And Then There Were Two: Big Blue Withdraws IBM i 7.4 - I...

September 22, 2025

UPDATED: If you have a compelling reason to stay on IBM i 7.4 and need a license to it for a machine, or if IBM i 7.4 is the last release you can get your applications to without a major change in that code, then you have better shake a leg. Because IBM i 7.4 is only going to be sold for a few more months.

In announcement letter AD25-0894, which was dated September 16, Big Blue said that it would stop selling the IBM i 7.4 operating system on April 30, 2026. A bunch of other related system programs are also being pulled from the IBM catalog on that date for the 7.4 release level, including all of the licensed program products (LPPs) that have been bundled for free with the operating system and also including any separately charged programs. The biggies are:

5770-BR2: Backup, Recovery and Media Services for i
5733-CY3: Cryptographic Device Manager for i
5770-DBM: Db2 Mirror for i
5770-HAS: PowerHA SystemMirror for i
5770-NLV: National Languages for i
5770-RD1: Content Manager of Demand for i
5733-WE3: Web Enablement for IBM i 1.1.1
5722-WE2: Web Enablement for IBM i 5.3.1
5770-WDS: Rational Development Studio for i

The Web Enablement add-ons to IBM i are the means for installing WebSphere Application Server and other programs as a package. WebSphere is, of course, is based on the open source Apache Web server, and you can get it separately from the Web Enablement, too.

If you look at the raw data from the IBM i Marketplace Study put together every year since 2015 by Fortra, through the end of 2024 (which means it is from the survey results and report dated January 2025), IBM i 7.4 has been trending at around 50 percent of the installed base of operating system release levels in the 2023, 2024, and 2025 studies, meaning as the 2022, 2023, and 2024 years ended. Take a look:

If you believe that the IBM i customer base has been holding at around 120,000 unique customers with only about 30,000 of them being relatively current on hardware and the remaining 90,000 being laggard, then you get an operating system distribution across the base that looks more like this:

In this scenario, IBM i 7.4 is the primary operating system on about 25 percent of the machines out there. If you believe that the IBM i installed base has shrank to maybe 90,000 or maybe even 75,000 customers – and we have talked to a number of ISVs who think this is the case based on the changes in their own installed bases and current business deals – then IBM i 7.4 probably is closer to 35 percent to 40 percent of the base.

The withdrawal from marketing is meaningful, of course, because within six months you won’t be able to buy a license, which means customers back on IBM i 7.1, IBM i 7.2, and even older releases will not be able to use IBM i 7.4 as a stepping stone to the current IBM i 7.5 or IBM i 7.6 releases. This happens a lot, particularly when older machines are finally upgraded. You often have to make a few jumps to get current. (We are certain IBM might quietly make exceptions for accounts trying to get current and make IBM i 7.4 available for these stepping stone upgrades.)

What really matters now, and what this withdrawal of marketing signifies, is the impending withdrawal of standard support for IBM i 7.4. The average time between the end of marketing and the end of standard support for all releases between OS/400 V5R3 (announced in May 2004) and IBM i 7.3 (announced in April 2016) is 394 days. It was a long of 857 days for i5/OS V5R4 and only 155 days for IBM i 7.3. Take a look:

You will have to click on that chart to enlarge it so you can read it.

It is hard to guess when end of standard support will happen for IBM i 7.4. It could be September 2026 or September 2027, depending on IBM’s mood. We thought, given Big Blue’s desire to get customers on modern Power10 or Power11 hardware and on IBM i 7.5 or IBM i 7.6 releases – with subscription pricing no less – it will not be long before customers will have to pay for extended support for IBM i 7.4. That would mean probably a year from now in September 2026, or maybe maybe in April 2027, but probably not longer than that. And extended support is very expensive, as you know – many, many times what standard Software Maintenance (or SWMA in the IBM i lingo) costs.

As it turns out, what we used to call end of standard support is now called date change for service level, and we missed that in the original story we did. That date is indeed September 30, 2026. And you best prepare for that. You are either going to be paying a lot more money for SWMA for IBM i 7.4 or upgrading to subscriptions on IBM i 7.5 or IBM i 7.6 on newer hardware. Or, freeze drying yourself in the past and hoping and praying nothing bad happens to you machine. The latter is not the smart choice, of course, but far too many companies do it.

By the way, in the same announcement letter, IBM said that it would withdraw support for Db2 Web Query for i on December 31, 2026.

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