Thanks to Twitter and other major web development companies including IBM, Java while now 16 years old remains the best tool for web development, SOA, and other Internet based applications.  I'm providing a fascinating if rather geeky article on the relevance of Java to Twitter and how it solved huge problems of scalability and keeping Twitter's web site up and running!  See: Twitter and Java.

Java now provides support in the Java Virtual Machine for other languages beside Java.  It has been enhanced with its just-in-time compiler to completely eliminate the old issues of being an "interpreted" language.

While RPG is dying of old age, Java is getting face lifts and major surgery to keep it current and relevant.  Many of the largest web developers now choose Java over C++ or any other language.

If you are not using Java on your IBM i based platform and do not have a program in place to replace RPG with Java, you need get moving!

Fresche Legacy Acquires Databorough

Merger expands Fresche Legacy’s product portfolio with best-in-class solutions complemented by 20+ years of AS400/iSeries knowledge and expertise

Montreal, Canada and Weybridge, United Kingdom, September 5, 2013 – Fresche Legacy, a leading provider of legacy management solutions for IBM and HP platforms, announced today it has acquired 100 percent interest in Databorough, a UK-based world-leader in knowledge mining and reuse for the IBM i (AS400/iSeries) platform. The acquisition, which closed August 7th , 2013, solidifies Fresche Legacy’s brand and leadership position within the IBM marketplace, and broadens the Fresche Legacy product portfolio to include X-Analysis, X-Migrate & X2E industry-leading solutions enabling sophisticated environment analysis and code transformation from Synon, RPG and COBOL to Java or C#.

“This agreement unites two of the most powerful and knowledgeable players in the System i legacy modernization space,” says Andy Kulakowski, President and CEO, Fresche Legacy. “Databorough brings to Fresche Legacy more than 20+ years of AS400/iSeries experience, a highly pedigreed list of more than 200 enterprise customers, and deep technical knowledge. There is also tremendous brand synergy between the two companies. We both have a passion for the customer, and a belief in always going above and beyond to ensure our customer’s continued success. We are incredibly fortunate to welcome the Databorough team into our organization.”

“Databorough is a highly respected vendor in the IBM i marketplace and the company’s flagship product, X-Analysis, is absolutely best in class, providing enterprise IT organizations with robust capability to analyze and understand their legacy System i environments and extract continued business value from their legacy application investments,” says Garry Ciambella, Vice-President Fresche Legacy Research & Development. “We have spoken with countless X-Analysis customers, who consistently raved about Databorough’s technology, customer support, and the team’s technical know-how. Databorough’s solution complements and extends our product portfolio, allowing Fresche Legacy to provide our iSeries customers with the broadest and deepest solution for legacy modernization and migration available on the market today. Databorough customers equally benefit, gaining access to an extensive array of modernization solutions, end-to-end delivery services, world-class support, and a strong partner network.”

“We have been warmly welcomed into the Fresche Legacy family, and look forward to working with Andy and our Fresche Legacy colleagues to deliver legacy management and modernization solutions that are proven to provide real tangible business value to the System i marketplace,” says Mark Tregear, CEO and founder, Databorough. “As a part of the Fresche Legacy organization, we are able to provide our customers with many new product offerings representing the broadest array of legacy modernization solutions, as well as end-to-end service delivery offerings, and managed service capabilities. Fresche Legacy directly extends our North American market reach, and the company’s SCP-certified, 24X7 support centre provides our customers with global support coverage, which offers up an entirely new level of assurance and confidence for our products. We are incredibly excited about the possibilities this merger represents for our enterprise customers,” says Mark Tregear.

About Fresche Legacy 
As a leading expert in legacy management and modernization, Fresche Legacy helps enterprise organizations transform their business to improve financial performance, increase market competitiveness, remove risk and add business value. Our team of experts has successfully completed over a hundred transformation projects within the most complex enterprise environments, helping organizations future-proof their business by modernizing their applications, business processes, technologies, and infrastructure. Committed to 100 percent customer satisfaction, Fresche Legacy’s services and solutions span the complete legacy management spectrum from concept to maintenance, and include Discovery Services, Modernization Solutions, and Application Management Services & Transformation. For more information about our company, visit us on the web at www.freschelegacy.com 

About Databorough 
Our products reflect our approach and what we believe: listen to our customers, think hard and work hard. For 25 years we have been privileged to employ some of the top talents in the AS/400 world. We have spent that time inventing and refining the most comprehensive toolset on the planet for analyzing and reengineering RPG, COBOL and CA:2E applications. For more information visit www.databorough.com

Who are the IBM i Customers?

