IBM i Has a Future “If Kept Up To Date,”‘ IDC Says
March 22, 2023 Alex Woodie
The slow demise and death of IBM i has been greatly exaggerated, at least in the eyes of IDC. In a white paper for Rocket Software, an analyst for the storied firm says that IBM i does indeed have a future in customers’ digital strategies, provided it’s “kept up to date.” That’s good news for the community, but there’s still a lot of work to be done.
Application modernization has been an important topic for IBM i shops for decades, particularly when it comes to organizations that believe they’re still living in the early 1990s. While you technically can run 30-year-old RPG code on a 30-year-old operating system and 30-year-old hardware thanks to IBM’s unparalleled investment in backwards compatibility, that’s not exactly a recipe for success in the digital age.
Unfortunately, there are a number of IBM i shops who have not taken even the most basic steps forward into the 21st century. (It’s probably not even fair to call these “IBM i shops.” They’re more like “AS/400 shops,” perhaps even “S/38 shops.”) Should the actions (or non-actions) of these digital cavemen (and cavewomen) be allowed to define the IBM i in 2023?
The answer is no. Of course, they shouldn’t be allowed to define the IBM i of today. But the reluctance of a few individuals to upgrade their skills, tools, and technologies should not poorly reflect all the great people in the IBM i world who are working hard day in and day out to get their IBM i environment up-to-speed and keep in there for the betterment of their organization.
We all know how great the IBM i can be, but all too often, it’s perceived as an over-the-hill platform that should be unplugged and discontinued as soon as possible. There’s no denying that the IBM i platform has a rather a low perception by many of the IT pundits that influence public opinion in the IT world at large. Ditto for its big EBCDIC brother, the System z mainframe, which faces many of the same challenges and misperceptions as the IBM i server.
But give credit to IDC and its analyst Peter Rutten for giving the platform a fair shake in “How IBM i Can Play a Pivotal Role in Supporting a Digital First Strategy.” The March 2023 white paper, which was commissioned by Rocket Software, delivers a message that may be music to embattled CIO’s ears:
“IDC believes that IBM i, if kept up to date and included in an organization’s modernization initiatives, can play a pivotal role in supporting an organization’s digital-first strategy,” Rutten writes in the eight-pager.
It’s noteworthy that Rutten – who has the IBM-esque title of “Research Vice President, Research Vice President, Infrastructure Systems, Platforms and Technologies Group, Performance-Intensive Computing Solutions Global Research Lead” – doesn’t give the IBM i platform a get-out-of-jail-free card. Organizations must make the effort to include their “high-end enterprise-class” systems (such as IBM i) in their modernization endeavors, and that’s not always the case.
“Unfortunately, organizations with such high-end enterprise-class platforms quite often exclude these systems and their workloads and applications from their digital-first strategies,” he writes. “At best, they include a few applications or operations, while modernization of the rest of the platform is put on the back burner. In some instances, modernization is superficial; for example, merely replacing the green screen interface with a more modern user interface while leaving the rest of the platform untouched.”
Organizations often don’t modernize these high-end enterprise-class systems because they’re afraid of the cost, time, and complexity involved. It’s just too big of a lift, Rutten says, and so many organizations with these systems just don’t do it.
But that’s a mistake, he says. Since digital enablement is becoming a necessity, Rutten prescribes taking a different approach to modernization. Instead of the “big bang” endeavors, organizations with these high-end enterprise-class systems can start their modernizations journeys with smaller, such as a pledge to stay on the latest operating system release level, “or at least not falling more than one generation behind,” he writes.
By embedding a commitment to continuous improvement into the fabric of the IT team, modernization can become “a permanent aspect of their IT initiatives,” Rutten writes. IBM i shops should carve out some of their IT staff’s time to dedicate to modernization efforts, he says.
While that last request may be a tough one in an age when IBM i professionals are retiring in droves and replacements are proving hard to find, the good news is that IBM i’s core benefits–primarily its capability to power high-volume transaction processing with a low total cost of ownership – remain intact. This appears to be the primary reason that Rutten believes the platform can serve as a platform for building modern application.
“IBM i is sometimes referred to as a ‘legacy’ platform, and there is a perception that ‘legacy’ means RPG, COBOL, green screen, CL, and such,” he writes. “However, the IBM i platform is much more than that. It is object oriented, has built-in security, is highly optimized with an integrated database, and allows users to work with all modern technologies, such as Python, Node.js, Jenkins, and mobile, on the platform.”
While RPG and COBOL have the perception of being old, they can still be used in a modern manner, Rutten writes. But the capability to run open source languages like Python and PHP make IBM i attractive for developers with more mainstream skill. The availability of IBM i in the cloud; the IoT and edge capabilities available via Python apps; and the in-built nature of security on IBM i all play to its advantages.
There’s one mistake that IDC hopes IBM i don’t make in their modernization journeys: not taking a holistic view of everything on the box. All too often, Rutten writes, IBM i customers look at just one component or one application, and ignore everything else. That’s a path to a piecemeal modernization effort that lowers the odds of success in the long run, he writes. “[D]on’t modernize one part of the platform without quantitatively determining whether that part is indeed of the highest priority or without thinking through whether it will have a measurable impact on the totality of the platform’s service to the organization,” he writes.
At the end of the day, the IBM i naysayers who ditch the platform are likely making a mistake, while the true believers are well positioned to capitalize on their previous investments, provided they take a methodical and wholistic approach to modernization. “IDC believes that IBM i is a solid, modern, and future-proof platform for enterprise-class computing that organizations should invest in and integrate with their evolving digital-first IT landscape,” Rutten concludes.
You can download the IDC Spotlight paper here.
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imho part of this perceived obsolescence is to blame in part on IBM for lack of improvement on the 5250 protocol… a native GUI and full graphic terminal could have been the “trojan horse” to force laggards to adopt new machines, new tech, new OS releases, new programming methodologies … still keeping backward compatibility.