ARCAD Discover: Global Application Analysis With An AI Interface

February 10, 2025 Michel Mouchon

Here is a simple test to reckon the value of the applications that run your company. Walk down to the datacenter, or over to the datacloset, or SSH out to the cloud, and turn the physical or logical machine running those applications off. What happens next?

Aside from a lot of animated conversations and possibly some cursing, not much until you turn the machine back on and the system, databases, and applications reboot. You already knew this, but now everyone else has discovered, rather suddenly, how the very existence of the business and the livelihoods of the employees is dependent on those applications that were momentarily quiesced.

At many companies, there are 5 million, 10 million, 20 million, or more lines of code that encapsulate the very processes and procedures that define the company while keeping track of its work and its money. These applications have probably been created over many decades, by dozens to hundreds of people who have come and gone, and now management wants to figure out how to modernize these applications with better databases and interfaces and modern languages and also wants to add generative AI capabilities to them.

And compounded by the shortage of IBM i skills, the task of maintaining and modernizing these critical applications often falls unwittingly into the hands of developers with little or no RPG, COBOL, or DB2 experience.

Where do you start? You and your team can try to figure out how those millions of lines of code across dozens to thousands of programs are interconnected and interdependent, and you can spend so much time trying to figure out what you have that you don’t have enough time to actually do the modernization work and GenAI integration that is critical right now. Or, you can buy ARCAD Discover.

ARCAD Discover is not only a tool that can help IT shops add AI functionality to modernize their applications, it is itself a tool that has been modernized with AI functionality. Discover is based on an RPG and SQL application and metadata repository that ARCAD has been curating for more than three decades and that is based on thousands of AS/400 and IBM i applications. This repository is at the heart of many of ARCAD’s IBM i DevOps tools and represents a treasure trove of knowledge for generating and transforming code.

This repository is one of the foundations of ARCAD Discover, and so is the ability to characterize and classify all of the compiled objects and application libraries on the IBM i, whether they are from third-party software developers or created in-house. As well as analyzing the source code itself, ARCAD also works at a higher level of global application analysis – tracking how everything is hooked together, with dependencies on data and workflow explicitly mapped out and then diagrammed so it can be visually represented.

ARCAD Discover – macroscopic view

ARCAD Discover – database diagram

As the name suggests, ARCAD Discover is used to automate application analysis for IBM i platforms, and frankly it will do a better job than just throwing all of those millions of lines of code at a generative AI model and asking it to tell you all of the dependencies. (So be careful of someone who might create such a tool and tell you that it works.)

That does not mean, however, that AI is not useful. In the right context, AI is absolutely useful. In fact, ARCAD Discover has been equipped with a conversational AI front end – a chatbot in the modern parlance – so developers can ask questions about the applications in plain English, French, Spanish, and other languages and get answers back in the same languages. Because of this AI chatbot, users of Discover do not have to have the in-depth knowledge of RPG or SQL programs that developers have; they can be business managers, project managers, application and system analysts, or quality assurance engineers that, for various reasons, need to do a functional mapping of the applications running on the IBM i platform. That mapping is literal in that ARCAD Discover analyses the applications and creates functional flow charts of code components, fields, source lines, and how they are interrelated.

ARCAD Discover – natural language query

Discover can also be used to retroactively document existing IBM i applications and perform an in-depth analysis of IBM i databases. It can also run a “health check,” rooting through the application code base to find parts of the application stack that are obsolete, redundant, or broken. It is also a key tool for doing impact analysis before any modernization efforts get underway. In many cases, doing impact analysis prior to a modernization project might take days, but with ARCAD Discover, this can be accomplished in hours.

ARCAD Discover – logic diagram

ARCAD Discover can be acquired as part of the ARCAD stack or as a standalone product. It is available now with a per-user subscription price, and it runs natively on Power Systems machines, with part of it running on the IBM i and another part running on a Linux partition.

Customers can run the AI chatbot front end and functional diagramming feature of ARCAD Discover on an external Linux server if they choose, but we recommend keeping both parts of Discover not only on premises, but on the Power Systems server. The vector and matrix math units on the current Power10 chip and the impending Power11 chip are more than powerful enough to run the AI models underpinning ARCAD Discover. So you don’t have to worry about having to buy expensive Nvidia or AMD GPUs and integrating them with your application platform.

One thing more: It would be misleading to get the impression that ARCAD Discover is only useful for large IBM i shops with millions or tens of millions of lines of code and thousands of applications. The need for application analysis to underpin modernization efforts – including the addition of GenAI functions to those applications – is just as intense for small companies as it is for large ones. And there are proportionately fewer resources at the smaller IBM i shops, so the need to use automated analysis is arguably greater. So, yes, ARCAD Discover maybe have been created at the behest of some of the largest IBM i shops in the world, but it is designed – and priced – for all IBM i shops to benefit. Most precious of all, it renders IBM i applications accessible and understandable to newcomers to the platform.

For more information: ARCAD Discover datasheet

Michel Mouchon is chief technology officer at ARCAD Software.

This content is sponsored by ARCAD Software.

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