IBM i Skills Supplant Cybersecurity as the Community’s Top Concern: Fortra Survey
To unpack the 2026 report, Steve Will and Kris Whitney of IBM i are joined by veteran analyst Timothy Prickett Morgan and Fortra’s Tom Huntington
For the first time in a decade, cybersecurity is not the number one issue weighing on the minds of IBM i shops, according to Fortra’s 2026 IBM i Marketplace Survey, the results of which were released this month.
Cybersecurity has been moved down to number two on the list of “top concerns,” dislodged by the issue of skills shortages. Of the 315 IBM i users responding to Fortra’s survey, 69% said being able to find technologists with the skills to work on the platform was a top concern.
IBM i Skills: Help Is on the Way
“This community has always been beset by this issue that IBM i skills are harder to find than other skills,” IBM i CTO Steve Will said during a Jan. 22 online stream recapping the survey results. But there are potential solutions to the skills question, including a variety of education initiatives such as IBM’s own Power Skills Academy, along with the continued development of AI tools that can help technologists navigate unfamiliar systems.
Teaching IBM i skills to a computer professional is relatively easy, Will noted. And with the forthcoming IBM Bob AI-powered development environment and other AI solutions, the task should get easier. Shops looking for developers with 10 years of IBM i experience may have a difficult time finding technologists of that experience level, but those willing to IBM i newbies will soon have access to an “evolutionarily better” set of AI tooling that can assist in coding, Will said.
(For in-depth analysis of the skills challenges IBM i, watch this webinar featuring Will, Linda Alkire of IBM Power Skills Academy, Brian Nordland of Fortra and Alan Pearson of Gateway Technical College.)
AI Enters the Top 5
Another big riser on the list of IBM i concerns is AI, which entered the top five for the first time in the survey’s 12-year history—47% of respondents listed it as a concern, making it the fifth most popular answer in the category. “There is a lot of focus in our IBM i community on, ‘How am I going to incorporate AI?’” Will said.
So far, most use of AI on IBM i amounts to “looking at APIs and playing around with the models that are being built to try to figure out, how useful is this thing?” said Timothy Prickett Morgan, longtime industry analyst and co-editor of The 400. “What we haven’t seen a lot of is regular old enterprises picking a model, dropping it in.”
However, with the likes of IBM Bob on the way, 2026 may be the breakout year for AI adoption, he added. Joining Will and Prickett Morgan on the survey presentation stream, IBM i Chief Engineer Kris Whitney had similar thoughts: “2026 is going to be a very exciting year for IBM i and AI, and I think it’s going to be hard to keep up with all the things that we’re doing.”
The Eternal Concern: Cybersecurity
One concern that will probably never go away is cybersecurity, listed as a top-five concern by 64% of respondents. But just because it dropped to number two doesn’t mean people are getting complacent, Will noted. “It’s probably always going to be in that top five because it’s so critical,” he said.
The decline in security concerns may be a good sign, Tom Huntington, executive vice president of solutions at Fortra, said during the survey presentation. “It’s really good to see it not be number one, right? It means that people are addressing, or feel like they’ve addressed, their cybersecurity on IBM i.”
In addition to the current threats, quantum computing looms on the horizon, expected to be advanced and stable enough in the near future to decrypt currently unbreakable encryption.
“When we get to that moment, of course we’re all going to have to air gap stuff,” Prickett Morgan said.
“The threats are constantly changing,” Whitney said. In anticipation of quantum-enabled attacks, the last two generations of Power servers were designed to use quantum-safe algorithms selected by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).
Application Modernization
Coming in third among IBM i users’ concerns, just like last year, was application modernization, listed by 62% of respondents. One factor in that high ranking is the fact that 73% of respondents reported using in-house-written applications, the most common type by far.
The Application Development Tool Set remains the most popular development tool on IBM i, with 74% reporting using it. But Visual Studio Code is growing rapidly in popularity (58%), nudging ahead of Rational Developer for i (RDi) (57%). With solid momentum behind it, Visual Studio Code may become more popular than Application Development Tool Set in the coming years, Fortra’s report states.
As an AI-powered integrated development environment, IBM Bob will soon be available to aid in application modernization as well. The platform-neutral Bob replaces IBM i’s previous efforts to develop its own AI code assistant.
In describing the tool’s wide, agentic-AI-infused scope, Huntington referenced the product’s construction worker mascot. “Bob is no longer just a construction person. He is a construction person that takes on development activity,” he explained.
High Availability
To protect their data, 62% of respondents said they’re taking the high-availability (HA) route—the most popular option—while 47% called HA/disaster recovery one of their top five concerns. “I’m going to say everyone needs high availability, but that’s just from a purist standpoint,” Whitney said.
Recovery from tape was the second most popular option (54%), followed by recovery from data backed up to disc, or virtual tape library (VTL), at 36%. “The interesting thing is tape, physical tape is still a strong player out in the industry,” Whitney said.
Meanwhile, 11% said they were backing data up on the cloud. “So we’re starting to see some modernization. … That’s great to see people starting to utilize cloud,” Whitney said. He added, however, “That should be way higher than it is. There’s not a lot of reason not to look at that.”
Where the Platform Is Headed
In illuminating what’s on the minds of the IBM i community, the results of Fortra’s 2026 annual survey will help determine the direction of the platform. “We drive a lot of our decisions based on what are the biggest issues our customers are facing,” Will explained.
To help fulfill development goals at IBM i, “we steal this information and use it widely,” Whitney added.
The survey also asked about practices regarding hardware and software lifecycles, staffing, automation, infrastructure, OSes, in addition to their outlook for the platform and more.