4th December 2014

Trends and directions on the IBM i: survey results

Trends and directions on the IBM i_ survey results

During our recent seminar held in conjunction with BCD Software and Quadrant Software (now Fresche Solutions) on IBM i development, modernisation and mobilisation we held a quick survey amongst the attendees.

And it provided some interesting results on the current landscape and future plans for development on the IBM i amongst a diverse range of organisations and industries.

Using web browsers has become the de facto interface for the vast majority of people – with people increasingly using a mobile device.

Tablet and smartphone share of web traffic increased from 22.8% to 37% in 2013 according to Intelligent Positioning, with mobile visits expected to exceed desktop visits by the end of the year.

Browser access is not yet the standard for IBM i users, but that is definitely the direction we are seeing amongst our clients.

In terms of how IBM i applications are being accessed, 70% of attendees are currently providing internal browser access for some users, with only 30% providing any external web access to their applications.

30% are, however, planning to provide users access to IBM i applications on mobile devices, but surprisingly only 10% currently do so. Half of the attendees are delivering 5250 green screen access via a browser.

The majority of attendees (70%) are either currently actively engaged in planning new web applications, or are planning to develop them in the near future. Only 10% are using their IBM i for business intelligence, but 30% are planning on doing so in the future.

When asked about their current developer skills, all the organisations attending had developers in-house who were familiar with SQL. Over half (60%) had web developers within their organisation, with 50% of web developers working on the IBM i. These figures are probably better than you would generally across the IBM i landscape, as the seminar was specifically aimed at the developer community.

Java and PHP were the most widely used language used amongst the attendees, with up to 40% using one or the other languages on their IBM i.

Zend ran an online survey of over 400 IBM i professionals has revealed that 70% are using PHP on the IBM i in their businesses, with 45% of those users having five or more PHP applications. It is also worth noting that 15% of attendees at this year’s ZendCon, the leading PHP conference held in California were IBM i developers!

Perhaps one of the most illuminating questions within the survey was which versions of the operating system attendees were currently running in their organisation. 10% were running V5R3 or earlier and 20% running V5R4. 50% of attendees were running version V6R1 and 40% V7R1. 10% were running the latest V7R2 version.

At least 30% felt that their IBM i was underutilised.

Only 20% of our attendees were running Linux machines, and no-one was running Linux on POWER.

Only 10% were running open source applications on their IBM i, despite this being a growing trend in the wider developer community and on the IBM i. PHP and Dbi are opening up the IBM i to easily install and run most open source applications – such as Content Management Systems (this and our other websites are running on the Drupal platform on our IBM i), Customer Relationship Management systems, eCommerce platforms, wikis and bug trackers.

If you were not able to attend the seminar itself, but are interested in viewing and downloading the various sessions, you can do so on Slideshare.

Posted by Paul on 4th December 2014.

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