IBS to Port OS/400 Apps to Unix, Windows, and Linux

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

There are very few big application software developers left in the midrange market that can claim to being exclusively available on the iSeries platform and written in the RPG programming language, and the list will soon be a little shorter. Stockholm, Sweden-based International Business Systems, which is one of the largest software companies in the world, announced last week that it would create Java versions of its Application Soft Ware (ASW) suite of supply chain applications so it could expand into the Unix, Windows, and Linux markets.

However, don't think IBS is in any way abandoning the iSeries, OS/400, or RPG, because it most certainly is not. Mark Cockings, who is vice president of global software at IBS, says that the company is merely creating a Java version of the ASW suite, which was originally coded for the System/36 back in the dawn of time and was ported to the AS/400 back when that product was launched in the summer of 1988. Rather than do what sometime rival and also Swedish company Intentia International did with its MOVEX suite, which was port it from RPG to Java and then support the Java applications on OS/400, Windows, and Unix servers, IBS is going to keep coding its ASW suite in RPG on the iSeries and use tools developed in-house in conjunction with IBM specifically for ASW that will automatically port the RPG code to Java for non-iSeries platforms.

While iSeries shops will certainly be able to run the Java implementation of ASW, which is expected to be called ASW 6.0 and will be launched in September 2005 with general availability in the fourth quarter, Cockings expects that for cultural and performance reasons, iSeries shops will choose to deploy the RPG version of ASW 6.0. And customers who want to make a gradual move away from RPG and toward Java will be able to do so in a leisurely fashion, one module at a time if they so choose. But, because the code base will only be developed in RPG, IBS will only have to maintain its applications in one code base, not two (which is what hurt the former J.D. Edwards and the prior incarnation of System Software Associates a decade ago as they both created C versions of their applications to run on Unix and then Windows servers while trying to maintain RPG versions on the AS/400 platforms).

With Intentia making the move to Java in the late 1990s, you might ask yourself what took IBS so long to get around to creating a Java version of the ASW suite. It sure was not the lack of expertise. IBS was one of the early partners in IBM's "SanFrancisco" application frameworks project, which sought to create generic business logic frameworks that all ERP vendors could use. SanFrancisco was launched internally by IBM using the Smalltalk object-oriented programming language in 1993, but most of us know of it as a scheme for accelerating the use of Java for enterprise applications from a few years later. IBS was there, learning Java along with IBM. And, if IBS didn't move to Java, it was not because it was not ready for Java, but because Java was not yet mature. "We know the good stuff and the bad stuff about Java," says Cockings, "and we think Java is quite a bit more mature now than it was when people first started to try to use it for enterprise applications."

Right now, IBS is shipping ASW 5.50, which is the core code base on which the future ASW will be derived. IBS is working to deploy ASW 6.0 on a IBM's WebSphere middleware stack, which it will be able to do for both the RPG and Java versions. In exchange for picking WebSphere as its middleware, IBS has managed to get IBM to help create the ASW-specific code generating tool that converts ASW in RPG to ASW in Java. This tool includes optimizations that will keep Java performance from being too sluggish, but it looks like RPG will provide better performance. While the RPG version of ASW 6.0 is expected by the end of the year, it will take time to get the Java versions out the door. Cockings says that IBS will not just support the Java version of ASW 6.0 on any Java-capable platform, but has tuned versions specifically for Microsoft Windows, Novell SUSE Linux, and IBM AIX Unix. While Red Hat Linux is a possibility, as are Sun Microsystems Solaris and Hewlett-Packard's HP-UX Unixes, it is no coincidence that IBS is supporting the platforms that IBM is emphasizing on the i5. If some customers prefer Windows, Unix, or Linux, IBM's Software Group (which has former iSeries general manager Buell Duncan brokering this deal with IBS) certainly wants IBM's Windows, Unix, and Linux platforms--and particularly those supported on the iSeries--to benefit.

While the move to Java is about expanding IBS' potential market, it is equally about removing the whole issue of supported platforms from the discussion. As solely an iSeries-OS/400-RPG sale, IBS has had trouble pushing its software, regardless of the good features in that software, into mixed platform accounts or those with no experience with the iSeries before. Now, IBS can give the RPG and Java versions of ASW the same features, and help the customers to decide what platforms they want to deploy on give their own skills and existing boxes. "We want to remove the whole platform decision from the buying process and focus on the features of the ASW software," says Cockings. And because ASW has, like most modern ERP software suites, an n-tier architecture that breaks the client front end from the application server from the database server, customers will be able to choose a mix of database and application server platforms, so it is never a question of all one platform or another anyway.

Cockings says that the advent of the Java version of ASW will probably have minimal effects in 2005, but that it will start seeing some action in 2006 and through 2007. He says that the Java version will help in emerging markets where Java skills are more handy than RPG skills, such as in Asia (excepting Japan, which apparently has some RPGers), India, and Eastern Europe. These are the fastest-growing iSeries markets now, but RPG skills are scarce and therefore expensive. Having a Java version makes the ASW more palatable in these cases. Database skills are another issue, and that is why IBS needed to be able to have a solution that runs on databases other than DB2/400. Presumably, IBS will support IBM's DB2 variants for Unix, Windows, and Linux, but it is hard to imagine IBS not eventually supporting Oracle, SQL Server, and MySQL databases eventually.

IBS has over 5,000 customers worldwide, with the majority of them in Sweden and its Nordic neighbors, but also a sizable business in Western Europe in general, a growing business in the United States, and an expanding presence in Mexico, South America, Asia, and Australia. The company had just over 1,900 employees as 2004 ended, and sales of 2,367 million Swedish krona, which works out to about $331 million at current exchange rates to the U.S. dollar.