What the Latest ALL400s Survey Tells Us About the IBM i Community
October 18, 2023 Alex Woodie
What is the most popular development tool in the IBM i community? What technology exists in nearly every shop? What BI tools are in use? And what activities are sitting in the IT backlog’s of IBM i shops? These are some of the questions that ALL400s answered with the latest edition of its IBM i community survey.
You may have heard about ALL400s as the comprehensive list of IBM i customers around the world. John Rockwell, the Florida man behind ALL400s, does his best to keep the list as updated as possible.
In addition to the list, Rockwell has put together a few surveys over the years, which he gives to people who submit information to the ALL400s list. The latest such survey dropped a few weeks ago, and there are some interesting tidbits that will surprise.
This map shows the location and relative density of IBM i sites across the lower 48. (Image source: ALL400s)
But here is one piece of data from the survey that probably won’t surprise you: SEU remains by far the most popular development tool in the IBM i community. Source Edit Utility (SEU) and its old companion product, Program Development Manager (PDM), garnered close to an 80 percent share of the roughly 600 individuals who took the ALL400s survey this year.
IBM’s Rational Developer for IBM i (RDi) was the second most popular development environment with about 55 percent of survey-takers saying they used this tool, followed by Microsoft’s VS Code at about 26 percent. Notepad++ was fourth with about 9 percent, followed by Remain Software’s MiWorkplace, Broadcom’s CA 2E, Hardis Group’s Adelia Studio, and GeneXus. Several other tools received one vote.
Not surprisingly, RPG/Free was the number one language that developers work with, with 73 percent of ALL400s survey-takers indicating they use this language, followed closely by SQLRPGLE at 72 percent. RPG ILE garnered a 65 to 69 percent share, for OPM and NPM types, respectively, followed by CL LE at 59 percent, according to the survey. COBOL came in at 18 percent, followed Java and XML at 15 percent and 13 percent, respectively.
Many developers in the broader IT community are using generative artificial intelligence tools to help with coding, documentation, and testing. In the IBM i community, 50 percent claim they don’t use any AI tools to for development, documentation, or testing, according to the ALL400s survey, which means that 50 percent are using it. Twenty percent say they use ChatGPT, while 2 percent say they use Impact Analysis by Programmers.io. IBM Watson, Google, OpenAI, and Jira all came in around 1 percent, according to the survey, while another 1 percent say they develop their own AI.
The most popular ERP software is a custom homegrown system, with 28 percent of ALL400s survey-takers saying they developed their own package. The next most popular package was the JD Edwards World package from Oracle at about 10 percent, followed by Infor’s ERP XA (MAPICS) package at about 8 percent (sum of responses for “Infor/XA” and “MAPICS). Infor’s ERP LX (BPCS) package was next at about 7 percent (the sum of responses for “Infor/LX” and “BPCS). Oracle’s JD Edwards EnterpriseOne came in at about 5 percent, while SAP Business Suite and SAP/HANA both had about 3 percent.
Nearly 70 percent of ALL400s survey respondents say development is their number one activity sitting in their IT backlog, followed by bug fixes and application code fixes at 57 percent, developing modern user experiences like Web, mobile, and tablet interfaces was number three at 33 percent, followed closely by Web service API integration projects at 32 percent. Operating system upgrades was next at 27 percent, followed by reporting at 22 percent.
Security, interestingly, came in as the eighth-most common activity sitting in IBM i professionals’ IT backlogs, with an 18 percent share. Perhaps that’s because security is such a top priority that it’s not in the backlog?
Rockwell did address security in some other questions, including by asking users what security strategies they’ve implemented. The top three answers — IFS and network security, multi-factor authentication, and user access management — each garnered positive answers from between 46 and 48 percent of the pool of survey-takers, followed by encryption at 40 percent and ransomware protection at 24 percent.
A virtual private network (VPN) is the number one response to the question “What IBM i security products is your company using?” with 54 percent of survey-takers choosing VPNs. About 41 percent answered “IBM” (which doesn’t say a lot because IBM supplies a bunch of different security tools), followed by the inhouse “we-handle-security-ourselves” crowd at 24 percent. Microsoft won 18 percent of the vote, followed by Fortinet at 13 percent, Fortra at 12 percent, Raz-Lee Security and Precisely at 4 percent, and Fresche Solutions at 2 percent.
