Welcome to another edition of Talsco Weekly

IBM i Brief: Updates on Power11 systems and IBM’s AI governance initiatives.
AI: IBM’s Granite Speech model capabilities, use cases, and security features.
Career: Outside-in thinking benefits for IBM i developers’ professional growth.
Learning: IBM i job priorities, AI coding tutors, and technology philosophy.
Modernization: FalconStor’s transformation and legacy migration impact on business.
Security: Shadow IT challenges in AI era and MFA solutions for IBM i.
Vendors: Shield’s monitoring solution for IBM i systems.

IBM i Brief

🏗️ Power11 Systems: Evolution Rather Than Revolution

IT Jungle examines the upcoming Power11 processors and their modest improvements over Power10, exploring IBM’s processor roadmap challenges.

This article highlights how manufacturing issues with GlobalFoundries forced IBM to switch to Samsung’s 7nm process for Power10, creating a different chip than originally planned. Power11 (shipping July 25) represents more of an incremental update than a major architectural leap, describing it as essentially a “Power10+” or “Power10 prime” chip.

🔐 IBM launches unified AI governance software

IBM launches unified AI governance tools to rein in shadow AI, which can create enterprise blind spots that could carry far greater risks than shadow IT.

AI

🎙️IBM’s Granite Speech excels

What is Granite Speech?

The IBM Granite Speech model, designed for automatic speech recognition (ASR) and automatic speech translation (AST), offers several enterprise use cases due to its compact, efficient design and focus on enterprise-grade performance.

Overview:

Granite-speech-3.3-8b (revision 3.3.2) delivers robust automatic speech recognition and translation, supporting English, French, German, Spanish, and Portuguese. Its two-pass design ensures accurate transcription and translation, outperforming peers in sub-8B parameter models on public benchmarks.

Enhanced by a deeper acoustic encoder and expanded training data, it offers improved English ASR accuracy and multilingual capabilities, making it ideal for enterprise-grade speech processing tasks.

Use cases:

Customer Support Automation: Transcribes calls, translates multilingual inquiries for efficiency.
Meeting and Conference Transcription: Real-time transcription, translation for global team collaboration.
Content Creation and Media Production: Generates captions, translates video content for accessibility.
Legal and Compliance Documentation: Transcribes legal proceedings for accurate, secure records.
Healthcare Documentation: Converts medical dictations to text for EHRs.
Enterprise Knowledge Management: Transcribes training sessions for searchable knowledge bases.
Support Case Summarization: Summarizes customer support calls for faster resolution.

Security Considerations:

Using IBM Granite Speech is secure for enterprises due to robust governance, on-premises/private cloud support, and regulatory compliance. IBM ensures data isn’t used for training without consent. To maximize security, enterprises should:

Deploy on-premises/private cloud: Keeps data within enterprise control.
Use governance tools: Enforces data isolation and encryption.
Customize agreements: Prevents data use in model training.

Career

👁️ Perspective Shift: Outside-In vs. Inside-Out Thinking

IBM i developers can significantly enhance their value by adopting outside-in thinking rather than purely inside-out perspectives.

Understanding the broader technology ecosystem isn’t about competition—it’s about collaboration and integration.

Why this matters:

Business-first mentality: Outside-in thinking prioritizes business outcomes over technical preferences.
Communication bridge: Understanding other tech stacks helps translate IBM i strengths to non-technical stakeholders.
Integration opportunities: Seeing complementary capabilities reveals partnership potential rather than competitive threats.
Career evolution: Broader perspective expands your skill relevance across the enterprise landscape.

Learning

⚙️ IBM i job priorities explained

Have you ever been in a meeting and heard non-technical staff make well-meaning but misguided suggestions about system performance?

Here is a quick overview of why batch (aka background) jobs run at 50. 😉

🖥️ AI transforms terminal into coding tutor

Have you been programming for 30 years and looking to learn a new language? Or maybe you’ve just recently started to code.

Introducing Warp, a modern, AI-powered terminal for developers.

Warp Terminal’s built-in AI helps beginners learn programming by generating code samples, explaining each line, and guiding through compilation.

