i-Rays:
The Crystal Ball Webinar
On July 28, A team of IBM i experts, including Omnilogy’s Maciej Wielgus, sat down for a round table discussion about the future of IBM I and Power. Rather than focusing on the challenges that everybody knows about, the group focused on the massive opportunities that organizations that rely on this technology can benefit from in the coming years. They pulled out the crystal ball for a conversation – not a lecture – to talk about where Power is really headed, from the technology to the business case behind it. We invite you to read the transcript to see what was said about the future of the Power ecosystem.
Featured Speakers
Dawn May, Moderator and IBM i Consultant
Robert Swanson, Co-Founder and Partner, CNX Corporation
Amy Williams, CISSP, CISA, PCIP, Power by Fortra
Maciej Wielgus, IT Architect, Omnilogy/i-Rays
Todd Brooks, CEO, FalconStor Software
Dawn May (Moderator):
Welcome to today's webinar. We're going to talk about the future of IBM i, starting with introductions of our esteemed guests.
Todd Brooks:
I’m Todd Brooks, CEO of FalconStor Software. I joined the company almost nine years ago.
Rob Swanson:
Rob Swanson, one of the founders and partners at CNX Corporation in Chicago. I cut my teeth on this platform in the early nineties during the days of the big beige AS/400 towers. Our main product is Valence, and we do modernization tools and services for IBM i and their predecessor clients.
Amy Williams:
Amy Williams with Fortra. I've been on IBM i since about 1994 and fell in love with it. It just comes easy, and it just runs. With Fortra, I'm able to help with automation of the workloads and things I used to do manually as an administrator, as well as security, which is super important these days.
Maciej Wielgus:
I'm located in Poland, working as an IT architect for Omnilogy. I've been involved with IBM i since the early nineties, starting with CISC Systems.
Dawn May:
I've worked at IBM Rochester, the development lab from AS/400 release one through 2018. I do consulting work, and I love collaborating with the clients and businesses that run IBM i.
Dawn May (Moderator)
What do you see as the greatest opportunities for IBM i and power over the next five years?
Todd Brooks (FalconStor)
Most of the IBM i community runs mission critical applications on this platform. What’s really impressed me in the last several years is the investment in hybrid cloud solutions vendors. Whether for test dev, data protection, cyber resiliency, or security, providing these offerings to the IBM i community has been really interesting. Vendors are recognizing the power (pardon the pun) of the IBM power, and that it’s not going anywhere.
Rob Swanson (CNX)
We talk to many users who view IT as a bottleneck to getting their jobs done, which oftentimes results in creating little oases of spreadsheets that are ancillary to the system. The biggest opportunity is in the evolution of the platform, which has embraced all the latest tech that's so hot in the market, everything from open-source programming to AI tooling. We have a great opportunity to reverse that notion of IT being an impediment and make it a contributor to efficiencies that really make the platform shine. In the coming years, we'll see explosive development that changes the perception of the platform. IBM i is doing all these whiz-bang things that many users might not even know it’s capable of.
Dawn May:
IBM i is in the background running businesses day in and day out. Much of the world's economy runs through the system every day. Share your thoughts on what industries are very strong with IBM i and why.
Amy Williams (Fortra):
I got started in warehousing, which is all about uptime. I moved into gaming, and now I work with logistics companies running trucks all over our country and Europe. We've also got healthcare and banks of all sizes. Any industry you know of probably has a core of IBM i for the uptime. This is not a machine that needs constant care and feeding, which is to its benefit most of the time but its detriment sometimes. You get it set up, and it runs. Uptime has been the common thread at all the industries I've worked for and will always bring IBM i back into the forefront. When we're running AI workloads, or integrating with all these other systems, stability is critical to that connectivity.
Dawn May:
Maciej Wielgus, give us the European perspective on which industries are strong with IBM i?
Maciej Wielgus:
The technical profile is very common and great for midsized-plus customers with a strong emphasis on things like reliability, transactional throughput, and application stability. The financial services sector, manufacturing, logistics, insurance, and health care, for example. Europe is not homogeneous. The DACH countries of Deutschland (Germany), Austria, and Switzerland see an overrepresentation of manufacturing installations and family businesses with a very traditional approach to systems. They’re thinking generationally, not quarter to quarter.
