To understand what the future of the AS/400 ( iSeries – IBM i ) system may be, we have to look at the past of this platform.
Over the past 25 years, the AS/400 has lost a large market share to PC and Unix platforms.
In particular, the loss of installed instances occurred within small companies (up to 20/30 users) in favor of PC networks and, for large companies, in favor of Unix systems with SAP software.
For small installations, the replacement was often linked to the advance of low-cost and high-functionality applications for vertical sectors (accountants, autoconcessionari, etc.) on the market.
For large installations, the replacement was often dictated by the Corporate the company was part of in order to consolidate the global information system in a single software (almost always SAP).
This has essentially halved the AS/400 systems fleet in Italy (currently around 15,000 systems, against 100/150 thousand in the world).
This flight from the platform, however, has slowed sharply in recent years. The factors dictating this decrease are linked, primarily, to the exhaustion of companies in the conditions mentioned above.
The companies that still use AS/400 have a strong legacy (that is, applications created or modified specifically for the user company) and/or a very practical approach to IT aspects, typical of the Italian family-owned small and mid-sized enterprise.
In these companies, when evaluating a change in management systems, pragmatism prevails, and the core values of the AS/400 system (robustness, insensitivity to viruses, very high MTBF, low thrust to the replacement of the platform, etc.) become a major element in the choice to continue with the existing platform.
This means that in the coming years, the AS/400 system will certainly remain an important player in the Italian IT landscape.
There are also specific factors of technological improvement of the platform that help to increase or maintain the number of installed instances, such as the methodical and constant improvement of the power of the hardware and the spread of new tools for the construction of graphical interfaces.
Last but not least, the presence of tools (database, saving, power on/off management, interactive and batch job management, spooler, etc.) which make it competitive, from the point of view of cost, and compact compared to the choice Unix or Server PC.