Visualizing the Business Apps Used In the IBM i Marketplace
April 10, 2024 Alex Woodie
IBM i shops run an incredibly diverse array of software, including open source programs, packaged applications, and homegrown software. When it comes to business applications, data from the last nine State of IBM i Marketplace Surveys from Fortra helps to tell the tale.
The IBM i platform was born to run applications. It’s right there in the original name, after all: Application System/400. Software vendors flocked to support the AS/400 following its launch in 1988, and while there has been some attrition over the years, there remains a strong core of vendors developing and supporting applications running on the platform.
The IBM i platform was designed to run the most critical applications that a business uses, often categorized as the enterprise resource planning, or ERP packages. If you’re a bank, that means running the core banking system that keeps track of customer deposits and expenditures. If you’re a distributor or a trucking company, it’s running the dispatch management system. If you’re a retailer, it’s running the merchandising system. If you’re a hospital, it means running the electronic healthcare system.
Fortra IBM i Marketplace Survey 2024
More than 70 percent of IBM i shops surveyed by Fortra for 2024 IBM i Marketplace survey run half or more of their “core business applications” on IBM i, and 43 percent say they run more than three-quarters of them on IBM i. Database-powered apps are king on IBM i. If you’re looking for a system to run file, print, email, or Web-serving workloads, then you’re in the wrong place. The IBM i server can also run these ancillary IT functions, but many IBM i shops punt these less-critical workloads over to less-capable Windows and Linux systems.
IBM i Chief Architect and CTO Steve Will said it’s not surprising that IBM i shops run a large majority of their most critical apps on the IBM i server.
“That makes perfect sense,” Will said during the 2024 IBM i Marketplace Results webinar on January 23, which you can watch here. “The client base who uses and loves IBM i – that’s what they use IBM i for, [as] that critical business platform. And that’s why we continue to invest to make sure that we are always the best platform for their critical business systems.”
As part of its Marketplace Surveys, Fortra queries participants about where their critical business applications come from. For the 2024 survey, homegrown software was dominant, with 70 percent of survey-takers indicating they develop their own business applications in-house. That is directly in-line with the homegrown figure for other years, which range from 64 percent to 76 percent.
Plotting the data from nine Marketplace Surveys from 2016 to 2024 gives an indication of which packaged applications are most popular, and how the usage of various ERP systems has changed over time. At the top of the heap are the Big Three – Infor, Oracle, and SAP, followed by a handful of vendors with smaller IBM i footprints.
Infor acquired more than a dozen different IBM i vendors over the years, including the three core ERP systems, BPCS, MAPICS, and System/21, as well as other industry-focused ERPs like M3, PRMS, Infinium, KBM, PRISM, Anneal, and A+ (among others). Infor’s market share, as reported in the Marketplace Surveys, has varied from a low of 10 percent in 2021 to a high of 26 percent in the 2016 survey. In 2024, it had an 11 percent share across the mix of ERP systems.
Oracle’s IBM i footprint is comprised of the two JD Edwards systems, World and EnterpriseOne, that it obtained in its 2004 acquisition of PeopleSoft (which had just acquired JD Edwards). The market share of the JD Edwards products, which Oracle is in the process of ending, ranged from a low of 8 percent in 2022 to a high of 16 percent in the 2020 report. For 2024, it came in at 10 percent, which is near its median for the time period.
SAP, the only member of the Big Three that didn’t develop its IBM i customer base through acquisition, has supported IBM i with R/3 and now Business Suite for more than 20 years. The German software giant, which is also in the process of sunsetting its IBM i products in favor of S/4 HANA running in the cloud, has seen steady usage on the IBM i. Its share suddenly spiked to 11 percent in 2021, only to plummet to 6 percent in 2022 (which probably is due more to the limits of Fortra’s self-selecting statistical sample than to actual market dynamics). In 2024, it had an 8 percent share.
There are two other vendors that have shown a sizable and growing installed base on IBM i, per data from the Marketplace Surveys. These include Manhattan Associates, which has seen its adoption rate for its renowned IBM i-based Warehouse Management System (formerly PkMS) grow from 3 percent in 2018 to 6 percent in 2024. The other is Fiserv, which has seen adoption of its core banking system for IBM i, called Signature, grow from 3 percent in 2015 to 5 percent in 2023 (it had a 4 percent share in 2024).
The remaining IBM i vendors show an adoption rate between 0 and 2 percent over the past nine years, including Jack Henry (banking), TMW (trucking), Euronet (banking), Medhost (healthcare), and McKesson (healthcare).
Clearly, there are (still) more than 10 software vendors developing software for IBM i (even if about one-third of these top vendors have plans to cease supporting IBM i at some point in the near-to-distant future). To that end, the “Other” category has been a catch-all where all sorts of vendors make their marks as write-in candidates.
Together with homegrown software, the “Other” category represents another pillar of strength for the IBM i vendor ecosystem, and routinely accounts for one-quarter of the applications mentioned by the IBM i Marketplace Survey participants.
There are dozens, if not hundreds, of vendors lumped into “Other,” and many of them are doing fine work for their customers in their specific industry or micro-industry. It’s a shame that “Other” doesn’t get more recognition, but it’s good to know they’re out there leveraging this unique business platform and providing customer value, just the same.
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Alex and Tim;
My big question for IBM is, why don’t all these application providers show up in their ISV Council meetings? They have another set of meetings at Common the Sunday before the PowerUP conference. Instead these meetings are filled primarily by tool vendors. Us tool vendors certainly love the attention by IBM but what about all the other vendors that you don’t list in this article on applications. Tim Rowe now owns this event.
Fiserv, Jack Henry, CU Answers, FIS Global, Smiley Technologies, Euronet, Midas (Temenos) just alone in Banking aren’t represented at these events. Every industry represented on the Marketplace survey has at least 3 to 5 vendors that service IBM i.
Obviously a pet peeve of Tom’s!
Cheers for the coverage on the Marketplace Survey. See you at PowerUp..
Tom Huntington
Executive Vice President of Technical Solutions, Fortra
Tom,
Great question. Maybe they don’t know about the ISV Council meetings? Or maybe a better answer is they’re now on cruise control and have slowed investments in IBM i development?
I know that the COMMON Expo has, for the past 25 years I’ve been doing this, been almost entirely occupied by tools vendors. The exceptions are Kronos, which used to be a regular. I still have a laser pen that Lawson was handing out to the press back in 2000 or so. There’s been a handful of others.
Maybe the ISVs are sending their developers to COMMON for the technical sessions, but the companies themselves don’t seem eager to raise their profiles at the Expo or the ISV Council. Lord knows I bug the ISVs quite a bit about their IBM i development plans. Most of my emails and calls go unanswered.
Thanks as always.
I worked at CU*Answers several years ago as a contractor. Based on what I saw while I was there, I doubt that they are aware of ISV Council meetings. I’m trying to remember whether they were even a COMMON member.