AS/400-based independent software vendors (ISVs) are finding it increasingly difficult to sell their wares to new customers. Many companies will not accept a legacy platform such as the AS/400 when there are more modern environments, such as Windows and .NET, which utilize hardware with price-performance of a magnitude or better than the AS/400. In addition, utilizing a modern .NET environment translates to a more agile code-base, which enables the ISV to quickly adjust their products to new and evolving markets.

Many RPG programmers are reaching the end of their careers and new programmers are trained in new languages and wouldn't know the first thing about programming in AS/400 languages. Embracing new technology has never been more important and Microsoft and its partners are here to help ease the burden. In addition, ISVs that have their products based solely on AS/400 could possibly be left behind by their competition as they will only be addressing customers using that programming platform. They are ignoring a wide customer base that uses .NET, thereby missing out on a large potential market.

Being behind the times is never a good thing in business and it's often crucial to stay on top of new technologies. While, as a legacy AS/400 ISV, you have knowledge of the applications that are used in that environment, you'll never be able to take that knowledge into new markets if your only platform is the AS/400. If you can move your applications to Windows and modernize the interface, you have an inherent advantage over companies that can't. In addition, you don't have to leave behind your AS/400 customers, but you can address both platforms simultaneously with different versions of your applications. There are a multitude of ways to get you from that old programming technology to the more visual, flexible, and capable environment of .NET. Here, we'll look at options from ADC Austin, ASNA Software, PBSI, and Sykora-ML, all of which take different approaches to modernization, any one of which may be a good fit for your company.

ADC Austin
John Rhodes, principal architect for ADC Austin, sees a number of reasons to move away from RPG and into the world of .NET. "There are several advantages," he says. "There's the availability of people that have knowledge of .NET programming languages. It's easier to find people who work in .NET than people who work on the iSeries. Migrating to more modern hardware also has benefits. For the same hardware dollar, you can get much better performance from a Microsoft server environment than from an IBM server environment. We had a project where we saw a ten-to-one performance increase on .NET over iSeries. Last, but not least, is the benefit of having a modern graphical user interface. If you're on the iSeries, then you're programming in RPG and you're very limited as to what you can produce in terms of a UI."

ADC Austin's approach to helping clients migrate is a CA 2E to Plex migration through a partnership with Hawkbridge of Australia. The CA 2E enterprise application development tool has been a highly-successful product for the IBM System i platform. CA 2E, formerly known as AllFusion 2E and Synon, has been in use for more than 20 years—and thousands of companies have used 2E to develop mission-critical applications. 2E models, developed to handle enterprise applications such as insurance, financial services, and enterprise resource planning, often contain more than 5,000 database tables and 50,000 functions. Although 2E has been successful, some aspects of the development platform are starting to show signs of age. 2E generates RPG and COBOL code exclusively, and the user interface is limited to 5250 character-based displays. This limitation is becoming more and more significant for modern software development organizations. To help 2E-based organizations resolve these limitations, ADC Austin has developed a tool called ADC Migration Studio (ADCMS) that enables developers to port their 2E applications to the modern CA AllFusion Plex environment, which is compatible with .NET. Once the 2E model is in Plex, the company can then take advantage of the capabilities represented by Microsoft .NET or Java, while still generating and maintaining RPG-based 5250 applications for as long as it makes sense.

When asked about the size of companies using ADCMS to modernize their code, Rhodes cites surprising numbers. "We've worked with companies that range anywhere from 300 users to those who have twenty to thirty thousand users. I'd say certainly, the ISV or software vendor is the most interested because they would like to open up new markets for the product. They'd like to have an iSeries version and a .NET version and maybe a Java version as well. There are a number of reasons why migration can be necessary, and obviously, a modern UI is one important reason that people are looking at. They want to move from a character-based UI to a browser- or Windows-based UI because that's what their users are demanding."