Kyndryl Wants to Connect Your IBM i to Microsoft Azure
October 12, 2022 Alex Woodie
Kyndryl, the former IBM division known as Global Technology Services (GTS), last week unveiled an expanded partnership with Microsoft that will see it helping IBM i and System z customers integrate their applications and data with Microsoft Azure, specifically its low-code, no-code development platform called Power.
Kyndryl’s alliance with Microsoft will make it easier for companies to leverage the valuable data and business logic contained in their midrange and mainframe assets as they develop new applications in the Microsoft Power Platform, which is a low-code, no-code development environment.
“Basically, it provides a low-code, no-code environment in Azure for programmers,” said Richard Baird, who holds the title of VP, CTO & Engineering Lead, Core Enterprise and zCloud at Kyndryl. “We’ve brought i into that domain so that people can access their i environment from a Microsoft Power platform, in an easy, secure, and best-practices way.”
The work that Kyndryl consultants will do connecting Microsoft Power to IBM Power (no relation) and mainframe environments will now be done in a low-code, no-code manner, Baird said. There will likely be code written to create the data and/or application integration connections between Big Blue’s big iron platforms and the Microsoft Power Platform, whether the connections are done using ODBC/JDBC database drivers, ETL tools, REST-based Web services, or even change data capture (CDC) techniques.
“It can be through whichever adapters you choose to use,” Baird told IT Jungle. “We both know there are a variety of players out there that have adapters to get to i-based data and transactions. It could be Client Access connections, could be Db2 Connect, any of the third-party adapters that will get you into logical and physical files. You can open up the RPG and COBOL applications through Web services. Whichever approach you want to take.”
Once the Kyndryl consultants have established those integration points and ensured they’re fully secured and authenticated, such as through Microsoft Active Directory’s service, then the organization’s Microsoft Power Platform developers can start to use the rich customer and product data contained in the IBM i and System z servers to quickly design and build the sort of next-generation applications that organizations are looking to build in the cloud, Baird said. This is very important, as it allows IBM i clients to integrate their IBM i applications with the cloud in order to deliver a better experience for their clients/developers and will help them in resolving their developer’s skills gaps.
“There’s no new product,” the longtime IBM and Kyndryl executive said. “It’s not like we’ve replaced Db2 Connect, or Client access or anything like that. It’s more about how we bring these together in a first-class fusion, wrapped with known best-practices and automation from an operational and implementation standpoint, to tie it quickly and easily to the Azure platform.”
Long before Microsoft honored IBM by creating its own Power platform (and perhaps sowing a little brand confusion along the way), there has been a special relationship between the IBM Power platform and Microsoft Windows. Surveys have shown that users of IBM i and its predecessors were also big users of Windows servers and clients. While the relationship is mostly logical now, for a long time IBM enabled its midrange users to have their own isolated Windows server environment integrated directly into the midrange server’s PCI bus via the Integrated xSeries Servers and Integrated xSeries Adapter lines. The IBM i Access product today runs on a multitude of client environments (Mac OS and Linux, in addition to Windows), but for many years, Windows and DOS were the only games in town if you didn’t want to use dumb 5250 and 3270 terminals.
Today, there’s a contingent of IBM i customers that still have a special affinity for Windows development and runtime environments, and these customers are embracing Microsoft Azure for cloud computing. It’s a natural fit for Kyndryl to leverage their decades of experience in managing IBM i and mainframe environments in helping customers access these proprietary systems from Azure, Baird said.
“Kyndryl can bring in the skills to set up that connection, and then manage it, maintain it, etc., as a managed service,” he said. “Then from a programming standpoint, hey you’ve got access from a Microsoft Power Platform to build these applications to tie them back to i data, and data from other sources as well.”
Baird, who came up into the IBM midrange business in the 1980s under Malcolm Haines out of the IBM London Central branch, spent decades working in IBM on a variety of IBM i products, including the WebSphere Application Server and the IBM i compilers and development environments. In short, he knows a lot of people in the IBM midrange business. “And they’re not all in Rochester,” he joked.
Now in a technical leadership position with Kyndryl, Baird is helping the former IBM infrastructure business branch out in ways that it could never do under IBM. With more than 2,500 LPARs under management in its managed services business and 500 professionals globally with IBM i experience, Kyndryl is positioned well to help get IBM i customers what they need, even if it doesn’t come from IBM.
This deal with Microsoft is exactly the sort of partnership that company leaders had in mind when they spun Kyndryl out of IBM. Much of the technical innovation these days is occurring at the big Web giants like Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, and Google Cloud, and Kyndryl has the relationships and expertise to act as a bridge between the cloud and the IBM i and mainframe servers. After all, that is where the most valuable data is.
“At the end of the day, it’s data,” Baird said. “People are saying, I’ve got lots of data here. I know it’s used with my existing application. But I know there’s stuff in this data that I can use in other ways to help me drive my business. How do I quickly and easily get access to it and bring it together without also having to look at the application development challenge around my RPG programming skills, which are already tied up doing this? I’ve got a challenge in getting more RPG [skills]. Oh, I can now do it in a low-code, no-code environment? Okay. That gives me access to a huge citizen developer community that I can go after and start building out the stuff I need in a much quicker way maybe than I have before.”
RELATED STORIES
How Kyndryl’s IBM i Customer Base Benefits from the Big Blue Split
