15th CA 2E / CA Plex Conference

Source versioning tools like Git have transformed modern development—but for IBM i teams, Git alone isn’t enough. When paired with structured change management, this powerful combination streamlines source control, strengthens compliance, and improves collaboration across IT teams. If you’re looking to modernize your IBM i development process without compromising stability or compliance, we’ll show you how to achieve the best of both worlds: agile, collaborative development with safe, controlled deployments.

IBM i was built for what the industry is only now catching up to — and in this session, we'll prove it. We'll cover the Power11 roadmap, hybrid cloud integration, IBM i's industry-leading security and reliability, and the real cost advantages that make it hard to beat. Then we'll show why IBM i is uniquely AI-ready today, thanks to the depth of SQL Services that make connecting modern tools to your business data straightforward.
In the second half, we get hands-on with Bob and the Premium Package for i — an AI assistant built specifically for IBM i. We'll show how operators and administrators can use Bob to review audit journals, investigate job logs, monitor system performance, and understand unfamiliar programs — all through natural conversation. No migrations, no rewrites. Just actionable intelligence from the system you already run.

I’ll demonstrate how CM DDSToDDL turns legacy IBM i DDS source into ready-to-run SQL Server and IBM i DB2 DDL in minutes — with clean, business-readable names and correct keys generated automatically, never hand-inferred. A live demo shows a single source folder producing deployable, dependency-ordered scripts for both platforms in one pass.

Modernize your Synon (CA 2E) applications without rewriting proven business logic. In this session, you’ll learn how to expose existing Synon programs as secure, scalable REST APIs and MCP servers, that can be consumed by AI agents, web applications, mobile apps, cloud platforms, and third-party systems. We’ll demonstrate how to rapidly create APIs and MCP servers, apply authentication and security, and integrate with modern technologies while preserving your investment in IBM i. Whether you’re building a digital transformation strategy, enabling cloud integration, or supporting AI initiatives, this class will show practical techniques for extending the value of your Synon applications through standards-based REST services.

When modernizing CA 2E models to CA Plex, the same business logic can be preserved, but the execution cost can change dramatically when native RPG is replaced by Plex-generated Java. A row-by-row access pattern that was inexpensive with native IBM i I/O can become costly when every lookup becomes a JDBC round trip. This session examines a practical approach to modernizing these performance bottlenecks. We will identify repeated database access and shared computations and transform row-by-row processing into set-based SQL and stored procedures. We will also discuss alternative approaches, including caching and parallelism.