IBM i Modernization: Definition, Benefits, Challenges, and More

IBM i modernization solves an urgent business dilemma. Outdated enterprise legacy systems and apps lack the agile, cloud-driven, and innovation-ready infrastructure needed to meet modern needs.

IBM i applications have been the backbone of mission-critical enterprise operations for decades. They’re still relied upon in major industries like finance, manufacturing, and healthcare, and they’re renowned for their long-standing resilience. 

However, like many legacy systems, IBM i applications have arguably become outdated, leading to significant limitations. And when these applications fail, it can throw your entire business operations into jeopardy. 

By modernizing IBM i applications, enterprises can develop a future-proof IT infrastructure that enhances business agility, scalability, cost-efficiency, and user experiences. OpenLegacy plays a pivotal role in this process, enabling seamless API integration and modernization without disrupting existing systems.

So, exactly what is IBM i modernization, and how can it benefit your business? Let’s discuss the advantages and challenges, and walk through the modernization approaches you can take to reach your goals.

What is IBM i application modernization?

IBM i application modernization—sometimes also referred to as AS400 modernization—is the strategic process of updating, improving, and adapting business legacy applications that run on IBM i platforms. 

This may include refactoring and rearchitecting the existing codebase, integrating applications into modern cloud platforms, and/or rebuilding new applications from scratch.

The ultimate goal of IBM application modernization is to align IBM i applications with modern digital technologies and, in turn, improve their ability to support evolving modern business needs and customer expectations. 

Despite the benefits, businesses often struggle with modernization due to the complexities of legacy integration. OpenLegacy simplifies this process by automating API generation, allowing businesses to expose and connect their IBM i systems with cloud-native and cloud-first applications seamlessly.

Statista reports that the top three reasons businesses choose to modernize legacy systems are to improve security, drive efficiency, and reduce cost: 

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But that’s only the tip of the iceberg. 

From facilitating modern technology integration to increasing agility, improving scalability, and enhancing user and customer experiences, the driving forces behind modernization are plentiful. 

Advantages of IBM i modernization

Many enterprises hesitate to upgrade their legacy systems due to concerns about cost, complexity, and potential disruptions. However, failing to modernize can limit competitiveness and expose businesses to security and compliance risks. Let’s explore some key benefits of IBM i modernization.

 Improved agility

Legacy applications are built on monolithic architectures that are difficult to modify and scale. Their intricate interdependencies make them resistant to even the smallest of changes, hindering innovation and compromising agility.  

Modernizing IBM i applications typically involves adopting microservices architecture—a collection of small, independent components.  

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This approach enhances business agility, allowing enterprises to quickly adapt to market changes, customer expectations, and technological advancements. OpenLegacy facilitates this transition by automating the exposure of IBM i functionalities as APIs, enabling seamless interaction with microservices and other modern applications.

Greater scalability

Traditional IBM i applications don’t support targeted scalability. If just one component experiences performance issues, businesses often need to scale the entire system, leading to inefficiencies and increased costs.

By modernizing with OpenLegacy’s API-driven approach, businesses can break down monolithic IBM i applications into smaller, scalable services that can be expanded independently. This ensures optimal resource utilization and cost savings.

More cost-efficiency

Maintaining legacy-only systems can skyrocket costs, especially in the long term. They require specialized hardware, outdated software licenses, and a shrinking talent pool of specialized skills.

Predominantly, legacy systems were written in RPG or COBOL, which are languages that have existed since the 1950s. Apps that were updated using these codebases often have minimal documentation, making them difficult for newer developers (many of whom have embraced newer, digital-first languages) to leverage without complications and risk. 

And, with many RPG and COBOL engineers reaching retirement age, this creates a significant shortage of the specialized expertise as well the organization’s tribal knowledge needed to maintain and modernize IBM i applications. 

All of this is to say that modernization lowers maintenance expenses. Leveraging microservices architecture, moving applications to cloud-based environments, and decommissioning outdated, underemployed legacy systems reduces operational costs and technical debt. 

Cloud solutions eliminate physical hardware and the costly maintenance and overhead expenses they accrue. Microservice architecture optimizes resource allocation for increased efficiency and enables you to identify and remove applications you don’t use. 