Precisely’s MIMIX was the big winner in the high availability (HA) disaster recovery (DR) sweepstakes, with a 23 percent share, followed by in-house tapes at 16 percent, IBM’s PowerHA at 14 percent, none at 9 percent, and IBM Flashcopy at 8 percent. About 7 percent use SAN replication, while Precisely’s Quick-EDD came in seventh place with 6 percent. Global Mirror, an asynchronous replication protocol available on SANs and PowerHA, came in eighth with 4 percent, followed by Precisely’s iTera and Rocket Software’s iCluster with about 3 percent each and Maxava HA at 2 percent. LaserVault and Vault400 from Focal Point garnered 2 percent share, too.
On the business intelligence (BI) front, Microsoft PowerBI is the big winner, with a 29 percent share among ALL400s survey respondents. That’s followed by in-house with 26 percent, Microsoft Azure SQL Server as a data warehouse at 13 percent, and the Qlik BI tool at 8 percent. About 7 percent of survey-takers say they use Snowflake’s data warehouse and another 7 percent chimed in for the Tableau BI tool, while 2 percent say they don’t use anything. Another 2 percent say they are Amazon Redshift data warehouse customers, while about half that number use Google Cloud’s BigQuery data warehouse. Less than 1 percent say they use Db2 Web Query, the OEM product that IBM last week announced it will stop selling and reporting.
When it comes to API tools, IBM’s Integrated Web Services (IWS) was the number-one vote-getter with a 10 percent share, followed by Profound Logic’s Profound API at 6 percent and the open source Spring Boot library at 5 percent. Another 5 percent say they develop their own custom API tools, while another 5 percent say they use MuleSoft. Eradani Connect has a 4 percent share, same as IBM Integration Bus (IIB). Google’s APIgee clocked in at 3 percent while Midrange Dynamics North America’s Rest4i had 2 percent.
On the forms front, TL Ashford was the big winner with a 20 percent share, far ahead of the number two forms package, Fresche’s Formtastic at 4 percent. DRV Technologies was next with less than 4 percent share, followed by Real Vision Software at 3 percent. Another 3 percent of IBM i shops create their own forms and overlays, less than 3 percent use ICS FormSprint, while about 2 percent use ACOM Software. InterForm A/S rounded out the top seven with 2 percent of the votes.
What external application or technology do customers integrate with their IBM i platform? If you said “WebSphere with a 98 percent share,” then give yourself a gold star. But the odds are low you will guess the second-most popular tool on this list: Omnitracs, the Qualcomm-developed cellular truck-tracking system now owned by Solera Fleet Solutions, with 105 of 240 votes, or 44 percent. ARCAD Software’s Verifier came in at number three with 23 percent of the votes, followed by Web-based point of sale (POS) at 16 percent and BVS Tools Mailtool also with 16 percent.
You can download the complete 171-page survey results at www.all400s.com.
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Dear team,
sorry for my comment, but the image of Rockwells IBM-i-installations is misleading, because it show all the installations cumulated since 1997. For 2023 Rockwell is only aware of 200+ installations.
That is a very big difference.
Sincerly
Berthold Wesseler from across the atlantic
Actually, if you select confirmed year = 2023 you’ll see roughly 3,000 companies. If you widen the range to 2020 – 2023 the number of likely installations is closer to 15,000.
Every now and then I’ll find out that a company which hasn’t been confirmed for a long time, say 2004, is on the system. That’s why the older confirmations are kept on the list.
I understand your point that the data could be misleading though, especially to those who are seeing how it’s being presented for the first time. The ‘Confirmed Year’ is the key.
(Also, in the beginning I had a lot of help identifying companies in Europe from people who live there – those resources have been drying up.)
Many thanks to John Rockwell and to ITJungle for this important survey, which was a huge effort by John Rockwell.
I personally believe that the original IBM AS/400 software distributed in the 1980s, like SEU and PDM and RPG3 nad RPG4 is confirmed to still be, by far, the most used and needed software in production, and the RPG enhancement RPG FREE (/FREE) is almost all in production use, not the Fully Free RPG (**free) delivered some nine years ago and its C++ notation.
Even the more “modern” Survey responders indicated that the original AS/400 software of SEU and PDM and simple but powerful RPG 3 and RPG4, and no support for modules, is still the most used, in spite of IBM’s futile and expensive efforts to turn IBM i RPG into a C++ world of programming.
IBM should focus on how to actually make IBM i programmsrs stop wasting 75 % of their time on trying to understand what their programs are doing by using the primitive IBM Debug program, rather than on diversions like making RPG into C++.
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