Move to the Cloud?

Is it time to put your old trusted IBM i based war horse out to pasture and move to the cloud?  Most of the major traditional IBM i or OS/400 based software vendors have versions of their software that run on modern Linux or Windows platforms.  There are now vendors such as Logica in the UK who offer secure reliable cloud based platforms to host these applications and more importantly guide you through the migration from your IBM i based version of software that is probably a few releases back from the vendor's current software running on modern systems.

Are you running WebSphere applications?  Should you be?  Proprietary (and expensive) application servers like WebSphere have given way to Apache Tomcat.  You should be able to run your Java based apps on Tomcat with an improvement in productivity and a major reduction in cost.

I personally recommend moving your applications to a cloud based hosting company, engage professionals to help manage migration to your existing vendor or a new vendor's software.

It is sort of ironic that today many IBM i based companies who originally selected the AS/400 as a turnkey machine, complete with hardware and software to run their business now have a highly customized and extended set of applications that has grown their IT staff from zero to many.

What are you IT folks telling you?  That RPG will be here forever that IBM will keep the IBM i OS forever?  Are they telling you that you are sitting on a powder keg that can explode at anytime WHEN not IF IBM withdraws support for IBM i and the RPG programming language? 

I've been working with European companies who put the best interests of their companies first over their own careers.  They are with very few exceptions working to modernize and move to Linux or Windows based system and many are doing so in a combination of public and private clouds.

Clouds are pretty amazing.  You can buy additional capacity when you need it to handle peak period demand on your systems.  All reputable cloud vendors have automatic load balancing and replication to multiple physical data centers so that if there is a local outage your systems automatically switch to the remote site.  In fact if you are a geographically distributed organization you will most likely have applications running on systems in many locations.

There is no system maintenance!  It is the responsibility of the cloud vendor to keep both their hardware and software current with the latest vendor fixes and insure that they have stable reliable operating environment.  Translate that to read you do not need system support people.

The total cost of cloud based operations is a fraction of what you will pay in terms of hardware, software, and people to maintain and support your own Power Systems IBM i based environment.

There was a linkedin topic that reports that going rate for an IBM i system administrator is $90k per year plus in most parts of the United States.  So figure about $120k total cost.  That is a lot of money for any company, but especially smaller companies with small IBM i based machines!  This is a totally unnecessary expense in a cloud based environment.

Some cloud vendors can offer IBM i based systems so that you can move your systems to the cloud immediately and eliminate the costs associated with owning your own systems.  You can then work with the vendor or other vendor to begin migrating to a Linux or Windows based solution for long term strategic systems.

There is absolutely no reason to own your own hardware or operate your own data centers and infrastructure today!  You can save thousands to millions of dollars running your systems in a cloud.

Call or email me (see:  http://www.rjcancilla.com/ContactUs.html).

How do your employees feel about your AS/400?

My wife was shopping in a major well known jewelry store this past week.  The employees apologized profusely for the difficulties in looking up her account and resolving an issue.  The system was an old AS/400 (IBM i on Power) based system running.  It was using a 5250 based user interface and the employee and her manager were totally frustrated in the difficulties of performing what should have been a simple task of looking up a customer and reviewing recent sales to the customer!

I checked into a hotel that was using an IBM i based system.  We had a price quote that was not matching the information that the desk clerk had in his 5250 based system.  He asked his manager to help and they still couldn't find the information we had.  Since we had a printed confirmation they honored the rates that had been quoted, but they had to call corporate to get help entering the overrides into the system.

I began moving the company I was working at the time to the web via Java and WebSphere and subsequently WebSphere portal back in 1995 and implemented our first web based applications in January of 1996 when the web was opened for commercial use.  Many AS/400 customers have yet to move to the web.  They are still using green screen 5250 terminal based applications written in RPG.

I call these companies AS/400 companies and it really doesn't matter that they may be running the latest version of IBM i on IBM Power system computers.  The reality is they are stuck in 1987 or prior.

The real issue is customer and employee frustration or satisfaction.  In today's world of instant messaging, video conversations, movies about everything, and the ability for computers to connect to each other around the globe, to be stuck with a green screen menu based system with all of its training requirements and complexity is nuts.

Where is the benefit?  What is the cost of supporting these old systems?  What are you paying the RPG programmers that maintain these systems? 

Isn't it time to move into the 21st century?  Isn't it time for systems that work for you instead of holding you back? 

Visit us at www.rjcancilla.com and see how we can help.

Figures Don't Lie -- Look at these Job Statistics

If we look at Indeed.com and their job trends based on evaluation of job openings, we see the graph depicted below with the grim facts.

This graph is based on the number of open jobs for these languages.  If anyone believes that the iSeries and RPG programming has a future, this pretty tells the story.  If you are a business executive in an IBM i based shop you need to act now before you lose you current staff and cannot replace them.

Take a look at what we do and how we go about it at www.rjcancilla.com.  Maybe we can help. 

Goodbye to Sam Palmasano?

Well, finally Sam Palmisano is retiring as IBM CEO!  Good riddance!  This man following in his mentor's footsteps (Lou Gerstner) has done absolutely nothing to further IBM as an industry leader and has probably darn near destroyed any vestiges of industry leadership that IBM once may have had.

Under Sam's leadership, he has totally shifted the focus of IBM from hardware and software to consulting.  He has sold off the IBM Printing Division, the PC Division, was involved in eliminating the System i Division of the Systems and Technology Group!  He has been a huge advocate of IBM's ill defined Cloud venture!  His head is in the clouds, but IBM sure as heck can't figure it out.

