IBM Unveils Watsonx Code Assistant For Z This product will be generally available in Q4 2023, and is being designed to help accelerate COBOL application modernization
By Teena Jose •
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IBM, has announced watsonx Code Assistant for Z, a new generative AI-assisted product that will help enable faster translation of COBOL to Java on IBM Z and enhances developer productivity on the platform. This product will be generally available in Q4 2023, and is being designed to help accelerate COBOL application modernization.
Watsonx Code Assistant for Z is being designed to assist businesses in leveraging generative AI and automated tooling to accelerate their mainframe application modernization – all with the goal of preserving the performance, security and resiliency capabilities of IBM Z, said the company.
"By bringing generative AI capabilities through watsonx to new use cases, we plan to drive real progress for our clients. IBM is engineering watsonx Code Assistant for Z to take a targeted and optimized approach. It's built to rapidly and accurately convert code optimized for IBM Z, accelerate time to market and broaden the skills pool. This can help enhance applications and add new capabilities while preserving the performance, resiliency, and security inherent in IBM Z," said Kareem Yusuf, PhD, senior vice-president, Product Management and Growth, IBM Software.
According to an official statement, Watsonx Code Assistant for Z will preview during TechXchange, IBM's premier technical learning event in Las Vegas, Sept 11-13. Watsonx Code Assistant for Z is a new addition to the watsonx Code Assistant product family, along with IBM watsonx Code Assistant for Red Hat Ansible Lightspeed, scheduled for release later this year.
As per the company, these solutions will be powered by IBM's watsonx.ai code model, which will have knowledge of 115 coding languages 1 having learned from 1.5 trillion tokens. 2 At 20 billion parameters, it is on target to become one of the largest generative AI foundation models for code automation.
Additionally, it revealed, the watsonx Code Assistant product portfolio will extend over time to address other programming languages, to improve time to value for modernization and address growing skills challenges for developers.
The resulting Java code from watsonx Code Assistant for Z will be object-oriented. IBM is designing this solution to be optimized to interoperate with the rest of the COBOL application, with CICS, IMS, DB2, and other z/OS runtimes. Java on Z is designed to be performance- optimized versus a compared x86 platform, the statement noted.