There is quite a myth out there that IBM i is the machine of the SMB market.  Well that is true in terms of IBM's definition of SMB which are companies with over 50 employees and annual sales well in excess of $30 million.

There are some well known large corporate accounts that support their franchises with turnkey packages that run on IBM i.  There are also huge companies with field offices that have a machine in every field office.  When you see quotes from vendors or partners about the number of small Power Systems IBM ships with IBM i it is very likely to a company that has a small IBM i based system in every store, warehouse, factory, car dealership, agent's office, etc.

The truth is that IBM has targeted mid-size companies for the AS/400.  Additionally the vast majority of these customers primary software is a solution purchased from an independent software vendor and not software developed in-house by the company's IT organization.

Many of these companies who have 1500 or more machines (one in every business location) are looking to lower cost alternatives including Intel based systems (Windows or Linux), variations of Unix (SunOS, HP-UX, BSD, or other variation) .  Some companies are looking at cloud based solutions.  The bottom line is that a huge part of the IBM i install base had been location based systems.  As companies migrate to lower cost solutions this will have a major negative impact on IBM and its revenue from IBM i on Power.

Future of IBM i?

Lots of heated activity on the AS/400 forums on Linked-in.  It seems to come down to the realists and to those whose livelihoods are locked into the platform.  Folks who sell products or services, or developers with no other path but AS/400 aka iSeries aka System aka IBM i on Power defend the platform regardless of facts or fiction.

Here is a link to Google search hits on various AS/400 aka IBM i related terminology.

Here is a link to jobs by various system names from major job search sites:

This one is my favorite.  It is the number of Google hits when restricting the search to the IBM.COM web site:

Here is one I just did searching on programming languages including RPG!  For the RPG programmers out there, read it and weep.  For managers, business owners, and executives with a large install base of RPG code, you better take some action to replace your RPG code!

Note that Java is the clear leader by all of the search firms and languages.  Microsoft's Visual Basic dwarf's RPG today!

So what do all these numbers mean?  It means that while IBM continues to support the IBM i operating system on its Power line of machines, it is not marketing or promoting the OS.  No one is selling IBM i, and the programming population of RPG developers (RPG runs only on IBM i) is diminishing.  On the linked-in forums you will see recruiters posting jobs for RPG folks and having tremendous difficulty filling the jobs.  The average age or RPG programmers is approximately 60!  These folks are retiring.

The bottom line is that sentiment measured by hits on Google is that the majority of folks dealing with computer systems have no interest in IBM i or have never heard of it!

Once again, I don't recommend pulling the plugs on you IBM i or OS/400 based machines, but taking positive action to protect yourself and free your company of the dependancies of RPG or IBM i aka OS/400.  Be prepared to move to another platform (be sure you can move), and the hold out for IBM to withdraw the OS.

Bend Over IBM i Users

Bend over!!! IBM is raising SWMA (Software Maintenance on IBM i)

Take a look at IBM's new pricing for Software Maintenance.http://www.itjungle.com/tfh/tfh022513-story01.html (see http://tinyurl.com/ceshxkx for tier level mapping) 

This applies across the board to all versions of the OS. Note that $7,000 per core on P30's and above is a lot of money for software that is not enhanced much or an OS that has had its development team cut drastically over the past several years.

IBM is sending a very clear message: use LINUX! Consider the following:

Why on earth would anyone pay over One Million per year in support for IBM i?  Even the small machines are outrageously priced!  If you do some rough manipulation, this will bring IBM about $30 Million per year.  Considering they have less than 100 people working on IBM i at a cost of under $10 Million that is one nice profit!  As long as you pay they will keep the OS alive!

Unfortunately, paying customers are dropping rapidly.

Hello guys if this isn't a wake up call I can't imagine what is?

Is IBM i still in the running?

The following article: http://tinyurl.com/aksp7hx which is really about Dell's going private puts some disturbing facts on the table for IBM i customers. 

