2025 IBM i Predictions, Part Two
January 20, 2025 Alex Woodie
With new wall calendars and a new (old) guy in the White House, change is in the air as we start off 2025. That much was obvious from the first installment of IBM i predictions, which ran last week. This second batch of predictions may be even bolder than the first.
We’re in the midst of a shakeup in the tech job market, thanks to several years of elevated inflation, emergence of cloud computing, and new technologies like AI. How does that impact the IBM i job market? For insight, we turn to Bob Langieri, the owner of Excel Technical Services:
I see the future bright for those who expand their IBM i skills and open source tools. If you can become a pioneer in using AI in conjunction with the IBM i, you will have the world at your command. While there are not a lot of openings for your typical 25-to-30 year RPG programmer, there is a big demand for younger developers who are familiar Python, PHP, C# or .NET and basic RPG skills.
Salaries for this younger generation of five-plus years’ experience could be in the $85,000 to $100,000 or more, while the typical 20–25-year veteran RPG developer is getting between $120,000 – $145,000. Salaries in the other “open” languages like .NET are getting between $145,000 to $175,000-plus. Some senior network specialists are getting from $150,000 to $200,000-plus. An IBM systems administrator is getting between $90,000 and $115,000.
IBM i shops need to address these salary differences with HR and corporate management and become competitive. For the last three-plus years, companies have now fully accepted developers working remotely when they cannot find the right person locally. And when they do find someone local, they usually let people work on a hybrid of some on-site and some remote. I have also experienced more clients willing to bring on part-time contractors for longer commitments. Being reliable and responsive is a key ingredient for a successful contracting career.”
IBM i shops are a lot like other shops – they respond to risk and opportunity. In 2025, the risks and opportunities they will be acting upon will largely revolve around security, cloud, and AI, predicts Kevin Beasley, the CIO of VAI, the IBM i ERP software developer from New York:
Adapting to modern demands in IT is driving next-generation IBM i solutions such as enterprise applications, application development, and security enforcement. These solutions will be powered by AI.
IBM Power11 system should be arriving in 2025, and will have advancements at the processor, system, and stack levels increasing performance by up to 25 percent. This and some additional enhancements will enable significantly more capabilities to support existing and up and coming AI projects.
2025 is the year that IBM i shops will take security more seriously than ever and elevate it to the top of their priorities. And IBM Power Systems with IBM i will run the new state of Greenland in 2025 and all the shipping through the US Canal in Panama and The Gulf of America.
New products and new technologies are in the offing for 2025. That’s great news for the IBM i installed base, who will be looking to leverage the new stuff to stay on top of existing trends, says Ash Giddings, product manager for Maxava:
As we enter 2025, the IBM i community remains at the forefront of innovation in both software and hardware. AI tools, such as IBM’s Code Assist, are poised to revolutionize legacy development, breathing new life into applications for both seasoned professionals and newcomers to IBM i.
With Power11 rumored to debut later this year, the second-hand hardware market is expected to receive its usual boost, prompting a wave of migrations from organizations looking to leverage enhanced power and performance. Despite the arrival of new hardware, hybrid and multi-cloud strategies will continue to gain momentum, with increasing adoption of cloud solutions–both public and private–for production workloads, enabling greater scalability and agility.
Exciting new features and enhancements for both developers and system administrators are anticipated in the spring with V7.6 and will be showcased throughout the series of 2025 user conferences, making these events essential for anyone in the IBM i ecosystem.
COMMON president Floyd Del Muro’s predictions are short and sweet:
- 2025 will be the year of agents for an AI-powered world.
- Security will be the number one issue for IBM i shops and their adjacent cloud technologies in 2025.
- No major COMMON or IBM name branding changes will occur in 2025.
Pete Massiello is in a semi-retired state following the sale of his company, iTech Solutions, to Service Express back in 2022. But the first ever Lifetime Champion for Power continues to work with the platform, and he’s definitely sharing his opinion on where the platform is going:
2025 is set to be an exciting year for IBM i enthusiasts! As per IBM’s IBM i and Power Systems roadmap, the next release of IBM i and Power11 servers is on the horizon for this year. I know there are quite a few really cool enhancements coming with the release this year, currently referred to as iNext until announcement day, when it will get its real name with a number.
IBM has also been talking about the Power11 chip, and while there isn’t any word yet on servers, you know that they aren’t spending billions of dollars on development in a new chip, not to incorporate that into a new server. Of course, many other announcements will tag along with these two significant milestones for the IBM i community. Stay tuned for the latest updates and enhancements coming your way; it’s a fantastic time to be working with IBM i!”
One of the bigger vendors that continues to plow the IBM i fields is Precisely. The company that was once Vision Solutions (and all the vendors that Vision bought) still provides high availability and data replication solutions, along with a host of other data-oriented products. Precisely’s chief product officer Chris Hall was kind enough to provide us with this prediction:
IBM Power Systems will continue to be vital to organizations by providing a reliable, secure, and scalable environment. At the same time, disruptive technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) is creating new business demands from processing to data integrity. IBM Power Systems will provide an ideal system to run AI or mine data that will be delivered to cloud-based platforms feeding AI models.
As part of the new requirements for AI, IBM Power Systems will increasingly connect into hybrid environments helping to build a more unified, cohesive data strategy. Organizations will need to establish integration patterns that bring together IBM Power Systems and the cloud. When executed successfully, organizations can reduce costs, increase flexibility, ensure governance, and deliver access to the data they need to drive forward strategic analytics and AI initiatives.
