What The Marketplace Study Says About IBM i Migrations And Outlook

March 10, 2025 Alex Woodie

One of the values that Fortra’s annual IBM i Marketplace Survey brings to the table is to function as a forward-looking indicator. If something is stirring in the IBM i installed base – say, that a large chunk is looking to mosey off the platform – then it likely will appear in the data. So when we analyze the data from the 2025 report, that’s something worth looking for.

The good news from the 2025 IBM i Marketplace Survey results is that there’s nothing to indicate any mass migrations are under way. Companies will always come and go on IBM i platform – although there is probably a bit more outflow from the platform than inflow to the system these days. But in comparing the 2025 data to the past five years of data, there are no large swings evident, at least in Fortra’s questionnaire.

Fortra asks a few questions in its “Outlook for IBM i” section, including “What percentage of your core business applications run on IBM i?” and “What are your plans for the IBM i platform?” For those who indicate they are looking to migrate all applications off the IBM i to other platforms, it asks for the customer’s timeframe for that migration. (And up until 2024, it also asked what the target platform is for the old IBM i apps, which was typically SaaS, Windows, and Linux, in descending order.)

Figure 1. “What percentage of your core business applications run on IBM i?” (Source: Fortra’s 2025 IBM i Marketplace Survey)

The fraction of applications IBM i shops run on IBM i has remained fairly steady over the years. As you can tell from figure 1, the percentage of shops running nearly all of their apps on IBM i (76 percent to 100 percent) has hovered the low 40s for the past five years, and has come in at 43 percent the past two years. The fraction of shops running the bulk of their apps on IBM i (51 percent to 75 percent) has declined very slightly. Those running a minority of apps (25 percent to 50 percent) and not many apps (less than 25 percent) has remained mostly steady, just under 15 percent each.

Those figures did not surprise Steve Will, IBM’s chief architect and chief technology officer of IBM i.

“When I talk to our clients, they’re running their key business” on the IBM i, Will said during the Fortra webinar introducing the Marketplace results. “Sure there are a few who run more of their key business somewhere else, but most of the clients who engage with us, they’re running their business on IBM i. Essentially, we are a lower cost mainframe for them. And so that’s who our client base is, and it’s why we work so hard to make an integrated, high quality, high security system.”

Figure 2. “What are your plans for the IBM i platform?” (Source: Fortra’s 2025 IBM i Marketplace Survey)

When it comes to plans for their IBM i platforms, a solid 45 percent of the Marketplace Survey respondents indicated they had no plans to change, slightly up from last year and the highest since 2020, when 45 percent indicated the same. Some 20 percent said they had plans to increase their IBM i footprint, which is a sizable increase from last year, when 12 percent said they wanted to grow their IBM i workloads. As far as customers moving off the IBM i platform, 20 percent said they had plans to do that, with 12 percent saying they planned to migrate some workloads off IBM i and 8 percent saying they planned to migrate all their IBM i applications.

As you can see in Figure 2, the percentage of customers with plans to migrate some or all of their IBM i apps has stayed relatively constant over the past five years fluctuating between about 19 percent and 23 percent. Generally, a slightly higher percent of customers say they would like to migrate just some of their apps compared to those who want to completely abandon the platform. In 2023, Fortra introduced a new answer to this question: Stay on the IBM i but move to the cloud. That figure has stayed between 10 percent and 13 percent.

Figure 3. “When will you migrate all applications from IBM i?” (Source: Fortra’s 2025 IBM i Marketplace Survey)

As for the cohort of survey respondents who consistently say they have plans to move off the IBM i platform – 8 percent in 2025, but generally about 10 percent every year, give or take – Fortra has another question: What’s your timeline for getting off IBM i? The responses to this question have changed in a significant fashion over the past few years.

As you can see from Figure 3, back in 2020, 42 percent of the shops in this cohort said they wanted off IBM i in less than two years, while 37 percent said they planned to take two to five years, and 18 percent planned to take more than five years. That trend generally held true from 2020 to 2022.

But then something happened in 2023, when suddenly 33 percent wanted off IBM i within two years, and 48 percent were taking the longer view, with a two-to-five year migration, while only 7 percent planned to take more than five years. In 2025, a full 50 percent of shops who plan to migrate plan to get off within two to five years, while about 39 percent want off in the near term (less than two years), and a low of 4 percent plan to take the long view (more than five years).

You can see this change just by looking at the colors. The blue bars (less than two years) were dominant in years 1-3, while the orange bars (two to five years) were dominant in years 3-5. These numbers indicate that something has happened with the migration plans of IBM i shops. They’re generally favoring midrange migrations (no pun intended), as opposed to the quick migrations (less than two years) and the long goodbyes (five-years-plus).

Considering that most IBM i shops write their own applications (70 percent in the 2025 Marketplace Survey), the lengthening of these migrations indicates either a decreasing willingness to get off the platform or a decreasing capability to migrate. As we know, migrating core applications isn’t easy, whether it’s IBM i or any other applications. When it’s a custom application, or a highly modified version of a packaged application, the challenges of replicating all that customized functionality is even harder.

Will, the IBM Distinguished Engineer, sees this every year. “When you look at those people who say they’re going to leave . . . almost none of them do,” he says during the call. “What that tends to come from is, there is a new leader in that organization who comes in, doesn’t know the value of IBM i, sets some sort of direction that makes the people who are responding to this say, oh, my new leader is telling me I’m going to leave. We engage with a lot of those folks and eventually help them. The new executive sees the value that’s being brought to their business by the platform, and then they don’t end up leaving. So I understand where the 8 percent comes from [who say they will migrate entirely off IBM i], no doubt.”

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