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For organisations running business-critical applications on the IBM i, supporting and maintaining those applications now and into the future is a key challenge.

Those organisations are looking strategically at their IT strategies and IT application landscape over the next five, ten and fifteen years to find a way to not only ‘keep the lights on’ with their existing IBM i applications, but in a lot of cases develop additional functionality or transform outdated green on black interfaces to a modern UI.

The types of applications that typically run on the IBM i also tend to be business-critical by their very nature – making downtime a significant risk to the business.

Additionally, many of the development teams who first implemented and configured those IBM i applications twenty or thirty years ago have started to move on or are reaching retirement age.

So, how can organisations continue to support, maintain and develop their IBM i applications?

One clear solution is to outsource IBM i software support, maintenance and development to a partner like Proximity.

Why choose Proximity for IBM i application support, maintenance and development?

A depth of IBM i experience & expertise

Proximity developers have a combined experience of over 307 years, developing, supporting and maintaining applications on the IBM i (and its past guises as the AS400, iSeries and System i).

We also have a number of long-standing relationships with customers, both large and medium-sized across the UK, Ireland, Europe and further afield across a wide range of industry sectors.

Customers like Gebrüder Weiss, DB Schenker, Wilko, and Draper Tools which allows us to develop close working relationships and a deep understanding of their operations, software and the wider industry in which they operate.

Learn more about some of our customers and their success stories here.

Working across many programming languages on IBM i

We can support, maintain and develop applications across a number of programming languages, including (but not limited to):

PHP
HTML
CSS
JavaScript
Java
RPG
COBOL
CA 2E.

Supporting, maintaining & developing IBM i applications across many sectors

We support, maintain and develop IBM i applications for a number of sectors, including:

Logistics
Supply chain
Retail
Food & beverage
Finance & banking
Manufacturing.

Proximity also developed and launched Stream on the IBM i. Stream is a powerful cloud-based delivery, logistics and fleet management software application that is accessed on your web browser.

Just some of our IBM i based customers

Within those sectors, here are examples of three of Proximity’s IBM i development, support and maintenance customers:

Wilko

Proximity helped high-street retailer Wilko to de-risk their IBM i applications, by transferring existing IBM i developers through TUPE augmenting the IT team, as well as taking on support, development and maintenance of IBM i structure and core business applications.

DB Schenker

DB Schenker are one of world’s largest transportation and logistics service providers. Proximity design, develop and maintain applications for International transport management system (ITMS), CIEL transport & warehouse management system, e Services for European land transport, and Business Intelligence, providing DB Schenker with development, support and maintenance services to manage a number of core business-critical applications on the IBM i.

Gebrüder Weiss

Gebrüder Weiss are the oldest transport company in the world. Proximity has a dedicated team of developers working on behalf of Gebrüder Weiss, to support a number of IBM i-based applications predominately using RPG. In 2013, Gebrüder Weiss’ launched the Freight Rate Tool across Europe using the native DB2 database and some RPG business logic.

Established partnerships with leading IBM i vendors

As well as established relationships with IBM, Proximity has partnerships with leading IBM i vendors including Fresche Solutions, Remain Software, Raz-Lee, Maxava, Ivanti, Zend and StayLinked.

These partnerships give our customers access to products across:

GUI, Web & Mobile Enablement & Development
IBM i Analysis, Monitoring & Productivity
Terminal Emulation & Windows CE migration
IBM i reporting & documentation distribution
IBM i security.

Learn more about these products here.

Get in touch to talk about how Proximity can help your business to support, maintain and develop business-critical applications on the IBM i applications.

The post Why choose Proximity for IBM i Application Support, Maintenance & Development? appeared first on Proximity.

Reliability.

Security.

Low cost of ownership.

We’ve long shouted about the benefits of the IBM i platform.

Now, it’s more than just shouting.

IBM and Forrester Consulting have put some data behind those claims, in their Total Economic Impact of IBM i report.

How the IBM i improves productivity – while cutting downtime and admin costs

The IBM environment integrates an operating system with a database, virtualisation layer, application server, and transactional system. Businesses can easily reduce system downtime, cut admin support costs, and improve productivity.

In fact, the study shows businesses making 171% ROI, with payback in as little as eight months.

Quantified benefits

Reduced system downtime – The study found that IBM i reduced the number of times an organisation experienced downtime – eliminating four instances every year, and saving an average of $125k (approx. £90k)
Reduced technical support costs – As an integrated platform, IBM i makes it easy for technical support teams to proactively focus on other systems. This allows functions, such as systems and
database administration, to be combined and reduces technical
support hours by up to 33%, saving an average of $255k (approx. £162k)
Improved productivity – business unit employee productivity grows as more tasks are automated. This allows 6,240 business unit employee hours to be repurposed annually, saving around $158k (approx. £114k).

Unquantified benefits

As well as the financially quantifiable benefits of an IBM i system, participants in the study also reported money-can’t-buy benefits like:

Peace-of-mind about uptime
Trust in security against malware
Easy integration with extensive IBM software, tools, and in-house developed applications.

Costs

There are (of course) some costs that come with an IBM i system. These include:

The cost of an IBM Power Systems server – with enough performance and storage capacity to handle your applications
Monthly maintenance fees – for upkeep and support of your IBM i environment
IBM i licences – to manage and operate an ERP system, alongside any other applications you need.

The report found though, that over three years, the financial benefits far outweigh the costs – representing an ROI of 171%.

About the Total Economic Impact Of IBM i report

You can download the report here

Taking the example of four current IBM i users, the report compares the costs, benefits, flexibility and risks of their current system versus the system they used previously.

It combines that data into a single composite view, or Total Economic Impact (TEI) which examines some of the IBM i server’s unique financial characteristics, and the potential ROI of an IBM i deployment.

The post How IBM i improves productivity – while cutting downtime and admin costs appeared first on Proximity.

This is a fantastic open source tool for looking at disk utilization on #IBMi

Start with a smaller directory to test it out but if you wanted to scan root and exclude other dirs check out this example:

ncdu -x / –exclude /QSYS.LIB –exclude /QOpenSys –exclude /QIBM twitter.com/IBMJesseG/stat…

– Matt Seeberger (@mkseeberger)13:27 – Aug 12, 2021Quoted Tweet:

Check out this handy disk usage tool for #IBMi! Just ‘yum install ncdu’ (don’t forget to ‘yum clean expire-cache’ first if needed). #IBMiOSS pic.twitter.com/rWoD4qildy

– Jesse Gorzinski (@IBMJesseG)10:56 – Aug 11, 2021

Register for our #webinar on August 19th to learn how multi-factor authentication can be implemented for #IBMi users to strengthen #security and prevent malware. bit.ly/3sakmcM pic.twitter.com/Ug7ttRfPSS

– Precisely (@PreciselyData)10:30 – Aug 12, 2021