In the UK and France, you see standard FSS public insurance and healthcare institutions, which are nationwide. Meanwhile, Eastern Europe has a heavy emphasis on the financial services sector.
Todd Brooks:
We see customers across the entire spectrum. If I had to pick the top three in our customer base, it’s banking, insurance, and then manufacturing, with regional differences, as Maciej Wielgus said. It's also been interesting and a little surprising to me how prevalent IBM i is in Southeast Asia and Japan. Every bank in Southeast Asia seems to run on IBM i, and all the manufacturers in Japan. Uptime is an undersold and undervalued thing. The conventional wisdom in the IBM i world is the uptime is 99.99% reliable. But we've grown to take that for granted. For people forced to use other systems, downtime is a frequent problem, and that advantage is something we should be trumpeting.
Dawn May:
We've had great careers and enjoyed working on IBM i, but what should companies do to get younger professionals up to speed on the platform?
Amy Williams:
Our last two or three COMMON events have been full of students and programs working with IBM i and colleges introducing the technology to them. Not just developers, but system admins and security professionals. They get excited when they realize there's not just one thing they can do on IBM i. Rob mentioned open source, and you can write any coding language to run things on IBM i. You don't have to spin up a new server for every new purpose. COMMON has programs like N2i, introducing new people. We've had success with our internship programs, where people get familiar with the platform and start falling in love with it.
Maciej Wielgus:
It’s hard if not impossible to switch to another platform, but that’s a compliment because there’s just no superior alternative. We should start selling that scarcity as an opportunity for young professionals. IBM i should not be perceived as a career dead-end where new professionals are afraid of being stuck, because that’s definitely not true. Just like the B-52 is undergoing modernization and getting a second lease on life because it’s still a great aircraft, IBM i is still young and running big money. This is a sign of trust. You have to match newcomers with professionals who are willing to be shadowed and introduce people into the tribal knowledge around the platform, developed over decades. Passing the torch is hard because lots of this knowledge is unwritten.
But to change the perception of young people, you must influence their peers, and make it clear there’s money in this platform. Companies have to show they understand their future is linked with IBM i, and they should invest in finding new people. If they only invest halfway, they get the worst of both worlds, to few people who are uncommitted. Old structures should be flexible enough to accommodate new professionals and leaders have to believe in the future and make investments that are scaled accordingly.
Dawn May:
Let's talk about how AI is affecting IBM i. How do you think AI will affect people as well as technology for those of us who work on this platform?
Todd Brooks:
It’s changing so fast, Holy Cow! In the Fortra annual survey, I think the number one response to the question about what’s top-of-mind was human resources. Folks might be retiring, and young people may not be filling those spots as quickly. AI offers an opportunity to fill that gap. Whether in researching issues you might be having as an administrator or solving any problem, whatever it might be. That's exciting. So, what are some great opportunities? Vendors are putting more money into AI offerings that will be fantastic for IBM i customers.
Amy Williams:
I think AI will open up the platform much faster for newcomers and fill that skills gap. IBM i is positioned in a neat way with all the data we have on these systems. AI tools are hungry for data. If you're migrating your system every three years, you're leaving all that data behind and only taking what you can with you, but IBM i shops aren't doing that. They have that information for however long they've been in business. That’s a huge advantage for those IBM i implementing AI the right way to enhance their processes and reach out to customers.
Dawn May:
What are the biggest advantages that IBM i offers users?
Maciej Wielgus:
I think the main advantage is integration. It’s the foundation of every other advantage, this vertically integrated system with co-designed stack, end-to-end appliance - like model. Everything we’re discussing, like reliability, security, performance, cost, and automation, has its roots in integration. For online transaction processing, IBM i is a killing machine. There’s no comparable system in the world.
