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Your #IBMi update for February 2023, delivered by Andy Nicholson: A snapshot of news and views on what’s been happening in the IBM i community in the past four weeks as reported by Proximity.
The FORTRA IBM i Market Survey Preview
At the end of January we enjoyed a preview into the latest IBM i Market Survey, as compiled by FORTRA. The survey asked over 300 IT professionals across multiple industries – the majority (22%) being IT Managers but with 18% being of director or c-level too.
There was a good spread across the globe with the majority coming from the USA with 45%, Canada 2%, Europe with 34% and the rest of the world with the largest contributor being Latin America with 8%.
Of these companies, the survey found a strong commitment to the platform with nearly 50% staying on or adopting cloud / datacenter services. Indeed, it was wonderful to see that a further 20% increasing their footprint with IBM i while just over 10% planning to migrate their applications to a new platform.
Equally positive was the belief that 95% of respondents thought that IBM i continues to be a good investment for their business.
That was reflected with the percentage of the core business applications running on the platform with 41% of businesses enjoying 76 to 100% of their core applications running on IBM i with a further 31% having half to three quarters of companies with IBM i at the heart of their business.
Talking of the core applications at the heart of their business, 71% of these application were bespoke, in-house written solution. A distant second was with the numerous ‘other’ solutions – I’ve included McKesson, Jack Henry amongst others here, then Infor with their XA, System 21, M3 to name just a few. But it’s encouraging to see the continued confidence from businesses in developing and supporting their own core business applications with the benefits of scalability, control and ownership these bring.
Talking of development, the eight most popular languages for new developments see RPG continuing to be the mainstay followed by SQL. However, of more interest was to see the modern ‘web’ languages finally catch up and eclipse COBOL in the case of PHP.
Continuing with development, it was unsurprising to see that Apache retains its top position as the top open-source development tool with GIT and other frameworks coming in second and thirds places respectively.
For the seventh year running, Cybersecurity continues to top the chart as the main concern facing IBM i IT professionals. Unironically, Disaster recovery comes in at second place, but the big climber this year is with modernisation and perhaps with the eclipse of COBOL by PHP, perhaps this will be a running theme into 2023.
We look forward to seeing the report in full when FORTRA release it in the coming weeks.
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Posted by Rob on 14th February 2023.