Application development today is a very different world from 10 or 20 years ago. As organisations embrace the microservices model, it’s become common practice to stitch together a patchwork of best-of-breed services from multiple vendors, rather than build everything from scratch.
On the face of it, this modern approach seems completely incompatible with the traditional monolithic applications that many businesses have built on the IBM Power platform. As a result, while these systems have been running successfully in production and delivering value for decades, they often get dismissed as “legacy code”.
There’s even a school of thought that companies should be looking to retire their IBM Power systems and replace their applications with off-the-shelf packages and SaaS software.
I’d argue that this would be a big mistake.
Preserving a treasury of corporate knowledge
In a classic article on software development, “Things You Should Never Do, Part I”, Joel Spolsky argues that rewriting a system from scratch is “the single worst strategic mistake that any software company can make”.
When a developer looks at an old codebase, it’s bound to be full of weird, complicated logic that doesn’t immediately make sense, and it’s tempting to start again with a simpler, cleaner version. But the reason it got so complex is that over the years, developers have encountered and addressed all the strange use-cases that weren’t obvious when the system was first designed.
As Spolsky writes, “When you throw away code and start from scratch, you are throwing away all that knowledge. All those collected bug fixes. Years of programming work.”
This is equally true when companies decide to replace a system that they’ve built and refined over many years with an off-the-shelf product. What you get off-the-shelf is not what your business needs; it’s just the vendor’s best guess at what an average business like yours might need. To get a solution that really fits your requirements, you will have to customise it extensively just to get the same functionality you already have in your existing system.
Meanwhile, you’ve thrown away decades of investment and corporate knowledge, and replaced a rock-solid reliable system with something that only partially works for your business.
The number of times I have heard that we trialled another solution however, it is missing ‘x’ functionality that the business needs, or we are having to revert and redesign using alternative way is always growing.
Challenging assumptions
We need to challenge the idea that you can either have a traditional IBM Power application or a microservices architecture, but not both. In fact, this is a not true.
Creating a microservices architecture is possible because we now have the concept of open standards for application programming interfaces (APIs) between systems. Standards such as REST make it possible for any system to communicate with any other system using well-defined protocols such as HTTP. It doesn’t matter what hardware your application runs on, or what programming language it’s written in: if it can make and receive API calls, you can treat it just like any other microservice.
This has been available for years but requires understanding of how it can be adopted. However, as the Alex Woodie reviews the Forta marketplace study shows the recent trend of why customers are realising it’s not a easy to migrate “what the marketplace study says about ibm i migrations and outlook”.
In another article we can see the important of needing these APIs , “Why API-Based Architecture Is the Foundation of Modern Software” which demonstrates a need to be saleability and flexible.
At Meridian IT, we’ve worked on a wide range of projects to help our clients integrate their IBM Power applications into the API economy. For example, we helped one business expand its operations internationally by integrating its bespoke IBM Power ERP system with Lazada, a hugely popular e-commerce platform that serves 300 million customers across Southeast Asia. We’ve also just helped another client link their ERP application with Australia Post’s APIs, enabling them to ship their products faster and more effectively throughout Australia.
If you’d like to learn more about how Meridian IT can help you protect your years of investment in the IBM Power platform, extend the value of your core applications, migrate to IBM Power 11 and seize competitive advantage in today’s API economy, please contact your Meridian IT Client Director or myself ([email protected]) for a chat.