Amy Williams:
Integration is definitely something I lean on. People don’t realize how easy it is to connect into IBM i. Over my last fifteen years doing security, I’ve seen IBM build a lot of tools into the OS and the system to lock it down and harden your system without needing third-party tools. If you want, you can use third-party software for IBM i, or write your own. But peers of mine on other platforms, to do anything, from reporting, security, logging, oversight, or locking things down, they have to buy other tools just to expand the basic functionality. With IBM i, it’s all built into the system core. Not only that, but IBM i runs right out of the box. And the IBM i community is unique and special in terms of passion for our platform.
Dawn May:
What can we do as a community to showcase the value of IBM i and Power systems?
Rob Swanson:
The platform is one of the best-kept secrets in the business, and that's good and bad. Sometimes we’ve tried to do case studies for successful modernization customers who resist because they don’t want that secret out because IBM i is their competitive edge, doing these amazing things to make them hyper-productive and super-reliable. Attendance at COMMON is going up, which offers a great environment for networking with other IBM i users. We need to grow the knowledge of what this platform brings there and at other events, because it’s a tremendous system.
First-timers that are showing up are amazed at the integration. Students are accustomed to having a dedicated server for every little function. But they can get the full stack in one system with IBM i and it blows their minds. If you unleash them to exploit their skills and backgrounds, their job satisfaction will skyrocket, and they’ll become great contributors. We really need to promote that with mentorship, as Maciej said. These students grew up in this AI world we're just now digging into, and they know how to magnify their skills. Their enthusiasm for IBM i is just amazing. Their eyes explode.
Amy Williams:
Mentorship is where we can build that feedback loop. Give students somebody they can reach out to and rely on for those answers. When I started out in IBM i as a business analyst, conversations with other people working on the platform were crucial. Whether it was the operators monitoring all the jobs and doing all the backups, or the programmers teaching us all the things they were doing on the system, they encouraged and convinced me this was the place I wanted to be. We should have more of those conversations so newcomers don't feel like they're on their own. I'd like to see companies doing more sponsorships and bringing more young people in to see if IBM i is a fit for them.
Dawn May:
How can we better reach people not engaged in IBM i-adjacent communities? How can we open the doors so more people can become engaged and recognize the tremendous career opportunities out there?
Todd Brooks:
One thing IBM did many years ago that was really smart was developing the IBM Champion program. Amy, you're a multiyear IBM Champion. I'm a first timer, awarded the honor this year. There are 1300 or so IBM Champions around the world. I would encourage anybody in the community to become an IBM Champion. It gives you an opportunity to talk about what's great about the platform, to engage and to network. If you've been sitting on the sidelines, it'll be great for your career.
Rob Swanson:
Managers need to budget for sending students and new employees to conferences because there's no greater wealth of IBM i knowledge. Some of the best resources are the folks from the IBM i teams that go to these events. They're amazingly approachable and offer insights into the platform that you may have never imagined. Send your employees to these conferences and they’ll return with brains full of new ideas.
We also need to trumpet all the marvelous things IBM i's doing in the wild and how key this platform is. We have such an edge over the alternatives out there. If a new CIO wants to replace IBM i, the consequences can often lead to disaster, including loss of customers when users find they can’t do some of the simple things their IBM i systems let them do before. New companies are coming into the IBM i ecosystem because of these advantages, and it's really exciting. Now we have AI magnifying your productivity as a developer by severalfold. The things we can produce in a few days used to take weeks or months of tedious work. We can do YouTube videos to show off what we've got now which was unfathomable even two years ago. This is the excitement we should glom onto to make the platform shine.
Dawn May:
We’re really excited for the growing awareness of IBM i. Historically, Navigate's been a small conference, but will soon be part of IBM's tech exchange event, drawing maybe six thousand people. That's a really good example of the work being done to build excitement for IBM i.
Todd Brooks:
We can work with local communities and educators, have conversations with high school students doing career programs to let them know what options are out there. Because you're not hearing about IBM i in school, and they're not finding out about it until after they've gone down another path.
Dawn May:
Let’s get through some of the community questions. How can we get our professionals using IBM i to stop calling it the AS/400?
Todd Brooks:
I just always say it's IBM i and don’t ever use AS/400. But it’s more challenging in Southeast Asia, where you won't see the phrase IBM i anywhere. We went to a conference in Kuala Lumpur with one of our big partners there. They made moon pies for Chinese New Year and stamped AS/400 on them. The legacy is strong.
