The IBM i RPG Crisis Decade

There are many IBM i shops for whom the persistence of their legacy RPG applications is a growing concern. The aging, and pending retirement, of many RPG programmers is diminishing the RPG talent pool. Many of our customers have expressed concerns about finding RPG talent. These customers are worried about how to persist their business-critical RPG applications in a world where RPG programmers are a precious, shrinking resource.

IBM i hardware will likely persist for a long time, however, the same can’t be said for the RPG programming talent needed to keep legacy RPG systems running. Many RPG programmers are reaching retirement now and many more within the next few years; and there are very few young RPG programmers in the pipeline to take their place. Good hardware doesn’t do you much good if your critical software can’t be maintained and enhanced.

It’s vital to your business that you give this issue some critical thought. Persisting your business hangs in the balance.

Good-bye, boomer #

By 2030, nearly all RPG talent will have retired. Let that sink in.

The aging workforce means finding RPG programmers will be challenging and costly. Young programmers are not entering the field, and the IBM i and RPG are not included in contemporary IT education.

According to the Forta 2024 IBM i Marketplace Survey, 70% of respondents report using homegrown IBM i applications. Many others use RPG ERP packages for which they long-ago acquired the source code. Without decisive action, businesses that depend on these RPG applications face an impending crisis.

Let’s generalize a little and assume that today’s typical IBM i RPG programmer was born in 1955. That makes that typical RPG programmer 70 years old in 2025. Many boomers today are working beyond the traditional US retirement age of 65, but very few are working past 70.

The rapidly disappearing RPG programmer is a big challenge for IBM i-centric businesses deeply dependent on its RPG applications. Offshore outsourcing may offer some respite to the RPG programmer shortage. However, not only does using offshore outsourcing dramatically change your RPG maintenance/enhancement workflow it imposes substantially communication challenges, cultural considerations, and a general imposition on your RPG programming comfort zone.

Can you trust your IBM i RPG team's advice? #

You need reliable and solid input about your IBM i RPG application to make effective decisions about it. Unfortunately, those who know the most about your application can’t always be counted on to provide you with the most critical, effective input.

In most IBM i-centric businesses, RPG team leaders have been intimately involved with this RPG application for many years—-often several decades. For many, your RPG applications are quite literally their life’s work. They are deeply invested and their strongly held opinions about it are often formed emotionally, not logically or rationally.

The conundrum is that while these are the only folks who fully understand your RPG application, they are often not the best input source as to what you should do about that application. You need cold, logical, rational advice and they often think with their heart, not their head. Consider the factors below.

• Your questions could make them defensive. Most decades-old RPG applications were created by on-staff RPG programmers. These RPG coders did amazing work and that these applications are in use decades later is a testament to that fact. However, as you start to probe and consider the future of their RPG application, it’s only natural for these programmers to be protective of their creation. Their defense mechanisms will likely cloud their objective thinking.

• You are challenging their comfort zone. It may also be that for many RPG team leaders it is easier to defer decisions than to make them. Many RPG programmers are deep into a decades-old comfort zone and the notion of disrupting that comfort zone isn’t very appealing. Rather than be challenged, many would rather ride out the last few active years of their career doing simple maintenance tasks that don’t stretch the bounds of their technical expertise.

• PC programmers are threatening. It isn’t true for all shops, but for many (many!) shops, it’s likely that little peace and harmony exists between RPG programmers and PC programming teams. The thought of a bunch of busy-bee, egghead PC programmers (at least as perceived by many RPG coders) looking over their shoulder asking, “why?, why?, why?” will not engage their willful cooperation in any application persistence initiative.

Your RPG source and your RPG team are enormous assets! #

What is a decision maker to do? It’s a challenging topic that has no magic answer. We’ve seen many real-world examples of the personas we’ve cited above many times. They can be destructive forces that can cost an organization a lot of time and money. However, when guided correctly, your RPG team can be enormous assets as you chart your business’s course.

Your RPG source code is key #

The custom processes and workflows that ensure your business delivers its unique business value to your customers and business partners are locked inside your RPG applications. Rarely, if ever, are these critical RPG applications formally documented. Rather, the secrets, the work-arounds, and the data flows that keep your business ticking are locked inside the heads of your RPG programming team. And the folks that have all this knowledge are very near retirement. Therefore, your RPG source is the irrefutable single source of truth for how your business application’s workflows, database access, and processes work.

At ASNA, we think your RPG source code presents the only rational path to avoid the IBM i and RPG’s pending decade of reckoning. There are many benefits to using your RPG source code to migrate that application to .NET:

• High fidelity. Your RPG business logic and database is mechanically transformed (using your RPG source code as input) into a .NET application with high fidelity with the business rules and workflows in the original RPG application.

• Knowledge transfer. Your RPG coders will be actively engaged in this language transformation and can transfer their community knowledge of your application to your younger programming team.

• The cloud beckons. Microsoft’s Azure has established itself as a leader in cloud computing. Migrating your RPG to .NET and DB2 database to Microsoft SQL Server provides a first-class path to get your most critical business application to the cloud. Microsoft’s cloud offerings are scalable and reliable.

