If It Ain’t Broke, Don’t Fix It
March 13, 2024 Alex Woodie
The information technology industry has a “newness” bias. It always has, and probably always will. But when it comes to the systems for processing business transactions, decision makers need to think carefully about what they’re doing, as ditching “legacy technology” for a shiny new one doesn’t always deliver the promised upgrade.
The cloud is currently the hot new thing in IT. Even though it’s not necessarily “new,” and not necessarily “a technology” (it is a collection of technologies and a platform and a business model…), business owners are under tremendous pressure to “get to the cloud” by whatever means necessary.
In some cases, that means ditching on-prem systems, which includes everything from Windows and Linux servers to the biggest IBM i and System Z installations, and using the cloud-based storage, processing, networking, and application resources offered in the cloud.
Clearly, it’s easier to move Windows and Linux workloads, since the cloud is largely based on X86 Intel processors. Viewing the cloud as “the platform” for X86-based workloads isn’t much of a jump, and the infrastructure as a service (IaaS) or platform as a service (PaaS) model makes some sense.
Where it makes less sense is in the proprietary IBM operating systems, IBM i and System Z, which continue to provide tremendous value to their users, even if they’re viewed as “old tech.”
An AWS data center.
There is a smattering of IBM business partners offering IBM i instances running in private clouds, featuring fast links into the public clouds run by AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. In this case, proximity to the cloud matters, since data has gravity. The cloud is where the data is accumulating, and that’s attracting cutting-edge AI and analytics offerings to the cloud. If you want to partake of these exciting AI and analytics offerings, you at least need to get your data in the cloud.
But when it comes to moving older transactional systems, like those commonly found running on IBM i and System Z, the public cloud just doesn’t have much to offer. While there is a justification to be made for moving data into clouds for the aforementioned AI and analytics capabilities, the math for actually running OLTP workloads in the public cloud doesn’t really add up for IBM i and System Z shops — at least not yet.
That doesn’t mean the IBM i community isn’t facing mandates to move to the cloud. SAP has set a deadline of 2027 for moving off on-prem versions of its ERP systems, including the ones running on IBM i, AIX, and Linux, and moving everything to S/4 HANA running in the cloud. The fact that the S/4 HANA business applications don’t yet offer the depth of features found on on-prem systems hasn’t slowed Walldorf down with its forced march to the cloud.
Even the American heartland hasn’t resisted the siren call of new tech. Jack Henry & Associates, the Monett, Missouri-based provider of banking software for IBM i and other platforms, last year reiterated its long-term plan to rewrite the monolithic RPG-based packages into modular micro-services using a mix of modern languages (Go, Scala, and C#) and databases (PostgreSQL, SQL Server, MongoDB, Google Cloud Spanner, and Kafka), all running atop Red Hat’s OpenShift flavor of Kubernetes. Such changes are likely decades away, however, and Jack Henry has promised to support IBM i “for the foreseeable future.”
ERP vendors notwithstanding, actual ERP customers seem loathe to make the move to the cloud. Consider the trucking industry, which is a longtime IBM i stronghold that has weathered the server wars over the decades. According to Chad Crotty, the senior director of sales for DDC FPO, most American trucking firms are happy to keep running IBM i.
“I speak with carriers all over North America,” Crotty told IT Jungle recently. “They don’t have any plans to move away from their AS/400 system. It’s really the backbone of their business in terms of using it as a database.”
DDC is an Evergreen, Colorado-based outsourcing company that has served the trucking business for many years. It’s become familiar with the IBM i platform as it provides manpower to process paperwork with less-than-truckload (LTL) operators. The company works with more than half of the LTL operators in the United States, and so its employees have become familiar with packages such as LTL/400. It handles about one-third of the nation’s bills of lading, according to Crotty.
When DDC was considering branching out to offer RPG programming resources to the LTL operators to provide a buffer against retiring staff, Crotty had conversations with many of these companies. As he dug into the IBM i’s position in business computing today, Crotty discovered that the trucking business wasn’t the only industry with close ties to IBM i.
“When we were doing our due diligence, we saw there’s a need for it,” he said. “Costco uses it still. Home Depot is still on it. Starbucks. These are huge companies that are using a system that’s what, 30-40 years old?”
In most cases, it just doesn’t make financial sense for the trucking companies to move away from the system that allowed them to grow and be successful over the years, Crotty said. (He didn’t say it, but the same can be said of just about any large IBM i shop, with a few exceptions).
“Most of the larger LTL carriers that we work with are all still largely on the AS/400 system,” Crotty said. “They built their entire business around it, and it would be very difficult to move away from it and adopt something else. It’s still reliable, it’s secure, so they’re like, why go to a different system? Why risk doing something else [when] we don’t know what’s going to happen if we change our whole system.”
That sort of pragmatism used to be common in the business world, but unfortunately, it seems to be getting rarer and rarer by the year. It’s sad to think that companies will move away from a platform that has served them so well over the years, based on little more than a glitzy marketing presentation for “the cloud.”
Every company’s situation is different, and some may find moving to the cloud gives them the level of service they need at a better price. But making the move without conducting a rigorous study and carefully planning out exactly how the migration will be executed is a recipe for disaster.
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The ironic thing is that ILE RPG is perfectly able to allow for “microservices” pattern.
Just think of the microservice as a PGM called dynamically. And it is live swappable too. With some auto-stubs you can even publish it on a JSON/HTTP carrier, accepting JSON from outside.
If one want to do a “monolith”, that’s up to the programmer.
Truck companies doesn’t need distribution, they need reliability and ease of change.
That Japanese industry (known for efficiency, quality and result) has a big chunk of IBMi installed based (relative to the population) speaks for itself.