modernlift.

Talk to an expert

Or email us: sales@modernlift.ai
Series 16 · 9 Parts· 1h 53m

AS/400 & IBM i (RPG) Modernization

Modernizing the AS/400 — RPG, DB2 for i, and the 5250 green screen — without losing the enforced business rules. A skills-and-agility decision, since IBM i is actively supported.

Start reading · Part 1
Contents
  1. 01 What Is AS/400 (IBM i)? 13 min read The AS/400 — now IBM i on Power — runs the order, billing and inventory cores of thousands of mid-market firms in RPG, DB2 and 5250. What it is, and why modernizing it is a skills decision, not an end-of-life one.
  2. 02 AS/400 Talent Shortage & Risk 12 min read The RPG workforce is retiring and colleges don't teach it. Why the AS/400 skills cliff — not the platform's age — is the real risk, and how to capture what your developers know before they leave.
  3. 03 RPG Modernization Approaches 14 min read From fixed-format RPG II/III to free-format ILE RPG to a full move off the language — the real RPG modernization strategies, what each achieves, and how to avoid "RPG rewritten in Java".
  4. 04 RPG to Java Migration 13 min read Moving RPG off IBM i into Java or C# — how real transformation differs from literal conversion, why the enforced business rules are the hard part, and how parity validation keeps the cutover honest.
  5. 05 DB2 for i Migration 12 min read DB2 for i is the database built into IBM i, often defined in legacy DDS and accessed by record-level I/O. Migrating it means recovering the schema, preserving enforced integrity, and proving the data matches — not just copying rows.
  6. 06 5250 Green-Screen to Web UI Modernization 12 min read Replacing the AS/400 green screen with a modern web or mobile UI — what refacing and screen-scraping actually deliver, where they stop, and why the durable answer is exposing the logic as APIs.
  7. 07 AS/400 to Cloud Migration 13 min read The AS/400 can reach the cloud several ways, from running IBM i on cloud-hosted Power to re-architecting the workload off the platform. The targets, the trade-offs, and how to retire the platform incrementally rather than in one lift.
  8. 08 Should You Keep or Migrate AS/400? 12 min read A decision framework for the AS/400 — when to modernize, when to rehost, and when leaving a working system alone is the right call. Decided workload by workload on real pressures, not the platform's age.
  9. 09 AS/400 Modernization Cost 12 min read What drives the cost of modernizing an AS/400 — RPG entanglement, DB2 for i reconciliation, the integration perimeter — plus the TCO the platform bill hides and why the skills cliff makes the cost of delay literal.