• Business workflow persistence. Migrating your existing RPG application ensures that your critical business workflows not only persist, but persist as your organization expects them to. You’ll have no troublesome business challenges to resolve as you struggle to adapt to a new system because this new system faithfully does business the way your old system did.

RPG refreshed #

Many ASNA migration customers want to migrate their existing RPG application directly to C#—and ASNA can do that. However, we’ve learned that for some customers, especially with those with active RPG teams working with the C# team during the migration, producing C# directly makes it harder for RPG teams to pass on community knowledge about the application to C# programmers.

To help with that issue, an ASNA migration targets either Encore RPG or C# initially. Encore RPG is a .NET language with an RPG freeform-like syntax that has high fidelity with C# idioms and the .NET Framework. Encore RPG makes a great initial migration target language because the RPG programmers initially recognize their code and C# programmers can also easily understand it.

Once the RPG programmers are signed out for the last time and the application is fully in the hands of C# programmers, it is trivial to convert an Encore RPG migration to C#.

ASNA application migration #

Migrating a large IBM i RPG application is a big job. We’ve been doing it since 2004 and have learned a lot along the way. We have two primary migration solutions:

• Monarch. Monarch provides a rich suite of application discovery and migration features. Monarch migrates hand-written RPG to Microsoft .NET. Beyond transforming RPG to Encore RPG or C#, Monarch also includes a robust analytical component that provides dependency charts, call diagrams, and other information needed for a successful migration.

• Synon Escape. Synon Escape, a superset of our Monarch migration suite, migrates Synon-generated applications. Generated applications provide special challenges for migration. Synon Escape’s model-driven approach produces readable and maintainable C#.

Migration alternatives are risky bets at best #

Having determined that your IBM i RPG software is nearing the end of its useful life, beyond migrating your applications, rewriting your RPG applications or replacing them with a canned ERP are potential alternatives.

We’ve discussed persisting IBM i RPG applications with many customers. When discussing rewriting the application, the most common reasons we hear for wanting to rewrite the organization’s software are:

• Our old code base is a mess and no one understands it.

• We can make it faster and add more features.

• We didn’t understand what we needed then and we do now.

• Our programming team is smarter now and has broader programming skills.

Reasons to rewrite the application are almost always focused on the programmer domain; rarely on the business domain. Programmers love to write new software, use new tools, and explore uncharted territories. Programmers can tell you many ways rewriting the software will benefit them. However, reasons why the rewrite is good for the business are much harder to identify.

Failure is always an option #

A September 2024 article on CIO Dive quotes a recent Forrester survey: “Nine in 10 rewrite projects don’t succeed on their initial attempt and more than half of respondents said multiple failures stalled broader digital transformation initiatives.”

Although it was written more than a decade ago, Dharmesh Shah very clearly explains “Why You Should (Almost) Never Rewrite Your Software” on his blog.

Replacing RPG with an ERP is also risky #

If attempting the rewrite is too risky, how about replacing your application of record with an existing ERP? That also has a high failure rate. A September 2024 article on IT Jungle quotes Eric Kimberling, CEO of a digital transformation organization as saying, “70 percent to 80 percent of ERP implementations or digital transformations are failures.”

A risky venture #

Part of the root cause of high failure rates with either option is fully understanding what is being rewritten or replaced. RPG applications are nearly always poorly documented. In virtually every case, the single source of truth for your application resides in your RPG source code. An application migration is able to faithfully reproduce the RPG application’s business rules and data flows from that source. You need to manually deeply investigate, and then thoroughly test, when rewriting or replacing the application.

Rewriting enterprise software is a challenging, long-term endeavor. You need to investigate this alternative from every angle and have very realistic expectations. While a big rewrite isn’t guaranteed to fail, the odds are it won’t succeed. It will not only waste money, but perhaps more importantly, time.

IBM is little help persisting your estate RPG application #

IBM has rebranded the IBM i as a leader in open-source application development, but this does little to assist organizations who are losing RPG talent to persist those critical RPG applications. IBM’s (ten-year old!) Modernization Redbook offers guidance for rewriting RPG applications, but it fails to address the shortage of skilled RPG programmers and how its customers keep their RPG programs running in that vacuum.

Ultimately, IBM’s initiatives support the platform but not the persistence of existing RPG applications. Organizations must take their modernization strategies into their own hands. ASNA is your partner to help mitigate these challenges.

It's your move #

• ASNA has the tools, the engineers, planners, and experience needed to ensure your business avoids its RPG crisis.

• We have more than 20 years’ experience migration RPG applications to .NET.

• Our migration tools are mature and very effective. We can migrate 99% of your code without touching it by hand.

• The target database can be either the IBM i or Microsoft SQL Server.

• We are the only company that offers a staged migration where the user interface is first transformed to Web pages and then later migrate the application itself (using the previously transformed UI).

• Monarch targets either Encore RPG or C# directly. If you initially target RPG, it can trivially be converted to C# later for long-term use by your C# programmers.

Your RPG programmers aren’t getting any younger! We can help you avoid your IBM i decade of crisis.