For decades, the IBM i platform has been a cornerstone of enterprise IT operations, renowned for its stability, security, and reliability. Many organizations have built their core business processes on this dependable workhorse, and for good reason. It has faithfully powered critical applications, managed complex data, and kept businesses running smoothly.
However, the technology landscape is shifting rapidly, and a concerning trend has emerged: while most organizations recognize the need for modernization, many continue to delay taking action.
Yet businesses now face increasing pressure to adapt, driven by emerging technologies, fierce competition, and evolving customer expectations. IBM i modernization—the process of transforming your existing applications and infrastructure to meet today’s demands for operational flexibility, system integration, and technological innovation—isn’t just a trend. It’s a path to survival and growth.
The question every IBM i organization must answer isn’t if you should modernize, but when.
The stark reality is that sticking with the status quo has shifted from being a safe strategy to presenting significant risks. Every day you delay, the gap between where you are and where you need to be grows wider and more expensive to bridge.
This blog explores both the compelling benefits of IBM i modernizations and the six urgent reasons why waiting is no longer a viable strategy.
Key Benefits of IBM i Modernization
Before examining the risks associated with delaying IBM i modernization, it’s helpful to consider the potential benefits that modernization can provide. Organizations that update their IBM i environments typically experience measurable improvements in several areas. Common benefits include:
- Enhanced Business Agility: Organizations often experience improved response times to market changes and customer demands through more flexible application architectures.
- Operational Cost Considerations: Modernization can potentially reduce maintenance expenses and workflow complexity while decreasing reliance on specialized legacy skills.
- Improved Integration Capabilities: Updated systems typically offer better compatibility with cloud services, APIs, and third-party platforms.
- Security Infrastructure Updates: Modern components generally provide access to current security features and ongoing support updates.
- Access to Broader Talent Pool: Organizations using contemporary technologies often have access to larger developer communities and broader skill sets.
- Technology Platform Readiness: Modern infrastructures are typically better positioned to support emerging technologies such as AI, machine learning, and advanced analytics.
Why Should Businesses Modernize IBM i Now?
Here are six main reasons why businesses should prioritize IBM i modernization now, each of which we’ll explore in detail below.
- Shrinking pool of IBM i resources and talent pool
- Lack of agility to respond to business needs
- Mounting technical debt is slowing progress
- Escalating costs the longer you wait
- Poor ability to integrate with modern technologies
- AI is accelerating the pace of change — and legacy systems can’t keep up
1 – IBM i Resources and Talent Scarcity
A significant challenge facing organizations using IBM i is the shrinking talent pool. The generation of RPG developers and system administrators who built and maintained these systems are heading into retirement. They are taking decades of undocumented institutional knowledge with them, creating a critical skills gap.
This scarcity has a direct impact on your business. As the supply of experts dwindles, the cost to hire or retain them skyrockets. Finding replacements becomes a long, expensive, and often fruitless search. This creates a sustainability crisis, increasing the risk of system failures and operational disruptions simply because no one on staff has the expertise to manage or fix the system. Modernizing allows you to transition to contemporary platforms and languages with vast, accessible talent pools, securing the future of your operations.
- The Problem: The pool of skilled IBM i professionals is shrinking as experienced workers retire, taking undocumented knowledge with them.
- The Impact: Rising costs for scarce talent, sustainability challenges, and increased risk of system failures due to lack of expertise.
- The Takeaway: Modernizing now ensures businesses can transition to platforms with broader talent pools and future-proof their operations.
2 – Business Agility
Your business needs to move fast. Whether it’s responding to a new market opportunity, adapting to a competitor’s move, or meeting a new customer demand, speed is essential. Legacy systems, however, often act as an anchor, slowing you down. Decades of layered code can make even simple changes a monumental task. A modification that should take a few weeks can stretch into months of analysis, development, and testing.
