Is the AS400 dead?

Dead or Alive?

Is the AS400 dead?  Now I know many of you purists are going to say that it's been dead since 2000 and now its called IBM i, part of the Power Systems family.  Yes, I know but try telling users that.  In my community, the new names just never caught on, it's always been an "AS400" so for the context of this article, I'm just going to refer to any version of the i as an AS400.  Up until recently, I would told you that interest seems to be declining but my company spent around $1MM every 3 or 4 years on AS400 upgrades so it wasn't dead.  I'm no longer with Clayton Homes and I'm doing consulting work now of different varieties and my eyes have really been opened to just how few people rely on the AS400 today.

In the last 4 months, I have talked to several customers, VAR's, and ISV's that want a quote an a new and used AS400.  So far, the drivers behind this interest have been HA/DR and software.  On the HA/DR front, my customer has a production 520 and an HA/DR 270.  They wanted a new (or used) 520 to replace the 270.  Because the cost was going to be around $40k, they stuck with what they had.  The other customers are only interested in an AS400 because of the time keeping systems they are purchasing.  Again, the cost of new was too prohibitive and they are going to the used market.

As a new consultant, I have reached out to A LOT of companies in east TN just to see if they had an AS400 installed.  These are companies that I knew at one point had one and many of these companies have decommissioned them.  I have gone to several Dell, HP, and other end-user events relating to performance, storage, IO, Big Data, Data Mining, and BPM and these vendors aren't even considering AS400 as competition and the p series rarely gets a mention.  Now I don't expect the competition to tout IBM products but at the same time, I've been at this for a long time and I have been to many of these events as an end user and in the past, AS400 was always a target for the competition to go after.

For several years, my IBM business partners as well as IBM reps have told me that they rarely, if ever, see any net-new AS400 installs.  Pretty much all of the sales here in east TN come from existing AS400 customers.  If IBM thinks that it's large AS400 customers don't see this trend then they are only kidding themselves.  Large companies with big budgets are looking very hard at ways to get off of AS400.  They are writing much of their new code in an "off-platform" language running on a distributed platform.  They are wisely implementing web-services calls to get to AS400 data and programs.  

Companies and vendors are calling this "modernization" but what is really happening is customers are positioning themselves to come off of AS/400.  By slowly moving apps to distributed platforms, when the time comes, these customers just have to change what/where their data source is pointing to.  Now I know that is over-simplifying the process of coming off an AS400 but in a nutshell, that is what is happening.

Is the AS400 dead?  I sure hope not.  It is a platform that I firmly believe in.  I have configured AS400's to do pretty much anything that can be done in the distributed environment including running web-services servers accessing data using SOAP.  And the AS400 does it faster and more reliably with fewer people to maintain.

Good luck IBM!!