2022 IBM i Marketplace Survey Archives

7.1 Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest

April 4, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

We think there is a lot of Power7, Power7+, and Power8 iron out there in the Power Systems running IBM i base, and we think there is a lot of IBM i 6.1 and IBM i 7.1 running on that iron. Our assertion is based on years of anecdotal evidence from the resellers and business partners we talk to, the customers we talk to, and a whole lot of spreadsheet witchcraft that we do based on survey data we see.

The point is not just to come up with this data and then drop it and run, but to face …
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The State Of The IBM Base 2022, Part Three: The Rusting Iron

March 28, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

In the past several months, we have been drilling into the results of the annual IBM i Marketplace Survey that HelpSystems does every fall and then reports on each January. We have been taking our time going through the results, and in a number of cases we have been doing our own spreadsheet magic on top of the raw data to provide what we think is better information that describes the current state of the IBM i base.

In our first story, we talked about the distribution of operating systems over time, spanning from the 2015 report to the …
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IBM i Salaries: Underpaid, Yet Highly Valued And Hard To Replace

March 7, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

It is a funny old world. In many cases, the applications that are running on the IBM i platforms of the world are trapped in a kind of time warp and so are the people who created and who maintain them. This is the only plausible explanation for the fact that salaries in the IBM i real world also seem to be in a time warp. And here we are riding up a huge wave of inflation, in something of a war footing thanks to COVID and the war in Ukraine, and it is not yet clear to any of …
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IBM i High Availability: A Met Need?

March 7, 2022 Alex Woodie

Data from the IBM i Marketplace Survey suggests an interesting phenomenon may be playing out when it comes to high availability and disaster recovery: As the usage of HA solutions goes up, the percentage of users expressing concerns about HA and DR goes down.

After peaking at 66 percent in HelpSystems IBM i Marketplace Survey for 2020, the percentage of IBM i users declaring high availability and disaster recovery (HA/DR) a concern has dropped each of the past two years. For the 2022 survey, which was released last month, only 59 percent of survey participants declared HA/DR to be a …
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The State Of The IBM i Base 2022, Part Two: Upgrade Plans

February 23, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

It is always good for the IBM i ecosystem when there are new machines on the horizon with new processors, a lot more performance, and much better bang for the buck. This is, in many ways, what has drive the System/3X, AS/400, and IBM i midrange business forward for more than four decades.

But you have to admit, the kind of excitement that we used to have in the early years of the AS/400, when performance needs often outstripped what Big Blue – and indeed, any system supplier – could afford, is not prevalent in the IBM i base today. …
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The State Of The IBM i Base 2022, Part One: The Operating System

February 14, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

You probably already figured this out, but we love data here at The Four Hundred, and we are always particularly keen on any data that helps us to understand the IBM i ecosystem better. And that is why we always look forward to the annual IBM i Marketplace Survey report that comes out in January each year from HelpSystems, and because we are thankful for the data they gather, we help push the survey every year and also participate in the webinar for it as well as a donation to the IBM i community.

IT Jungle co-editor Alex Woodie …
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Marketplace Study Shows How IBM i Language Use Evolves

February 9, 2022 Alex Woodie

It’s no secret that RPG dominates development on the IBM i platform. SQL and Control Language (CL) are also heavily used in the day-to-day operations of tens of thousands of IBM i shops. But what about other established languages, like Java and C++? What about newer open source languages, like PHP and Node.js? The recent HelpSystems Marketplace Study provides us a clue into language use.

HelpSystems published its first IBM i Marketplace Study back in January 2016, reflecting data collected in late 2015 from 834 IBM i professionals around the world. One of the questions it has consistently asked is …
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The Real IBM i Legacy Is The People

February 7, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

I will never for the life of me understand why the word “legacy” has such a bad connotation in the IT business when in all other aspects of life it means something good. We talk about legacy systems, usually systems of record, a lot here at The Four Hundred, because we are focused on the AS/400 platform and its successors over the past three and a half decades. But the applications – and the people who extend and support them – that run on modern IBM i iron and some vintage predecessor systems have a heritage that extends back …
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Listen In To The 8th Annual IBM i Marketplace Survey Webcast

January 26, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

It’s that time of the year again when HelpSystems reveals the results of its annual IBM i Marketplace Survey, which believe it or not has now been done eight years in a row. The survey provides a snapshot into the thinking of IBM i shops all over the world as they contemplate the strategic and tactical issues relating to their mission critical applications and the security, resilience, capacity, economics, and long-term viability of the IBM i platform that supports them.

Personally, I sincerely wish that HelpSystems had been doing this survey since the AS/400 was launched in 1988, because it …
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We Need You To Take The 2022 IBM i Marketplace Survey

October 11, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

It is hard to believe that it is actually 2021, and it is even harder to believe that we are in the final weeks of the 2022 IBM i Marketplace Survey. This is the eighth annual survey, which takes the pulse of the IBM i community and gives us some insight into what you all are up to.

As you well know, the community has to express its needs if it ever hopes to steer IBM’s behavior as well as that of big third-party hardware, software, and services providers. Believe it or not, Big Blue is more open about receiving …
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