How is that Amazon, Google, Oracle, Yahoo, Microsoft, and others have operational clouds and IBM is still talking about them? 

Take a close look at his replacement.  While it is interesting and very PC (politically correct) that he is being replaced by a woman, she (Virginia Rometty) is cut from the same cloth as good ole Sam.  She was responsible for integrating Coopers & Lybrand into IBM Global Services.  She was Sr VP Sales and Marketing most recently.  


If anyone has any doubt about the future of IBM i, this pretty much seals its death warrant and close the coffin.  Hell it may close the coffin on the IBM that we once new who helped commercial enterprises figure out and manage computer systems! 

i in the Sky? Cloud based IBM i?

Symetry has announced its "i in the Sky" cloud hosting program for SAP running on IBM i in a cloud based environment.  While this appears on the surface to be a good thing for many SAP on i customers by eliminating the cost of running your own hardware and the people to support it. 

I am quite sure that Symetry has excellent people and support staff and can offer a great service to its customers.  I also think that this instead of prolonging the life of IBM i will hasten its demise.  If a significant number of customers move to this cloud environment, they will significantly reduce the software maintenance fees paid to IBM that keeps IBM i alive.

If I am right, then what?  You are stuck on a dated system running in a cloud where you are the prisoner.  SAP offers cloud based hosting on Linux and Windows.  Why not go with a solution that offers you longevity and eliminates the risk of being a captive of a single vendor on a proprietary system.  You can move a Linux based system to anyone of well over 100 cloud hosting company, with a dozen of the largest providers in the business offering services. 

Buyer beware! 

IBM i Manifest and Maxava iFoundation

On March 31, 2011 Alan Campbell, CEO of Maxava a dedicated IBM i ISV announced formation of the Maxava iFoundation funded with $50,000 to be given as grants to non-profit organizations dedicated to promoting the IBM i operating system on Power Systems (click the link to see details). 

While the phrase "a fool and his money are soon parted" comes to mind, this is actually a very clever manuever to milk the last dollars of revenue out of a rapidly declining market.  You can see more at their web site and praise from the sheep being led to the slaughter at the Linked In group:  IBM i Manifest Americas Group.  Maxava is a New Zealand based company headquartered in New Zealand specializing in IBM i high availability.  They must be commended on some major marketing innovations like a monthly software subscription instead of the traditional upfront purchase with annual maintenance charges.

Maxava must be commended for not only surviving but flourishing in light of IBM's acquisition of Data Mirror Corporation in 2007 that opened the doors for IBM to integrate and sell its storage systems hardware to the IBM i based community.  IBM's acquisition virtually wiped out LakeView Technologies and Vision Solutions who were the leaders in IBM i high availability and data replication.

Maxava will probably recover their investment in the foundation with new customers who see Maxava as somewhat of a hero in trying to preseve the IBM i market.  I personally think it is a good move that will enable Maxava to retain slow to migrate (to modern technologies) companies for at least 10 years out. 

Have you followed the IBM i Manifest Americas group you will see a rather pathetic group of folks both vendors and IT folks trying to promote IBM i awareness and education in spite of the fact that IBM has totally withdrawn all marketing support for the product and reduced a major division of the company to a single product (i.e. an operating system) that runs on Power System machines which is dominated by Linux which is their strategic OS. 

I know I was stunned and shocked when IBM announced that it was shutting down its System i organization in 2007.  Keep in mind that IBM reduced IBM i development from over 5000 people to less than 100!  The lab in Rochester, Minnesota is a ghost town with much of the facility leased to other companies.  IBM still manufactures Power Systems machines at this location as they have manufactured the RS6000 for years.  You won't hear too many folks talking about IBM i in Rochester these days however.

It is laughable to think that a group of individuals can do what a major corporation will not do.  Once again I close by saying The IBM i is finished.  It will not be resurrected.  It is time to move or at least make sure your applications are platform neutral and can be moved to a new operating system when the time comes and it will!  Do it now while you have the time.

IBM's Strategic OS

Developing Operating Systems cost money!

OS/400 at its peak had about 5,000 developers working on it in Rochester, Minnesota.  Today there are about 100 left.  There were thousands of developers working on zOS and AIX.  All of these operating system have reached their peak and have maxed out in terms of both new sales and support revenues for IBM. 

On an industry scale Microsoft Windows is the dominate operating system with over 90% of the servers in the world running Windows.  Linux is second followed by all of the UNIX versions then all others including zOS and IBM i bring up the rear.  You cannot find IBM i or zOS in any public studies of OS usage any longer.  Nintendo and Sony rate higher than these OS's.

IBM is focused on LINUX.  Linux is rapidly replacing proprietary Unix operating systems like IBM's own AIX, Sun's Solaris, HP's HP-UX,  AT&T's BCD Unix, etc.  Linux is free, it is open source, and it runs on every single platform that IBM builds.  Application programs are totally portable, unlike Unix.

IBM xSeries (their Intel servers which also support Windows), Power Servers (which also supports AIX and IBM i), and the zSeries (which also supports zOS) all support Linux. 

IBM can make more money providing services and support for Linux than maintaining the expense of developing operating systems.  IBM will focus on virtualization technologies that allow them to maximize the utilization of a single machine and sell enormous SAN's (Storage Area Networks) with Terabytes of data storage spread across multiple locations. 

Note that IBM's WebSphere brand is also going by the wayside.  It is also being displaced by open source software.

IBM has found that providing services for existing open source software is much more profitable than developing and competing with open source.