Getting [Stuff] Done Done With Briteskies

December 4, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

The IBM i ecosystem is big enough, and changes enough with the times, that we are still finding companies who are relatively new to the base but who have been around for a bit of time who are doing interesting things and who are not quite on our radar. Part of what we do is seek these companies out so we can tell you about them, what they are doing, what they see in the market, and how they can help you.

Such is the case with Briteskies, a consultancy based in Cleveland, Ohio, that we have written about a few times but which we really started getting to know at the POWERUp 2023 conference in Denver earlier this year.

Recently, we circled back and sat down with William Onion, managing director of the company, which was founded back in 2000 and that is currently 40-people strong and that has wide and deep knowledge in a lot of different technologies but has primarily served the OS/400 and IBM i platform.

Timothy Prickett Morgan: I glad that we ran into a bunch of people from Briteskies at POWERUp this year, and thanks for taking the time to talk to me today. Let’s start by getting a little more background about Briteskies and what you do.

William Onion: We have always worked on the IBM i and love that box. We also do some JD Edwards, with the World product that product runs on the IBM i and Enterprise 1 which can run on the IBM i but sometimes doesn’t. Outside of that, we do a bunch of e-commerce, specifically helping companies with the Magento stack from Adobe. That takes us in a whole different direction, which is really fun and interesting and challenging. It’s fun to watch the e-commerce folk interact with the IBM i folk – it’s always kind of a mix of personalities and skill sets, and so forth.

But the thing that really differentiates us from a lot of companies is our integration capabilities. That’s where we spend a lot of time. And the vast majority of that is getting the IBM i communicating with web applications and third party applications and so forth. So lots of tools, lots of techniques, and lots of different things in there that we do with that. We look at the IBM i as a great platform. But we all know it’s not all there is anymore. So we regularly and often get that box communicating with various systems, including e-commerce, warehouse management, transportation, logistics, customer relationship management – pick a thing that somebody needs to interact with and we can get that data flowing back and forth with the IBM i.

TPM: So you are an expert integrator for the stuff that runs on the integrated platform. Your support matrix must be insane and this must be almost bespoke with each engagement. . . . [Laughter]

William Onion: That is a polite way of putting it. [Laughter]

Where it gets interesting and more tailored is if you are running a customized IBM i application that’s been cobbled together over the last twenty years. Depending on the situation, whether customers are using homegrown code, third party applications, or a mix of the two, the process is very similar, but the code that we generate can be pretty different. And every system has its own idiosyncrasies. I would say that about half of our customers are running custom software, from the System/36 all the way up through free form RPG and the others are a package, whether it’s JD Edwards or BPCS or JDA or whatever. Those are more straightforward for us, because we’ve got some experience integrating with those and they are more standardized in terms of APIs and documentation. No matter what, we really love to dig in and solve whatever the problem is.

TPM: What kinds of tools do you use to help companies integrate these applications? Dell had Boomi for a while, and it is still around, and Eradani is selling an API server aimed at IBM i as well.

William Onion: So Boomi was one tool that we used for a while, and we used IBM’s WebSphereMQ back in the day, which was a great tool but which has gotten long in the tooth, frankly. We use Mulesoft – we are big fans of Mulesoft when it’s right, and it’s not always right. We love Eradani – we’re big fans and we’re partners with them.

What we want to do is help folks that are choosing to stay on the IBM i. How can we help them leverage that investment? So there’s some modernization, and there’s a lot of integration because people are surrounding that IBM i and its databases and applications with other systems. So we feel that for the integration market, there’s a lot of opportunity there because people just think the IBM i isn’t going anywhere. People might put in a new system and make things communicate well with the IBM i, and that’s where Eradani is a big deal. And to be honest, there is a lot of legacy EDI out there, particularly in the automotive sector.

A lot of what we do is educate people about what’s possible. We run into customers who didn’t know what’s even possible with Eradani, Mulesoft, and other tools that can make their lives easier from an integration perspective. Or people who have not been exposed to more modern technologies and don’t know that you can provide an API on the IBM i that a Web application can communicate with. We have done projects where we show customers how to do the first integration point or two, and then they take it over from there. And that’s fine.

TPM: That is a good, healthy way to think about it.

What are your goals for Briteskies as you look at over the next few years?

William Onion: I think there’s opportunity in the market for some pretty substantial growth. There’s more and more demand for resources, and we all know that. We’ve come through COVID, and I think people are looking more and more at how can they leverage what they have without having to replace their ERP platform. And we plug nicely right into that space there so we can help them with the integration and modernization and we also have some managed services to help if they have some developer gaps.

TPM: So you are offering what people are calling fractional services for programming?

William Onion: We have been doing it for the past four years now, and we can do fractional or full-time, or just do things based on a project. We have done a couple of projects moving customers from older RPG to free format RPG. It’s hard enough to find RPG developers, but it is really hard to find RPG-II developers. So let’s get customers at least on RPG free format, which at least is similar to Java and other languages in how it is structured. We have a nice blend of folks, some who have been programming in RPG for twenty or thirty years and some younger folks who know how to do other things. So it is a nice blend.

Perhaps the most important thing we bring to bear, though, is our core values. I could talk all day about them, but let’s just touch on the most important ones.

First, customer focus is our number one core value – always has been, always will be. That means that we always have to have our customer’s best interests at heart, to be thinking about how everything we do affects our customer and just have compassion for them, for their jobs and for their lives. If we always take great care of our customers – always – everything else will kind of work itself out.

Second, we have to get [stuff] done.

TPM: You know I can’t let you say [stuff] in The Four Hundred. This is a family newsletter. . . . Heaven knows we use expletives in the news business all the time. But not in print. [Laughter]

William Onion: [Laughter] We say it that way intentionally because it is impactful. When you say “get [stuff] done,” people know exactly what that means.

We have a term at Briteskies called “done done.” If someone says something is done, we ask, “Is it done, or is it done done?” I tell you what that doesn’t mean. It doesn’t mean almost done. Customers don’t pay us for when things are sorta done, or mostly done. They pay us when it is done done.

Finally, the other core value is that endless curiosity really permeates this company. People here have done lots of things before, but they are always thinking about how they can do it better. I’ll put my team up against any other consultant team because I know the quality we have and I know how talented they are, and I know what they can do is pretty phenomenal.

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