This friction between business needs and IT’s capacity to deliver leads to missed opportunities and frustrated stakeholders. Your organization becomes less competitive because it can’t react quickly. Modernization breaks these chains. By untangling complex code and adopting modern development practices, you empower your organization to become more flexible and responsive, turning IT from a bottleneck into a business enabler.
- The Problem: Legacy systems hinder the ability to respond quickly to market demands. Changes that should take weeks often take months due to brittle, outdated systems.
- The Impact: Missed opportunities, frustrated business stakeholders, and a competitive disadvantage in dynamic markets.
- The Takeaway: Modernization enables faster, more flexible responses to business needs, empowering organizations to stay ahead of the competition.
3 – Mounting Technical Debt
Technical debt is the implied cost of rework caused by choosing an easy, limited solution now instead of using a better approach that would take longer. For many IBM i systems, decades of quick fixes, workarounds, and outdated practices have created massive technical debt. This manifests as layers of inefficient, brittle code. Organizations often find that 30-40% of the code on a system is “dead code”—no longer used but still complicating analysis and maintenance.
This debt makes everything harder, slower, and more expensive. Development cycles get longer because developers must navigate a maze of undocumented and convoluted logic. The risk of introducing new bugs with every change increases. Modernization is a form of debt consolidation. It provides an opportunity to clean up the environment, eliminate dead code, and restructure applications for efficiency, setting a healthier foundation for future innovation.
- The Problem: Decades of quick fixes and outdated practices have created layers of inefficiency, including dead code and lack of modularity.
- The Impact: Increased complexity, longer development cycles, and higher costs for maintenance and updates.
- The Takeaway: Addressing technical debt through modernization reduces complexity, improves efficiency, and sets the stage for innovation.
4 – Escalating Costs
There’s a common misconception that waiting to modernize saves money. The opposite is true. The longer you wait, the more expensive and complex the project becomes. There are a few reasons for this. First, as mentioned, the talent you need for the project becomes scarcer and more expensive. Second, as more companies rush to modernize, competition for qualified vendors increases, driving up prices.
Over a ten-year period, the cost of a modernization project can increase by a factor of 5 to 10. Eventually, you can reach a point where modernization becomes prohibitively expensive or even impossible because the necessary skills simply no longer exist. Acting now allows you to control costs, secure the right partners, and execute a transformation on your terms, not out of desperation.
- The Problem: The longer businesses wait, the more expensive modernization becomes due to rising resource costs, increased competition for vendors, and growing system fragility.
- The Impact: Exponentially higher costs over time and, in extreme cases, the risk of modernization becoming impossible.
- The Takeaway: Acting now minimizes costs and ensures access to the expertise and tools needed for a successful transformation.
💡Learn more about why ‘good enough’ IBM i code might be costing you millions.
5 – Poor Integration Capabilities
Modern business ecosystems thrive on connectivity. Your systems need to talk to third-party partners, cloud services, and new technologies like blockchain and advanced analytics. Legacy IBM i systems were not designed for this world of open APIs and seamless data exchange. Integrating them with modern platforms often requires expensive, custom-built solutions that are difficult to maintain and lack resiliency.
This inability to integrate easily isolates your core systems, limiting your ability to innovate and collaborate. You struggle to provide API interfaces to partners or even to other internal systems. Modern platforms, on the other hand, are built for integration. They offer standardized, robust capabilities that enable you to connect to new technologies and partners quickly and securely, unlocking new efficiencies and opportunities.
- The Problem: Legacy systems struggle to integrate with modern technologies like AI, blockchain, and APIs, leading to inefficiencies and missed opportunities.
- The Impact: Expensive, custom-built integrations that lack resilience and scalability.
- The Takeaway: Modern platforms offer standardized, robust integration capabilities, enabling seamless collaboration with partners and adoption of emerging technologies.