You have more opportunities with new people coming in, to change their vocabulary. You have no idea the amount of changes IBM has made to enhance the platform, not just at the hardware level, but at the OS level, all the time. It’s nothing like the AS/400 I started on. It can do so many more things and is so much more powerful today. The message needs to get out there that this is not the AS/400 anymore. It may have started there, but IBM i is the platform it is today because it integrates more easily and across more systems. We've introduced pace and all these advantages to expose the hardware to whatever functionality clients need. So, it's really all about reframing the product.
Maciej Wielgus:
The term AS/400 is synonymous with what we knew back in the 1990s, which was green screens. We need to start showing what the platform can really do now and refer to that old stuff as AS/400. Those green screen days represent reliability and functionality and gave us a strong legacy to carry forward. IBM made the system infinitely backward compatible, which is kind of a double-edged sword. You can also do all this new stuff, but we have to raise awareness of that. It’s a challenge but a good challenge.
Dawn May:
If you have management without a background in IBM i who want to use something else, how can those of us working at a technical or low-level managerial level reach upwards to help educate them so they don't walk away from this platform? How can we communicate the IBM i’s strengths within our organizations?
Todd:
Anyone in the C-suite is trying to drive the company to create value. If you're within the IBM i team, it's incumbent upon you to demonstrate why this platform is valuable to the enterprise. What is it doing? There are concrete value statements you can prepare to prove why IBM i is critical for the company. Speak in dollar terms. It's important for technical teams to sell their executives from a value perspective. Clearly, a lot of teams have done this. That's why banks, insurance companies, and manufacturers run mission-critical systems on IBM i. Someone is showing the value.
Dawn May:
How can we raise awareness of big companies like Costco and FedEx who use IBM i, and spread the word about new tools like IBM Bob AI and other LLM models?
Rob Swanson:
Bob is just one tool, being fine-tuned to really be IBM-centric. But the other ones like Claude and Opus are out there, and people should try them out, dabble in them. You'd be amazed as you take the most monolithic RPG3 spaghetti code and have an AI tool tell you in real terms how to read and understand what the program is doing. That can be a first step in your modernization path, and there are surprisingly a lot of companies that still think Google is the modern way to find information. We recently had a customer with a misbehaving RPG program. We pasted the entire code into an AI, described the problem, and it actually pinpointed the exact line of code where the problem was occurring, in minutes. It would’ve easily taken us hours to comb through the code and find the bug ourselves. That level of evolution is just mind blowing, but a lot of people still haven't even put their toe in the water. So, my statement would be: just try it. Try any of them, whether Bob or what have you.
Dawn May:
So, what is Bob and what can it do? Maybe we should take a step back and answer that.
Amy Williams:
Bob is IBM's answer to the AI challenge, to be an integrated, resource-aware intelligence that magnifies your own experience and abilities. It's the ultimate power tool. Any company that isn't at least exploring these things is really missing the chance to evolve their systems and get things done. Bob is just a wonderful resource people should be embracing. But as Rob said, it's just one tool. I'm no expert in it, but from the outside looking in, it's a tool that can absolutely help developers, whether they're modernizing, troubleshooting, or looking for code comments. Bob can help with things developers do every day, and helps do them more quickly, more deeply. I think developers see AI and think, is this going to eliminate my job? I would argue just the opposite. It will only eliminate those that don't adopt it. If you don’t dabble, you won’t learn. The developers who dive in will thrive in the future.
Todd Brooks:
I don't see it as a replacement for developers. It's a hyper-productive turbocharge for developers. If you understand the system and the data, you can direct the AI to take on tasks like writing a subroutine that does x y z. You can look at that work and realize, “no, that's not quite what I meant,” and further prompt your way through it. We're seeing in-house, with our own development, just what we’re able to achieve with such an insane increase in productivity. Every business could stand to benefit from it, if used properly. Obviously, don't give it a random, vague prompt. AI won’t read your mind and give you a silver bullet. You still have to put your mind to work. But AI can really extend your resources.
