IBM i remains one of the top enterprise platforms to deliver exceptional support, security, reliability, performance, and functionality, making it a trusted foundation for core business operations even today. However, when left unquestioned, its stability can gradually turn into stagnation.
As market expectations evolve, your IBM i system can slowly fall behind. The fault does not lie in the platform’s inefficiency, but in the delayed decision to modernize its capabilities. Leaving a well-running system untouched may feel like the safest option, but it quietly increases costs, leads to missed opportunities, and stalls business growth over time.
The Compounding Costs of Not Modernizing Your IBM i Now
Rather than appearing as a single line item on your balance sheet, the cost of postponing modernization initiatives builds gradually due to several factors. This often-invisible expense can have a measurable impact on both your IT environment and the long-term health of your business.
1. Skills Scarcity:
With skilled IBM i experts retiring each year and the next generation of IT professionals focusing on modern platforms, hiring, retaining, and training talent becomes increasingly difficult and costly. As demand continues to outpace supply, the expense of acquiring and retaining expertise to manage mission-critical systems can rise significantly over time.
2. Susceptible Security:
Despite being widely recognized for their robustness, IBM i environments may struggle to keep pace with evolving security expectations when surrounding processes and tools are not modernized. When it comes to major repositories of sensitive business and customer data like IBM i, security gaps can expose your enterprise to regulatory challenges, financial loss, declining trust, and brand damage.
3. Poor Progress:
Decades of accumulated technical debt, manual green-screen processes, and siloed data often persist in unmodernized IBM i environments. These factors slow operations, increase inefficiencies, and hinder productivity, reducing your organization’s ability to respond quickly to market opportunities.
4. Innovation Interruptions:
For older IBM i systems, limited support for AI enablement, modern user experiences, and seamless system integration can become a significant barrier to innovation. Without the ability to work effectively with emerging technologies, your organization may find it harder to compete and thrive in an increasingly digital-first marketplace.
Overlooked Opportunities and How Leaders Can Grasp Them with IBM i Modernization
When IBM i modernization is delayed, organizations fail to realize the platform’s full potential. Rather than replacing or removing IBM i systems end-to-end, modernization helps you unlock new capabilities around your trusted core while preserving what already works.
This incremental, phased approach helps you capture meaningful business outcomes without making large, upfront investments. Below are some areas, with real-world examples, where thoughtful modernization has created immediate and measurable impact.
1. Data-Driven Decisions:
Limitation: Despite managing critical data effectively, IBM i environments often provide delayed or fragmented insights when modern, real-time access is not enabled.
How modernization helps: Data capture tools can help upgrade IBM i’s capabilities to detect real-time data changes from Db2 databases and deliver them to modern platforms for replication, analytics, and application integration, without major system modifications. This enables faster, more confident decision-making and allows your business to respond proactively to change rather than reactively.
Example: A banking institution modernized its IBM i data ecosystem using a data capture tool, successfully streaming 1,000 records per second to power AI, advanced analytics, and fraud detection initiatives. Learn more.
2. Enhanced Customer Experiences:
Limitation: Traditional 5250 terminals make it difficult to deliver intuitive, digital-first experiences users now expect. As green screens are deeply embedded in core logic, replacing them outright is often risky and costly.
How modernization helps: Modern UX transformation solutions can convert 5250 terminal applications into web-enabled graphical interfaces without altering business logic. This allows customers and internal teams to interact with IBM i–based systems more easily and efficiently.
Example: A national consulting firm modernized its IBM i green-screen application into a web-based solution, gaining access to a broader talent pool, improving usability, and reducing infrastructure costs. Learn more.
3. Improved Interoperability:
Limitation: IBM i–based systems are often difficult to integrate with partners, vendors, and cloud platforms, which limits interoperability, reduces operational efficiency, and restricts digital ecosystem expansion.
How modernization helps: Low-code connectors enable IBM i environments to integrate with modern platforms by exposing business logic as REST APIs, calling IBM i programs from middleware, and exchanging messages through data queues, all without manual coding. This approach enables more connected and cohesive business operations.
Example: A multinational manufacturing company modernized its IBM i–based ERP integrations using an easy-to-implement connector, reducing partner onboarding time from months to weeks. Learn more.
4. Process Optimization:
Limitation: Manual workflows, such as repetitive data entry and screen navigation, continue to dominate many IBM i–based processes, consuming time, increasing effort, and slowing operations.
How modernization helps: Automation solutions can streamline these manual activities, improve accuracy, and increase overall productivity—without requiring extensive coding or system changes.
Example: A renowned apparel retailer modernized its IBM i data update processes through automation, achieving an 83.33% reduction in update time and enabling bi-weekly website releases with enhanced security. Learn more.
Parting Thoughts
IBM i remains a powerhouse for major business operations, and the enterprises that succeed are not the ones that replace it, but those that evolve it deliberately. Delaying the decision to upgrade your multigenerational system’s capabilities may feel acceptable in the short term, but over time it leads to long-term consequences. What could be addressed through small, manageable improvements today often becomes a larger, more urgent, and more expensive initiative later.
Rather than viewing modernization as an IT initiative, as a business leader, you must see it as a strategy for business continuity and competitiveness. While many assume IBM i modernization requires large-scale, risky transformations, you can take small, incremental steps to drive measurable value, extend the life of existing investments, and prepare your business for future growth. The most effective strategy is not waiting for change to become unavoidable, but taking thoughtful action now, on your own terms, at your own pace.
If you’re unsure where to start, our IBM Champions and Influencers can help. From assessing system health and identifying high-impact areas, to creating a modular roadmap aligned with your budget and timeline, our experts can help you define the right approach to kick off your IBM i modernization journey. Contact an IBM i expert today to get started.
