Cybersecurity Still Top IBM i Concern, But AI And Others Are Creeping Up
January 27, 2025 Alex Woodie
Fortra last week formally released its 2025 IBM i Marketplace Survey results, which marks the start of the second decade of analysis into the IBM i community. In the closely watched Top Concerns component, there were minor changes in the top four items, led by cybersecurity for the ninth straight year. But what’s notable in 2025 is that there’s movement at the bottom of the list, indicating heightened interest in items such as artificial intelligence and machine learning.
IBM i users from around the world took Fortra’s annual IBM i Marketplace Survey in late 2024 – 250 of them in fact. They were asked dozens of questions about their IBM i environment, ranging from the number and type of IBM i servers they have to the programming languages they use, and everything else in between.
For the Top Concerns component, Fortra asks survey-takers to choose five items that they are most concerned about from a list of 14 (or 15 if you include Other). Cybersecurity (or security as the old Help/Systems used to call it), has been the number one concern since 2017. Last year, it hit an all-time high, with 79 percent of survey takers choosing it as a top concern, a year-over-year increase of 11 percentage points.
The security concern dropped a hair this year to 77 percent. That gave it a comfortable lead over IBM i skills, which moved into the number two slot at 60 percent despite losing five percentage points compared to 2024. In third is modernizing applications at 57 percent, which lost a whopping 15 percentage points from last year. Rounding out the top four is high availability/disaster recovery at 49 percent, a 14 percentage point decline.
Fortra 2025 IBM i Marketplace Results.
In fact, the percentage associated with each of the top four concerns was lower this year than last year. In the 2024 report, each of the top four concerns was up compared to the previous year, and in 2023, three out of the four were up year-over-year.
The big drop in the top four coincided with increases in some of the other 10 concerns, the Marketplace Survey results show. In particular, four items showed real growth.
Artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML), in particular, jumped from 10 percent in 2023 and 18 percent in 2024, to 30 percent this year. Compliance and regulations also had a big increase, going from 20 percent in 2023 and 29 percent in 2024 to 38 percent this year. Analytics and business intelligence (BI) also showed solid growth over the past two years, going from 22 percent in 2023 to 31 percent this year. Capacity planning seemed to come out of nowhere to go from 10 percent the past two years to 24 percent this year.
Items at the bottom of the list that were of lower concern to IBM i shops in the 2025 report included migrating apps to the cloud (17 percent in 2025 versus 23 percent in 2024); data growth (20 percent versus 28 percent); IT and business automation (31 percent versus 44 percent); supporting remote workforce (11 percent versus 19 percent); and document management (10 percent versus 13 percent). Reducing IT spending came in at 32 percent, a hair down from last year’s 33 percent.
IBM i chief technology officer Steve Will commented on the changes in the top concerns list – and specifically the bifurcation of the Top Concerns list into a perennial top four and the remainder of the field – during a Fortra webinar discussing the 2025 IBM i Marketplace Survey results.
“Those top four have been the top four forever,” said Will, who also holds the title of IBM i chief architect and IBM Distinguished Engineer. “In my view, everybody gets to select five. What’s happening in the rest of the set of options? Well, we finally got artificial intelligence up at 30 percent. So people who were not putting artificial intelligence on their list at all, now 30 percent of the people are putting that up there.”
Source for data: Fortra 2025 IBM i Marketplace Results.
People are constantly hearing about security threats, Will said, and so they’re on high alert. For that reason, Will said it was possible that security would always be the number one concern in this report.
“Security is probably likely going to remain at the top because, even if everybody feels like they have the right solution for today, people are always hearing about what’s coming tomorrow and how things are going to get more dangerous,” he said. “But that IBM i skills thing and the fact that artificial intelligence is growing in importance, I think is the trend here that we want to pay attention to.”
IT Jungle Editor in Chief Timothy Prickett Morgan, who also participated in the IBM i Marketplace webinar, sought to draw a distinction between what people say they’re worried about versus what they actually spending money on.
“If I had a magic spreadsheet, I’d want to see how these things are apportioned in their budgets and then what they’re concerned about,” TPM said. “What are you worried about? What are you spending on? And we don’t have a sense of that. Do they put their money where their mouth is? I don’t know.”
TPM said his hunch is that people spend too much time worrying about security and not enough time actually doing something about it. But when it comes to AI, IBM i shops may see a business opportunity that’s there for the taking – provided they invest actual dollars to go get it.
Download a copy of Fortra’s 2025 IBM i Marketplace Survey Results by clicking on the image.
“I think that we’re spending a little bit more money on artificial intelligence because we’re we think of that as an opportunity,” TPM said. “Last year that was 18 percent. The year before, it was in the 10 percent range. I think either next year or the year after, we’ll see it’s in the top five. It will be in the high 30s, low 40s, and I think it’ll eventually be in the top three because IBM is going to have the tools to help people do this. So then they can actually start doing something and it becomes not just a concern, but a thing they’re doing.”
IBM, of course, is investing in generative AI technology for the IBM i platform. The IBM i development team is currently working on RPG Code Assist, a coding co-pilot that will use an IBM Granite foundation model trained on reams of customer-submitted RPG code and available as a VERSUS Code plug-in. When it ships, which Will recently said is likely to be in the second half of the year, RPG Code Assist will help with code explanation, code generation, and test case generation.
Analytics and BI is also an area of concern for IBM i shops. This may have to do with the fact that hundreds of IBM i shops were left high and dry in October 2023 when IBM and TIBCO abruptly ended the OEM relationship for Db2 Web Query, which was originally signed by Information Builders.
When it comes to the concern for compliance and regulation, there are several changes that could be driving the increase. The European Union is a big driving force in this department, including with the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) as well as the AI Act. In the United States, President Donald Trump last week rolled back new AI regulations instituted by former President Joe Biden in October 2023.
The 14 percentage point uptick in capacity planning seemed to come out of nowhere. Could it be the ongoing movement to the cloud that is spurring IBM i professionals to get smart about plotting out their CPWs? Or perhaps it’s the Power11 chips looming in 2025. However, there is no discernable blip in the data associated with the Power10 rollout in 2021, so that one will need further explanation.
You can download a copy of the 2025 IBM i Marketplace Study and watch Fortra’s webinar from this link.