Unlike other AI tools, Warp can create programs, save to files, and demonstrate how to compile and run them. Perfect for learning languages from C++ to Python, it serves as a personal tutor that explains concepts while showing practical examples.

🎙️ Rethinking Technology: The AI Paradigm Shift

Ben Thompson is one of my favorite tech writers outside of the IBM i ecosystem.

He makes you think.

This article, or podcast, addresses:

One of the most paradoxical aspects of AI is that while it is hailed as the route to abundance, the most important financial outcomes have been about scarcity.

Enjoy!

Modernization

🔄 FalconStor’s Reinvention Catches IBM’s Eye

FalconStor’s transformation from legacy backup provider to hybrid cloud data resilience company was featured on IBM’s Transformers podcast. 🎧

CEO Todd Brooks and CTO Ron Morita discussed their strategic shift to focus on IBM Power environments and their development of Thomas, an AI assistant built on IBM watsonx that helps simplify complex backup environments.

Regarding Hybrid-cloud – A Drive towards security and simplicity – Ron Morita

Who is Thomas? Your watsonx Power Protection Data Expert.

FalconStor’s purpose-built solution for mission-critical IBM Power workloads delivers flexibility and resilience for hybrid enterprises.

🚀 Legacy migration fuels business growth

In 2025, outdated systems are silently blocking innovation while modern companies race ahead. With AI transformation, rising employee expectations, and growing security concerns, legacy platforms have become costly liabilities.

Legacy systems were built before mobile-first experiences, real-time data, and AI became the norm. They lack the agility and integration capabilities modern businesses need.

These outdated systems stifle growth by slowing workflows, reinforcing departmental silos, and increasing breakdown risks. The longer they remain, the more difficult progress becomes.

Thus, modernization isn’t just about new tech—it’s strategic transformation that cuts costs by up to 50% while enabling scalability and integration. The companies leading their industries aren’t waiting for systems to catch up—they’re actively building foundations for what’s next.

Security

🔒 Shadow IT In The Age of AI

As noted above, shadow IT could pose greater issues than Shadow IT.

Gartner predicts 75% of employees will create or use shadow IT by 2027, while Microsoft reports 78% already bring their own AI tools to work.

Shadow IT: Unauthorized software, hardware, or services used without IT department approval.

AI helps organizations to be faster and more flexible but increases security risks

Enterprise IT environments have seen this before. Mobile phones and apps brought in shadow IT. AI will continue this trend. Can you imagine if all Mobile Apps where locked down?

Path Forward: The future will call for collaboration between IT and users, improve security training, and establish clear vendor communication.

🔑 Vendors Fill Gaps in IBM’s New MFA Solution

IBM’s new multi-factor authentication (MFA) capability in IBM i 7.6 has been praised as a “massive security improvement,” but third-party vendors are addressing several limitations. These include:

Version compatibility: IBM’s MFA only works on version 7.6, while vendor solutions support older IBM i releases.
Security level requirements: Native MFA requires security level 40+ and password level 4, which not all shops can support.
Cross-platform support: Third-party solutions offer centralized management across multiple systems and platforms.
Authentication options: Vendors provide additional authentication mechanisms beyond IBM’s TOTP approach, including Radius, OAuth2, and OpenID integration.

The market outlook: While IBM’s native MFA is a positive step forward, third-party solutions continue to offer value through complementary features and broader implementation options.

🏢 MFA Vendors for IBM i

Here are third-party vendors offering MFA solutions for IBM i systems:

Fortra: PowerTech MFA – Centralized management across multiple systems with enterprise MFA integration.
Kisco Systems: i2Pass – Two-way “codeless” integration for systems below security level 40.
Raz-Lee: iSecurity MFA – Person-based approach supporting Radius, OAuth2, and OpenID authentication methods.
Fresche Solutions: MFA solution – Native TOTP implementation supporting IBM i 7.1+ with multiple authentication options.

Vendors

🎙️ Shield’s Monitoring Solution

Wim Jongman interviews Charlie Hird from Shield Advanced Solutions, discussing their cost-effective monitoring solution for IBM i systems.

Fun fact: It monitors more than 185 check commands on the system.

What does Shield do? Experts for HA and Monitoring for the IBM i. Learn more about the monitoring solutions here and here.

Join

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