This blog discusses considerations for those thinking about outsourcing “end of life” or “sunset” IBM i applications. I often hear these issues when speaking to larger Fortune 2000 clients that explore hosting their applications.
I was talking to a prospective hosting client the other day. He called because he is interested in moving his “end of life” IBM i applications off multiple IBM 9406-520 servers to a hosted solution.
Why?
Several reasons.
The BIG reason is to save money.
Yet there is more to it than that. (And the following is a familiar story… I hear it a lot.)
He works for a Fortune 500 company. In 2008, this firm decided to move to SAP and leave their IBM iSeries 9406-520’s by 2012.
What started as a $2 million implementation became a $12 million deployment. 2012 got moved to 2014, then to 2015.
Now at 2016, there are still key applications that run on the 9406-520s.
Realistically, does it make sense to spend another $2-$12 million on SAP to duplicate the remaining applications that run on the 9406-520s that only cost about $300,000 per year in support and data center fees?
Well, that is a corporate value judgement neither he nor I get to make.
We did, however, determine that by moving to a hosted solution we could save them $120,000 just in the first year. The savings get even bigger in subsequent years.
Here are the extra advantages by outsourcing to a hosted solution:
- New technology (faster new POWER8 vs. older POWER5)
- New OS Level (V7R2 vs V5R5 – which costs more to support…and IBM withdraws support October 1, 2016)
- Operational Expense – cloud hosting can be terminated at the clients convenience, if and when they are ready to pull the plug on the IBM i applications
- IBM i expert server management and support – to augment staff that will retire in the coming years
- Convenience of one key supplier to coordinate all the IBM i server management and support
Yes, I hear stories like this a lot from larger IBM i users.
I also asked why he happened to call us.
“Because your web site answered all my questions about what I needed to know. Sure, I looked at lots of other web sites. But yours was the only one that made it easy to get the information I needed to determine you would be the best place to start my research.”
Wow! What a compliment.
Application reliability , uptime and security should be of prime importance for any sustainable business model. People would prefer to have a slow (not true though) but a fool proof application . I-series for that matter has been used as a cloud application supporting multiple customer on POINT P&C applications.