Plus, microservices support a wide range of programming languages—Java, Python, C++, and more—so, maintenance becomes much easier and cheaper.

By modernizing through OpenLegacy, businesses can reduce operational costs by eliminating redundant legacy components, shifting to cost-efficient cloud environments, and leveraging modern programming languages.

Enhanced security and compliance

Older IBM i applications are prone to security vulnerabilities and compliance risks. Without continuous updates, businesses risk data breaches and regulatory penalties.

This is particularly concerning for financial institutions and healthcare services. Not only are these industries two of the main users of legacy systems, but they both store incredibly sensitive data, making them a prime target for cyberattacks. 

In BlackBerry’s Global Threat Intelligence report, the company found that financial institutions were the most targeted industry at 34%, followed by healthcare services at 14%. That’s almost half of all targeted attacks worldwide:

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Modernization involves moving IBM applications to a secure cloud architecture where they can be automatically and continuously updated and integrated with the newest security features. 

For example, end-to-end encryption, granular access controls, and multi-factor authentication (MFA) can be implemented at scale to protect sensitive data at rest and in transit.

By modernizing systems, you also avoid regulatory compliance issues. Mandated regulations like SOC 2, GDPR, HIPAA, and PCI/DSS outline specific security rules, standards, and guidelines that businesses must follow. 

Limited security capabilities mean that legacy systems can violate these guidelines, leaving you at risk of legal challenges.

With built-in security, automations, and access to new, advanced security features, modernized applications keep your data safe and your business compliant.

Modernizing IBM i applications with OpenLegacy enables enterprises to integrate security best practices, such as end-to-end encryption, access controls, and real-time monitoring. Additionally, API-driven modernization allows businesses to meet stringent compliance requirements like GDPR, HIPAA, and PCI-DSS.

Enhanced user experience and productivity

Modern users have certain expectations when utilizing applications. Rather than the clunky, unresponsive, text-based user interfaces delivered by legacy systems, users can enjoy intuitive, accessible, and graphical experiences that boost efficiency and productivity. 

For example, application programming interfaces (APIs) can be used to seamlessly connect applications, leading to simplified workflows and heightened productivity. 

Modernization also empowers developers to create polyglot applications and optimize database access, improving code efficiency, speeding up response times, and ultimately boosting user productivity and satisfaction.

Common IBM i modernization challenges

There’s no denying that IBM modernization comes with complexities and challenges. That’s why careful planning and risk management are so crucial to modernization strategies. They enable businesses to identify, navigate, and mitigate potential risks, increasing the chances of success.

Let’s take a look at the three main challenges you may face when undertaking IBM i modernization and discuss how to overcome them:

Ensuring integration with modern technologies

Many IBM i applications are deeply embedded in legacy infrastructure, making integration with cloud platforms, web services, and modern applications a challenge.

OpenLegacy eliminates this issue by automating API creation and providing native connectivity to IBM i systems. This ensures smooth integration without requiring significant changes to existing applications.

Legacy technology skills gaps

With the talent pool of legacy system technology experts dwindling, finding IT professionals who are proficient in outdated programming languages like RPG and COBOL has become a challenge. 

This skills gap, combined with poor documentation, makes efforts to maintain and modernize legacy systems more costly, time-consuming, and risky.

In fact, Infosys discovered that for over 50% of companies, a lack of relevant skills and talent was the biggest deterrent to legacy application modernization: 

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OpenLegacy addresses the skills gap by providing a low-code/no-code platform that allows businesses to modernize IBM i applications without deep RPG or COBOL expertise. Developers can work with modern languages while OpenLegacy automatically extracts and converts legacy functionalities into modern APIs.

Modernizing user interface and experience

IBM i applications often have outdated, text-based interfaces that hinder productivity and user satisfaction. However, UI modernization can be complex and expensive.

OpenLegacy enables businesses to expose IBM i data and workflows via APIs, making it easier to integrate with modern, user-friendly web and mobile applications without extensive UI redevelopment.

How to approach IBM i modernization

In light of the challenges we explored above, you must take the right approach to IBM i modernization. For enterprises, particularly those with complex legacy system environments and sprawling and hidden interdependencies, failing to do so can result in disruption, budget overruns, and failure. 