The cloud looms large for IBM i shops in 2025, but what will really move the needle is hybrid setups that meld tried-and-true IBM i apps with new capabilities that exist in the cloud and deliver the best of both worlds, according to ARCAD Software Philippe Magne, who brings several other predictions:
The inherent strengths of IBM i – reliability, scalability, and security – will become increasingly relevant. The operating system and database technology will continue to evolve at an impressive rate, making the risk of skill depletion the only true threat to the platform. Here the “coming of age” of AI arrives just in time. Thanks to AI-driven code explanation, new generations of developers will be capable of understanding and preserving the business logic behind critical IBM i applications. Look out also for AI-driven tools to modularize and convert RPG code into microservices.
In a cybersecurity focused world, IBM i will gain favor as platform of choice for mission-critical developments. Yet we will need to move from the assumption “I’m on IBM i, I’m protected” towards “We need to step up our security.”
DevOps methods will shift from being “standard” to being mandatory for compliance. IBM i shops will need to integrate their RPG and COBOL development into the same DevOps tools used on the open systems side of the business (and not only Git!). Private cloud is the future for the largest organizations. Until companies see real economic value in moving to the cloud, we’ll see many staying at the “cloud ready” stage. Organizations will take a pragmatic approach, refactoring back-end RPG code into web services to ensure connectivity with the digital world.
Modernization will be seen as the least cost, least risk option for securing business continuity (the costs of “move off” and “do nothing” options both prohibitively high and climbing). The future of IBM i shines bright.
Change is afoot everywhere in the new year, and the tech world is no exception. AI is the headliner in this play, but nobody is sure where it will lead us. For Trevor Perry, the change agent of the stars, 2025 is ripe with possibilities for AI:
From my perspective as a keynote storyteller, the world is hungry. Individuals are looking for connection, but wary to trust. People want to get out, but uncomfortable outside their bubble. Change is scary, but the status quo is annoying. Everyone, it seems, is looking for something else. Something bigger. Something that will fulfill their soul.
From my perspective as a lifelong techie, change is inevitable. It’s easy to find a comfort zone where one feels comfortable, successful, and even fulfilled. The moment that realization occurs, something changes. New technologies, new approaches to building applications, new demands from users, new pitches from vendors in an often cutthroat world.
And now, we have AI. On a personal level, we are told our jobs are threatened. Doom and gloom is spread for an Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) world, where robots mean humans are no longer needed.
AI is not new, but the noise about AI – particularly generative AI – is relatively new. In 2025, this will intensify. As history has shown, adoption of new technologies has spikes and plateaus, and if history tells us anything, it is that the rate of development of AI tools may not spike quite as much this coming year.
Adoption of AI will result in two ends of a spectrum – abject failure and moderate success. If companies and individuals find productive uses for AI, such as code advisory, code conversion (read, modernization), initial code generation, they will be at the success end. If companies or individuals adopt AI because it is trendy, or they want to one-up their competition, or they follow a path investing in the concepts rather than the practicalities, they will be at the other end.
One thing will never change: Users will continue to demand more productivity from their technology. The role of business analyst can be enhanced with AI, but the HI (Human Intelligence) will always be needed to interpret business requirements. Getting along with one’s fellow employees will be more important.
By the end of the year, the hungriness for connection, for soul fulfillment, for something bigger, will grow. As technology separates us, the human need for family will intensify.
Strong security has long been held as one of the advantages of the IBM i platform. In 2025, that reputation will help to drive customers decisions whether to continue investments in the platform, predicts Aneta Ranstoller, vice president of marketing at Fresche Solutions:
The broad technology marketplace has seen a five-fold increase in ransomware attacks in the past year. So far, not one of the attacks that our clients have experienced has affected the applications that run on the IBM i. While the client invokes their DR plans for other systems, the IBM i continues to service core business functions.
This data point has not gone unnoticed by the leadership teams of the affected organizations. Certainly, they are taking steps to further lock down their IBM i using security tools and it is our ‘bold’ prediction that clients will make the decision to stay on the platform! They will, instead, invest in modernizing and transforming their application code using new AI technologies, that will help them create business value, accelerate time to market, and minimize business risk.
Tom Huntington, the executive vice president of technical solutions at Fortra, has been around the IBM i community long enough to see some unpredictable things happen. That may have informed at least one of his 2025 predictions:
Isn’t a crazy thing to think about that a quarter century has gone by since the consultants of the world predicted death to IBM i as a legacy system, yet here in 2025 the server and the community is stronger than ever. We expect a continued growth in new employees taking on the work of those retiring. In 2025, it will be a year of more acquisition and mergers as a more friendly business environment will provide private equity firms with the ability to accelerate their activity as it has been dormant since Covid. Expect consolidation in the software industry and managed service provider space.
AI will help to head off the shortage of employees do to additional retirements. Rochester’s efforts to bring AI into the fold for automation of RPG coding will accelerate the productivity in managing IBM i. Expect great adoption of this technology by the sheer number of attendees at the annual COMMON conference, POWERUp. These AI sessions will be overfilled with eager learners. COMMON will have its biggest attendance in over a decade.
Beyond 2025, IBM i continues to solidify its space in IT. IBM strikes a deal with AWS to solve the problem of cybersecurity, reliability, and scalability by making their backbone IBM Power with IBM i as the OS behind their infrastructure. This scalable solution becomes the new cloud infrastructure that powers the world.
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2025 IBM i Predictions, Part One