In 2011 there were 9.5 million servers sold by Lenovo, HP, and Dell.  Note that IBM is not mentioned in a leadership position in terms of server volume. While IBM certainly is a contender in terms of dollar volumes for server sales, there unit sales are way behind others in terms of xSeries, Power systems, and zSeries.  

Keep in mind that iBM i is now just an operating system and its sales are fraction of the total Power System sales.  My guess based on my previous experience within IBM is that less than 30,000 systems sold by IBM have IBM i installed.  Quite frankly I suspect that number of machines sold in a given year is more like 10,000 (no facts to back that up), but 30,000 is the total population of machines with software maintenance.  Machines are replaced or upgraded traditionally in 2 to 3 year intervals. 

This means that IBM i sales are less than 3/10ths of 1 percent of the world's total server sales.  Even if those claiming an install base of 100,000 IBM i systems were correct (they are NOT) that is less than 1% of the total server market.  

Note that the article goes on to state that these units sold are only those from commercial vendors.  It goes on to state that companies like Google, Facebook Amazon or other giant system server consumers build their own machines using extremely inexpensive components manufactured in China.  

For IBM i to remain significant (unlikely IMHO) it needs substantial unit sales.  The economics just work against the system.  As great as it is and with all its many wonderful attributes, you have to ask how many powerful servers can you buy at $200 to $1500 for the $30,000 you would have to pay for an IBM i based Power system?  

How much has been "modernized?"

This was a question posted on a linked in forum recently.

"

How much has been "modernized?"

There's been a lot of talk for at least the past 20 years that systems would be "modernized." "We're going client-server & unplugging the mainframe." Still hasn't happened. Now c/s is legacy."

My assessment would be that very, very little has been modernized. We have the world leading analysis tool for the as/400 and of our thousands of users world-wide, less than 10% have done any real modernization. Most as/400 (and this is true of mainframe applications too) are large, complex beasts that are implemented for the most part using legacy languages and legacy architecture. Converting the language is not that big a problem, and automation tools have been around for decades to do this. but largely what they do is create legacy applications in modern languages. there are some real justifications for doing that on occasion, but not to reap the benefits of a modern application architecture, and development agility. 

To get a real modern application and the modern development benefits, you have to rewrite the legacy application. The problem with this (certainly on the as/400) is that the majority of legacy developers don't have the will, time, opportunity or capability to transition their own skills let alone a 10 million line mission critical application. Some have but not enough to create a pool of resource that would make any difference. 

Modern developers and often managers don't have the knowledge or experience of the business, and even if they did, the cost of rewriting manually is prohibitive and could take many, many years, and hugely risky. 

So the result is kicking the can down the road being the most prevalent attitude i see worldwide. Not that some management aren't interested in doing something, they just haven't had the means or method. 

To change this, automation is the only answer. Not automation by code conversion or even intelligent code conversion to produce neater legacy code in a modern language. Automation of reusable design recovery, complete transformation of the architecture and rewrite of the code. The drivers must be developers with a modern perspective, not legacy developers with modern skills, but a legacy perspective. so it should be a "harvest what we can from the legacy " rather than carefully preserving legacy in a modern language. The three aspects of automation that are required to effect this radical change are:

- Automation of complete system design recovery reusable designs/rules/models 
- Automated Transformation of architecture 
- Automated Generation of code 

The most productive part of automation is design recovery. It is also the part that has achieved the highest degree of automation(with our tools anyway). If functionally delivered in the correct way (graphical, interactive, drill down, models, flows, exports to UML/XML/DDL) it also solves another big inhibitor to modernization: putting the power of knowledge in the hands of new developers and management, and often legacy developers too (finally they can articulate what they have been doing for the last 25 years). 

Subsequent automation of transformation and code generation provides varying degrees of automation and cost benefits. But even modest levels of 50% can save 10’s of millions of dollars and years of risky effort. Projects done with our tooling have already delivered 80-95% automation of a manual rewrite. 

Most significantly we are seeing a release of pent-up frustration by companies who know the problem, know how it could be solved but couldn't find a technology that could deliver the solution with any real automation. 

I don’t believe that this will change the mentality of the many can kickers, who just want to see out their retirement in peace. It does mean that new and future developers/managers can harvest the value in their legacy systems, once the old guard has stepped down.