Welcome to your first IBM i Update of 2025.
In this update, we look at Fortra’s 11th annual IBM i Marketplace Survey. We will also compare the trends to last year’s results.
Full details on the marketplace survey (rather than my sub-6 minute summary) can be found on Fortra’s website here.
You can watch the video below or read the full article underneath.
Watch the Video:
IBM i Marketplace Survey results
At the end of January, we saw the release of a 2025 IBM i Marketplace survey as compiled by FORTRA.
The survey asked over 250 IT professionals across multiple industries, the majority, 22% of which being administrators and IT managers, also at 22% with developers and directors both representing 16% of respondents.
So a pretty good spread.
The global respondents were pretty much the same as 2024 and were dominated by the USA.
In Europe, the same, too, but notice that the figure is a considerable drop from 2023, and the rest of the world remains at 15%.
Now, the astute amongst you will notice that the figure doesn’t add up to 100%, but I’m sure this has to do with large multinationals responding.
Amongst these companies with the survey, we found a strong commitment to the platform with those looking to increase their IBM i footprint at 20%.
This was up 8% from 2024.
Retaining the status quo is also up 2%, but a surprise downturn was with companies staying on IBM i, but migrating to cloud, down from 13% last year to 10% this.
But the positivity continues with 96% of respondents rightly thinking that IBM continues to be a good investment for their business. This was up by 2% compared to 2024.
The percentage of the core business applications running on the platform remained pretty much unchanged, with 43% of businesses enjoying 76 to 100% of their core applications running on the IBM i, with a further 28% having half to three quarters of companies with IBM at the heart of their business.
But what was the development code at the heart of business?
Well, RPG continues to be the mainstay. Indeed, it’s up a couple of % from last year.
This is followed by SQL, also up.
The modern web languages continue to eclipse COBOL with a continuing uptake in Python, plus good adoption of PHP and Node.js.
All very positive signs for IBM i modernisation.
Continuing with IBM i development, Apache retains its position as the top open-source development tool.
Unsurprisingly, this was the 8% growth in the use of GIT, and I would expect to see this trend continue in the coming years, too.
The other big gain in 2025 is perhaps in the ‘Others’ category, as new and exciting open-source tools are adopted to support modernisation and API development.
But of course, the highlight is always the top concerns for the IBM i enterprise.
For the ninth year running, cyber security continues to top the chart.
However, in 2025, cyber security is down 79% in 2024 to 77% in ’25. Still well up from the 2023 figure of 68%.
The next biggest concern knocking modernisation applications into third place is that of IBM i Skills. With the mainstay development language being RPG and the aging demographics of the RPG workforce, it’s no surprise that companies running on IBM i see this as a risk to business continuity.
Indeed, that’s why companies like Proximity exist to help mitigate risk and provide resource where it’s needed.
Modernisation is next, and as companies continue to maximise their investment in IBM i, concern for modernisation continues, hence rise in interest in languages such as PHP and Python.
Finally, high availability and disaster recovery had a steep fall from 73% to 49%.
Before we close, the key takeaways from the survey are that the IBM i is seen as a beacon of compliance by audit teams across the globe, with year-on-year growth in adoption of security solutions.
The survey also unveiled a growing interest in artificial intelligence and machine learning, with 30% of respondents raising this as a concern. This demonstrates a legitimate interest in these technologies to support everyday business processes.
In addition, Node, Python, and PHP remain popular for modernisation. The strong adoption of POWER 10 continues as it did last year with more than half of the companies that responded to the survey now having the latest and greatest compared to just a third in the previous year.
With the adoption of POWER 10, trust and satisfaction have reached an all-time high with 96% of respondents believing that IBM i gives them a better return on investment than other platforms. But, the very same people are saying that we just need the support to be able to maintain and develop the systems with 60% of respondents listing the IBM i skills as a top concern when planning their IT environment.
One final item, seeing that talking about surveys, to help me create the content that you want, your feedback would be extremely valuable.
You can help by completing just a really short survey. It’s only six questions and should just take you a couple of minutes. You can find the link for this somewhere below or scan the QR code on your screen.
Now, thank you very much for reading and watching the IBM i update.
I’ve been doing this blog for nearly two years now, and I hope to see my passion for creating this content to continue throughout 2025 and beyond.
(Find a full list of all my previous IBM i Updates here)
It’s for you, the IBM i community.
See you next time. Goodbye.
Andy
Check out our November/December IBM i Update for 2024 in which:
- There’s a trip to Wolverhampton for the last i-UG event of the year
- Douglas Gibbs talks about IBM i Code Assistant
- There’s rumours abound for POWER 11
- We celebrate the 65th birthday of COBOL.
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