I'm hearing now that RPG and the iSeries will be making a big comeback this year. Apparently over 70% of IBM's customer base owns an AS/400 or iSeries box in addition to whatever else (if anything) they have. In addition, a huge percentage of those shops are focusing on building or maintaining custom, in-house applications. This is good news to the RPG world; let's hope it means better employment opportunities for AS/400 and iSeries professionals.

Remember the infamous application backlog? I haven't heard that term lately, but it was, in fact, this very issue that put a number of AS/400 software vendors into business. Many earned a living helping AS/400 customers catch up on some of that backlog by installing their code generators, query tools, and application development environments in AS/400 shops. Some of vendors that got their start on the iSeries architecture, along with their primary product, include but are not limited to the list below. (Author's Note: See the MC Press Online Vendor Directory for an extensive list of iSeries and AS/400 solutions vendors.)

• ProGen from BCD Int'l, Inc.
• mrc-Productivity Series from michaels, ross & cole, ltd.
• SEQUEL from Advanced Systems Concepts, Inc.
• LANSA from LANSA Inc.

These vendors are still going strong, and sales are better than ever. The iSeries announcements of late further emphasize IBM's commitment to the OS/400 platform. This means building and maintaining great new applications for iSeries is the right direction to be going. Clearly, Web-enabling new and existing applications is also a key element in any application development strategy.

iSeries application development is getting stronger. New customers are finally realizing what longtime AS/400 and iSeries customers have know all along: There is no more stable and reliable platform for which you can develop applications. What other platform (save an expensive mainframe) can you identify that has given you the same level of security and dependability as OS/400 architecture systems? Many of you are running some of the same applications you were 20+ years ago. Most of those old applications run unchanged even on today's most advanced iSeries systems.

Interactive applications need to be modernized. We call this application modernization; some people call it program maintenance. Regardless of the term you favor, our surveys show that most iSeries shops have application modernization in their plans for the first half of 2003.

The good news is that whatever we don't finish this year or next will still be running (without significant change if any change at all) long after you and I have retired. Can you name one Windows NT platform application that you can say that about?

I'm very optimistic about the OS/400 market this year--both from an end-user and an employment perspective. Many OS/400 applications will be getting facelifts with new, easier-to-use interfaces, perhaps with a browser or XML front-end. And the employment market will be better as companies begin hiring qualified RPG programmers to help fulfill their application backlogs. As for the software vendors, many are expecting a good year. They see the new announcements as an opportunity for longtime AS/400 customers to upgrade to iSeries hardware. This should give customers more capacity, which should allow more applications to be created and run on those iSeries boxes. The software packages mentioned in this article, along with many others, may be used to help create those new applications more quickly. All signs point up for the iSeries market.

Bob Cozzi is a programmer/consultant, writer/author, and software developer. His popular RPG xTools add-on subprocedure library for RPG IV is fast becoming a standard with RPG developers. His book The Modern RPG Language has been the most widely used RPG programming book for more than a decade. He, along with others, speaks at and produces the highly popular RPG World conference for RPG programmers.

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