So, let's summarize the five main modernization techniques you can use, followed by three different implementation approaches.

 IBM i modernization approaches

Depending on your unique requirements, goals, timeline, and budget, there are five main modernization approaches that you can take. These are rehosting, refactoring, replatforming, rearchitecting, and replacing:

1. Rehosting: This approach involves migrating legacy applications to a new, modern infrastructure—typically a virtual or cloud-based infrastructure. This is done without making changes to the existing code or features, which restricts agility.
2. Refactoring: Refactoring optimizes and restructures the existing code. While it doesn’t change the functionality of the code, it improves its maintainability and performance, boosting operational efficiency and reducing technical debt. 
3. Replatforming: Replatforming moves legacy applications to a new platform. It requires minimal code changes to improve performance, scalability, and security, but it doesn’t change the structure or functions of the code.
4. Rearchitecting: This approach undertakes a large-scale redesign of the application’s architecture with comprehensive code changes. 

While it’s capable of unlocking significant agility, scalability, functionality, and technology integration, it’s also the most complex of the approaches.

1. Replacing: Completely replacing existing legacy applications and building new applications in their place can accelerate modernization for businesses with particularly outdated or inefficient systems. 

That said, full replacements are expensive and resource-intensive, and you risk significant operational disruption.

IBM i application modernization implementation methods

Once you’ve decided on an approach, you need to decide how to implement your modernization strategy. 

There are three main ways of doing it: the big-bang approach, the phased approach, or the parallel approach. 

Once again, the approach you use will depend on your goals, needs, and budget.

1. The big-bang approach: Replaces your entire mainframe legacy system all at once. This strategy carries a high risk of budget overruns, disruptions, and failure.
2. The phased approach: Legacy system modernization is rolled out gradually and strategically, starting with the highest-priority applications. Migrations are tested and validated at each stage, significantly reducing risks. This approach is also combined with the parallel approach.
3. The parallel approach: The new system is implemented and runs alongside your legacy system, providing you with a safety net in case of errors. The so-called strangler pattern is an example of a parallel approach to modernization.

According to recent reports, only 5.9% of businesses choose the big-bang approach as it is a high-risk strategy. Phased and parallel approaches are less disruptive and intrusive, with fewer complexities and risks:

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That said, you still need the right IBM i modernization vendor in place to fuel your chosen modernization strategy while mitigating common IBM i modernization challenges.

OpenLegacy offers a tailored solution for every modernization strategy, whether enterprises choose to rehost, refactor, replatform, or rearchitect their applications.

With OpenLegacy’s automated API generation, businesses can:

• Expose IBM i functionalities as APIs without modifying core systems.
• Seamlessly integrate IBM i applications with cloud, web, and mobile applications.
• Reduce modernization timelines and costs through automated processes.
• Enhance security, scalability, and agility with a flexible API-driven architecture.

Built with native connectivity to all legacy systems, OpenLegacy builds a bridge between your outdated legacy IBM i systems and modern applications. 

And, unlike other solutions, it eliminates the need for unnecessary middleware or complicated legacy system modifications.

OpenLegacy’s language-agnostic automated API generation lets you automatically build and manage intuitive no-code, low-code, or full-code integrations via the modern language of your choice. 

This means that regardless of the modernization approach used, enterprises are able to create digital legacy services ten times faster with OpenLegacy, streamlining what may otherwise be a complex, time-consuming, and expensive process. 

You can see here how a global tire manufacturer achieved IBM i modernization with OpenLegacy. In just a few days—and without modifying its existing legacy system—the company created a modern tablet application that integrated seamlessly with its IBM i product catalog application. 

This successfully provided engineers with access to product catalog data from the factory floor (rather than just their desks), saving them hours a week in productivity.

OpenLegacy Hub can help you get the best out of IBM i modernization

IBM i application modernization is essential for businesses looking to stay competitive, improve efficiency, and enhance security. With OpenLegacy, enterprises can achieve seamless modernization without expensive and disruptive system overhauls.

By automating API creation and integrating IBM i systems with modern applications, OpenLegacy provides a scalable, cost-effective, and secure pathway to modernization.

Ready to modernize your IBM i applications? Request a demo today and future-proof your enterprise IT infrastructure.