IBM Bob now runs self-hosted and in air-gapped environments

Bob moves into the customer's own infrastructure

IBM has made a self-hosted deployment option for its agentic software development platform Bob generally available. Bob spans the full lifecycle: understanding code, planning work, executing changes and validating results. The new option lets enterprises run Bob on premises, in private or sovereign clouds, and in air-gapped networks.

Customers bring the model

Bob self-hosted does not bundle a model. Customers source and license one from IBM's supported list. IBM groups that list by deployment method: self-hosted options include NVIDIA Nemotron and Poolside Laguna, while hybrid or private SaaS setups can use external models such as Claude Sonnet 5.0, Claude Opus 4.8, Gemini 3.7 Flash and OpenAI GPT 5.6 Sol through an approved private connectivity pattern.

That choice determines where code and context get processed. With a self-hosted model, code, development context and build artifacts can remain inside the customer environment. In IBM's example, a bank could run on-premises inference for core banking applications while routing a less restricted workload to an approved external model.

What ships at GA

The self-hosted deployment includes core Bob capabilities: the IDE experience, BobShell, parallel tool calling, the agent harness, skills and modes. Self-hosted, air-gapped and hybrid model configurations are supported, along with bring-your-own-license (BYOL) for eligible models. Optional Premium Packages cover Java Modernization, IBM i and IBM Z.

IBM plans to expand the model portfolio and add multi-model routing, but that is roadmap rather than a shipped feature. Pricing has not been published, and IBM routes buyers to a demo request.