 36 years of IBM I, this presentation will cover some of the tricks and treats discovered over the years, including Operating System, Built in commands, licensed packages, 3rd party packages, IBM and 3rd party hardware and appliances.  Many of these tricks and treats were learned at COMMON over the years and many have helped justify the cost of a COMMON conference with the value of the knowledge gained. Please be prepared for audience participation and bring some of your own tips and tricks from over the years or from this conference.
 

For many years now IBM have positioned SQL as the primary interface to the database on IBM i. At the same time, new capabilities are being added only to SQL, not to the native database interface.

We need a different tool to understand and analyze query implementation plans and feedback from the optimizer – the SQL component that determines the most effective way to deliver the data we ask for in SQL statements. Visual Explain is just such a tool, and it both shows us graphically what plan the optimizer has chosen, as well as tells us details about each step along the way. It can also give us suggestions on ways to improve performance of our queries.