January 17, 2022

Alex Woodie

Due to an unprecedented response from the community, we are running a third installment of the 2022 forecast. The third (and final) forecast set kicks off with an optimistic prophecy from Charles Guarino, the president of Central Park Data Systems, who has many very good prospects for the coming year in the IBM i country.

“As business confidence and optimism rally, IT budgets will become less constrained,” says Guarino. computer jungle. “Even those with the least maintained and least improved legacy systems will experience pressure to modernize. This will come from all sources, internal, external and industry compliance, all demanding new features and functions fast.

“Another motivating factor will be the realization of technical debt, its effects on application flexibility, and the dwindling supply of senior developers who can maintain an outdated codebase,” he continues. “Companies can turn to existing proven digital transformation roadmaps to help solve even the most demanding demands and workloads.”

“With the growing ubiquity of open source solutions, more non-traditional developers will find a permanent place on the platform,” concludes Guarino. “Finally, third-party offerings will experience a surge in demand for their services and solutions.”

Marinus van Sandwyk, founder and CEO of TEMBO Technology Lab, gives us no less than five predictions for 2022.

“1. There will be growing recognition of the importance and value of data quality and integrity in our legacy (legacy) application resources when exploring AI and ML initiatives .

“2. 2022 could prove to be a turning point for initiating a fundamental modernization of legacy software assets or being forced to replace business applications to stay relevant and competitive in the rapidly changing digital business world.

“3. The rate of acquisitions and consolidation in the ISV space will intensify, especially in the middleware and tool space.

“4. The retirement and health of aging IBM i development resources will force IBM i facilities to carefully consider sensible approaches to renewing their development teams. Attracting and training young developers will be an important differentiator in the medium and long term.

“5. There will be increasing recognition and effort to leverage the treasure of native IBM i operating system functions and architecture and the price paid for PASE-based solutions.

It’s been a few years upside down, that’s for sure. What are the chances of things returning to normal in 2022? According to Robin Tatam, Director of Security Technology at HelpSystems, they are no good.

“The world was turned upside down at the onset of the global pandemic, but with hope that life would eventually return to pre-COVID normalcy,” Tatam writes. “The reality is that there is now a new normal and life will probably never return to the way we knew before.”

When it comes to security, security teams have had to pivot quickly to deal with new threats in 2021. In 2022, Tatam predicts these things will happen:

“1. Criminals will continue to attack the expanded landscape of devices and connections they were empowered with in March 2020 when many organizations transitioned to a remote workforce.

“2. Energy technology, as well as the IBM i operating system, enjoys the (arguably unrealistic) expectation of complete immunity from attack afforded by electronic border protection. Security personnel will no longer be satisfied with this one-dimensional layer of protection. In 2022, securing IBM i will mean both securing the Power Systems server itself and securing the systems that connect to it.

“3. Cybersecurity insurance providers will increasingly require basic security hygiene or customers will face dramatically increased policy costs or complete denial of coverage.

“4. The Great Resignation will continue throughout 2022. Organizations will be challenged to hold the line as silverback employees become harder to retain and qualified replacements become harder to acquire. All this in the face of an increasing volume of threats from an increasingly capable enemy.

The world of app development is changing rapidly, and 2022 will be no exception in this regard, according to the folks at LANSA, who see a more strategic transformation of the workplace, greater focus on mobile development, adoption of low-code tools and Security.

“Due to the early effects of the pandemic for businesses in 2020 and the first half of 2021, we have seen an increase in demand for tactical application modernization tools,” writes LANSA. “For the second half of 2021, we saw a shift towards more strategic investments in application modernization for longer-term solutions. These solutions have better adaptability to dynamic changes in the business environment with more automation and integration options.

“As web technologies such as Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) mature, we expect even greater growth in mobile app investments,” the company continues. “Field service workers are demanding better and more efficient mobile apps. Labor shortages and social distancing measures will continue to force companies to invest in employee efficiency to meet demand, service level agreements and quality expectations.

“AI and IoT technologies will drive low code demand in 2022 for IBM i,” they write. “Low-code has a natural ability to integrate these technologies with reduced time to market. Building custom business applications with minimal coding reduces technical debt and brings IT closer to the business.

“The Log4j zero-day vulnerability has affected even the ever-safe IBM i architecture, drawing increased attention to security, a reminder that it is only as strong as its weakest link. We anticipate that a renewed interest in security will be on the agenda of all IT managers and CIOs this year. »

Ransomware and cyberattacks will grow and become even more aggressive in 2022, says Amal MacDonald, who works in security solutions at Fresche Solutions.

“Organizations will struggle to identify attacks as they happen and before it’s too late,” MacDonald writes. “We will see a dramatic increase in breaches of core systems due to security misconfigurations, authorization errors and lack of adequate coverage. This will trigger an increase in security audits, services and better tools as organizations strive to protect their most important IT assets and safeguard their business.

Within the personnel department, the departure of professionals from IBM i worries a little Fresche CTO John Clark.

“Twenty percent of IBM i resources will retire in 2022, taking with them essential skills, knowledge and know-how,” Clark says. “Companies leveraging these systems will need special talent to help them bridge the gap between the technologies they have in-house today and the technologies they need to cultivate to stay competitive. The application, database, and infrastructure are now developed and managed very differently than when many IBM i systems were originally deployed. There will be a massive need for people who can understand these critical business systems and share the vision of how to move forward, while preserving the value found in these IBM i systems.

With the refresh cycle starting again, happy days are ahead, predicts Ash Giddings, product manager at Maxava.

“2022 promises to be an exciting year for those using IBM i with the continued rollout of Power10 coupled with the release of V7R5, further advancing the platform in performance, reliability and highly anticipated features,” says Giddings. “We will continue to see a slight increase in migrations to the IBM i cloud, but where these have primarily been in development and test partitions to date, we will start to see more workloads from production environments. and transactional migrate. The cloud has changed the HA/DR landscape and we expect to see a further increase in the number of IBM i environments using the cloud for their disaster recovery efforts to reduce their data center footprint.

Open source technology in general flourishes on IBM i. But Mike Pavlak, senior solutions engineer at Perforce, sees one particular project having a particularly good year in 2022.

“PHP is not only alive and well, but experiencing a real renaissance,” says Pavlak. “There is a tremendous amount of effort to bring in new blood, especially with the PHP Foundation, which has generated an impressive level of interest in sponsorship and participation.”

“While web development is the de facto standard for IBM i applications, APIs will support hybrid cloud if the configuration of aspects such as authentication and provisioning can be decided,” he said. declared. “In fact, the ‘API-first’ architecture is gaining traction with our services team as we help our clients modernize PHP.”

“IBM controls and has always been a beacon in this space, but the landscape is blurred by the organic and flexible nature of open source alternatives,” Pavlak continues. “Open source will continue to dominate the excitement landscape on the platform by stimulating new projects and talent. Finally, security will continue to be paramount as remote working remains commonplace.

Cloud database migrations are on the rise. In the world of enterprise computing, hybrid cloud adoption for core systems will be the name of the game, says Zeev Avidan, chief product officer at OpenLegacy.

“To satisfy the need for faster digital transformations, enterprises need to embrace their core (legacy) systems in new ways,” says Avidan. “A hybrid cloud infrastructure that incorporates both cloud aspects and legacy systems working together as a unified whole without users having to worry about where one ends and the next begins.”

“This unified solution only works when legacy logic and data are easily accessible through native cloud services in an automated fashion,” he continues. “Many companies are now recognizing the need to take this hybrid approach and simplify their work with legacy systems.”

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