April 13, 2026
IBM is working on a new Technology Refresh, as it traditionally does this time of year. But the spring TR announcement will not be made before the POWERUp conference takes place at the end of the month, IT Jungle has learned. Instead, the company will be holding off on the spring TR so that it aligns with a broader Power announcement.
IBM i shops have been conditioned to expect two TRs every year, one in the spring (usually April) and another in the fall (usually October). The spring TR is usually timed to occur before COMMON holds its annual POWERUp conference, which this year takes place the last week in April in New Orleans, Louisiana.
The IBM i user base has been expecting to hear about the latest updates to the IBM i operating system and related stack of products, with IBM i 7.6 TR2 and IBM i 7.5 TR8 being the most likely candidates (we’re not expecting IBM to make the leap to IBM i 8.0 at this time, but you never know).
That is not going to be the case this year, at least for the spring TR. IBM is being a little bit cagey about when the spring TR will occur. An IBM exec told IT Jungle on background that the company wants to align the spring TR announcement to coincide with an upcoming Power hardware announcement.
While IBM is not yet ready to take the lid off the Power11 upgrade it has cooking, it has been widely reported that Big Blue is gearing up to announce a new entry-level Power server in the first half of the year, with delivery likely occurring in the third or fourth quarter.
This machine is likely to be the replacement for the “Bonnell” Power S1012, the half-width single-socket machine that it launched back in May 2024. This “mini” machine likely will be called the Power S1112, and will fill the gap in the low-end Power11 lineup, specifically for the P05 tier.
IBM has started winding down sales of the Power10 lineup as the new Power11 servers have come online. IBM announced a price cut for the S1012 last August, and that machine currently is still available, even as IBM has begun ending sales of the rest of the Power10 lineup.
Reading the tealeaves (since the Big Blue tea leaves are not speaking explicitly for themselves), it would seem reasonable to expect IBM to make both the entry-level Power11 server announcement and the IBM i spring TR announcement at its own conference, IBM Think 2026, which is taking place in Boston from May 4 through 6.
Of course, IBM always reserves the right to change its mind. So only time will tell.
The nature of TRs has shifted a bit over the years, and in a way, delaying the spring TR to coincide with the introduction of new hardware brings the TR cycle in closer alignment with the reason for having TRs in the first place.
IBM adopted the TR cycle with the launch of IBM i 7.1 way back on April 13, 2010. At the time, the TR was a vehicle for updating the internals of the IBM i operating system to support new hardware. But in recent years, TRs have become primarily bi-annual roll-ups for the latest release of a range of IBM i products that IBM provides, including the core IBM i OS but also including everything else in the stack, such as Navigator, ACS, Power HA, BRMS, RDi, etc. These products have their own development cadences and updates are made outside of the TR cycles, yet the IBM i ecosystem has grown to expect these updates during the twice-yearly TRs.
In that respect, delaying the TR announcement just a few weeks makes sense. But beyond just aligning bits, there’s a more practical reason at play: IBM simply can’t say that IBM i 7.6 TR2 and IBM i 7.5 TR8 (or whatever the new version and release will be called) support a new Power11 server that doesn’t officially exist. (Although such support for unannounced products is often latent in releases if you dig down into the firmware, something we could find out about when IBM was more widely doing early testing of hardware with a wider variety of customers.)
IBM has a number of software development projects that it is juggling at the moment, and a lot of innovation is occurring in the labs. While the main reason for the delay in announcing the TR is to align it with the upcoming Power11 announcement, it sounds like IBM will use the extra weeks that it has carved out for itself to solidify some of this innovation into the fully baked shrink-wrapped products that IBM customers can expect.
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