Youthful IBM i Optimism In Fort Worth

June 3, 2024 Alex Woodie

The IBM i community showed up in force last month for COMMON’s annual conference. And they sure didn’t drive or fly to Fort Worth for the weather, which was hot and muggy. The POWERUp 2024 attendees – all 1,100 of them – came to the show to learn about the platform, which may be in the early stages of – dare we say it? – a youth moment.

First things first: the attendance number. COMMON was shooting for about 1,000, which is about where its annual spring conference has been for the better part of a decade (the fall conferences are smaller events). To actually draw 1,100 attendees to the conference represents a sizable victory for the COMMON organizers, who put on an excellent conference at a first-rate building, the massive Forth Worth Convention Center (having a little elbow room in a Texas-sized venue isn’t a bad thing if you’ve ever attended an overcrowded tech conference).

But drawing 100 more attendees than expected also shows that demand is up for IBM i education and skills, and that’s a good thing. And while we don’t have any hard data on this, several attendees commented that POWERUp 2024 class appeared to skew toward the younger side.

While there were many familiar faces at the conference, Steve Sibley, the vice president of Power Systems offering management at IBM, noticed many new ones, too.

“If you just look around here, yeah you have the older folks like myself. But there’s some newer folks,” the native Texan told IT Jungle during an on-site interview. “There’s new people coming on. We need to be able to show that.”

Sibley noted that the first two people he ran into as he left the keynote session on Monday, May 20 had never been to a COMMON conference before. “And one of them, brand new to IBM i a year ago, loves the platform,” Sibley said. “The other one had just moved to a new company, so he was just picking it up.”

It doesn’t take a statistical analysis to see that folks skewed both old and young when Kisco asked people to post a Polaroid on the year they started with IBM i.

There’s been a youthful tilt to other IBM i conferences too, says Marina Schwenk, a COMMON board member and co-founder of the New to IBM i (N2i) group, which was formed a couple of years ago to welcome kids of all ages to the platform.

“There has been an increase of young, new IBM i professionals at this season’s conferences. I saw firsthand how we had an increase at the WMCPA and NEUGC conferences and I was pleased to see that same increase at this year’s POWERUp conference,” Schwenk tells us.

N2i and the COMMON Education Foundation (CEF) both play important roles in bringing fresh faces to the platform, Schwenk says. “The students and N2i professionals have a space to start their career on this platform, which is critical for their success,” she said, adding that Steve Riedmueller has stepped up to take over leadership of N2i.

There was a youthful vibe in the POWERUp Expo hall, too. The Expo was packed Monday night during the evening reception, and many of the attendees wandering the aisles amid 53 vendors (also a higher turnout than anticipated) appeared to be in their 20s and 30s. That’s a big change from the usual crowd, which leans heavily towards folks in their 50s and 60s.

Sessions on RPG and development topics are typically well attended at POWERUp, but the sessions that IBMers Liam Allan and Jesse Gorzinski presented on VS Code were packed. With the database extensions now available on VS Code, IBM i developers are champing at the bit to start connecting to Db2 for i in VS Code.

It’s worth wondering how much the rise of VS Code is connected to the youthful turn. Allan, who once was the face of the IBM i youth movement as a 17-year-old coding phenom, has been very vocal in his distaste for the Java-based RDi environment. After his open source Code for i product, which extended ILE development to VS Code, exploded in popularity, IBM (wisely) brought Allan on as a full-time developer, paired him with Gorzinski and other architects, gave him a team of engineers, and tasked them all with making VS Code a first-class product, which they are well on their way to doing.

A youthful cowhand rides the mechanical bull at POWERUp. (Image courtesy COMMON)

The result is that VS Code came out of practically nowhere to own a 37 percent share of the market for IBM i IDE tools, according to Fortra’s 2024 IBM i Marketplace Survey (RDi sits at 56 percent). VS Code is also the number one IDE globally, which doesn’t hurt. But if you had wondered five years ago what impact allowing users to write free form RPG in a free, open source, Web-based IDE might have on the popularity of IBM i, the answer might be staring us in the face.

The youth movement couldn’t come at a better time to address a looming IBM i skills shortage. The demographic crunch from retiring Baby Boomers is real, and impacting both IBM i and System Z mainframe. Companies that have tried to fill vacant technical positions by hiring equally senior programmers, admins, and analysts who check all the usual boxes (20 years RPG experience, familiarity with SEU. etc.) have struggled to fill those positions.

For Tim Rowe, an IBM business architect in charge of development tools, it’s clear the old ways of working don’t work anymore.

“They’ve been looking for the same things, they’ve been doing the same thing for 30 years,” Rowe said of IBM i shops looking to fill vacant positions. “Again, some of this is they need to change, because our environment, our technology, how we can do things has changed. We don’t have to do development on IBM i like it’s 1988 anymore.”

Big Blue also put its money where its mouth is when it comes to addressing the lack of formal education for IBM i.

For years, there were just a handful of colleges or universities teaching IBM i, and recently the number had dropped to just two: Gateway Technical College in Kenosha, Wisconsin and Seneca Polytechnic in Toronto, Canada. But recently, IBM has attracted a third college to the Power Skills Academy, which is the IBM program to help spread IBM technology curriculum via workshops as well as two-year and four-year colleges and universities, according to Gina King, IBM’s director of strategic alliances software partnerships.

It’s all IBM i at POWERUp 2024.

“Since last year, we’re collaborating with the COMMON Education Foundation, and we’re also collaborating with imPower Technologies,” King said. “But we continue to be focused on colleges and universities, and we have a new university that just joined and they’re going to start teaching the IBM i curriculum. So it’s something we are very actively continuing to grow.”

Monty Chicola, the president of Real Vision Software, confirmed to IT Jungle that he helped convince his alma mater, Northwestern State University in Louisiana, to join the IBM i brigade. He did it to help give back to the IBM i community that he has worked with for decades, he said.

While getting four-year colleges on board with IBM i education is great, much of the youth movement is happening outside of colleges and universities.

For instance, Cameron Stewart, who is the first recipient of Kisco Systems’ Richard C. Loeber Fellowship for Careers in IBM i, was honored on the stage during the POWERUp opening session on May 20. The deadline is fast approaching for the second RCL Fellowship, which is aimed at folks who have worked for at least two years and rewards them with free RPG and IBM i education through Jim Buck’s imPower Technologies and free trips to POWERUp and NAViGATE.

The youthful tide at COMMON events will have two chances to continue this fall, as there will be two NAViGATE events to choose from: September 16-18 in Bonita Springs, Florida, and November 4-6 in Toronto, Ontario. POWERUp returns to the Disneyland Hotel in Anaheim, California May 19-22, 2025. We will be there.

This Issue Sponsored By

Table of Contents

Content archive

Recent Posts

Subscribe

Pages

Search