6 – The AI Factor: Adapt or Fall Behind
Artificial intelligence is no longer a futuristic concept; it’s a powerful tool that is actively reshaping entire industries. Competitors are using AI to optimize supply chains, personalize customer experiences, and uncover new revenue streams. Legacy systems like IBM i simply cannot keep up with the data-intensive, agile demands of AI-driven innovation.
Some may believe it’s better to wait, hoping AI will eventually automate the modernization process itself. This is a dangerous myth. While AI can assist, it requires a modern, adaptable system to deliver real value. Your legacy environment is a barrier, not a beneficiary, of the AI revolution. Modernizing your IBM i systems is a fundamental prerequisite for harnessing the power of AI and ensuring your business doesn’t get left behind.
- The Problem: AI is reshaping industries at an unprecedented pace, and legacy systems like IBM i struggle to keep up with the demands of AI-driven innovation.
- The Impact: Businesses that fail to modernize risk being outpaced by competitors who leverage AI to optimize operations, enhance customer experiences, and drive innovation.
- The Myth: Many believe AI will eventually handle modernization itself, but the reality is that AI tools require modern, adaptable systems to deliver value.
- The Takeaway: Modernizing IBM i systems is a prerequisite for harnessing the full potential of AI, ensuring businesses remain competitive in an AI-driven world.
The Hidden Costs of Delaying IBM i Modernization
Delaying modernization isn’t just a “maybe later” decision — it’s a gamble, and the odds get worse every day. Consider this: in the HP 3000 market, waiting to address aging systems led to modernization costs ballooning by 5 to 10 times over a decade. Some companies even reached a point where no amount of money could buy the expertise they needed because the skills simply no longer existed.
The same pattern is already slowly emerging in the IBM i market. Imagine your core business system grinding to a halt because a key developer retires — and no one else knows how to fix the issue. Or picture months of lost revenue and customer frustration as your team scrambles to patch together brittle, outdated applications that can’t keep up with a new market demand.
Every day you wait, your organization absorbs:
- Rising costs as talent becomes scarcer and more expensive.
- Shrinking access to knowledgeable vendors and support.
- Missed opportunities and slow responses to change.
- Facing higher risk of catastrophic system failures.
The cost of doing nothing, measured in lost revenue, brand damage, and missed growth, can easily outrun the upfront investment in modernization. The real question isn’t if you can afford to modernize, but if you can afford not to.
Successful modernization requires careful planning and a structured approach. Organizations benefit from following established best practices that help avoid common pitfalls and build sustainable momentum.
📖 Explore best practices included in our blog, “The Do’s and Don’ts of IBM i Modernization.“
Your Path Forward: Taking Action on IBM i Modernization
The evidence is clear: IBM i modernization has evolved from a strategic consideration to an urgent business necessity. From the shrinking talent pool and escalating costs to the demands of AI integration and market agility, the risks of delaying action continue to mount.
But where do you start? Based on our experience guiding hundreds of IBM i organizations through successful modernizations, the most effective approach begins with two critical steps:
#1. Understand the Size and Scope of Your Modernization
Before you can chart your path forward, you need a clear understanding of where you stand today. A comprehensive assessment of your existing systems, code quality, and technical debt is critical to defining the scope, cost, and timeline of a modernization project. Watch the webinar below to learn more about phased implementation and realistic project planning.
How to Plan Your Phased IBM i Modernization Strategy
👉 WATCH WEBINAR
#2. Develop a Strong Business Case
Modernization is not just an IT project, it’s a business initiative that requires executive buy-in and organizational commitment. To secure investment and buy-in, you need a compelling business case that connects technical improvements to measurable business outcomes. This will show how modernization will ties technology goals to business outcomes, like reduced risk, cost savings, and improved agility.
Every day you delay, the challenges become more complex and the solutions more expensive. The organizations that act decisively today will be positioned for growth and innovation tomorrow. Those that continue to wait risk being left behind in an increasingly competitive and AI-driven marketplace.
Ready to take the first step? Book a modernization discovery call with the IBM i experts at Fresche to begin building your business case and roadmap for success.
