IBM i Skills Shortage? IBM i (iSeries/AS400) Cloud Hosting Can Help

The purpose of this blog is to highlight how IBM i cloud hosting helps businesses that struggle to retain or access IBM i skills to support their critical business applications.

Disclaimer: IBM i is an operating system. iSeries and AS400 are servers. I use these terms interchangeably to make it easy for folks to find this kind of information on the web.

Background – Shrinking IBM i Talent Pool

A shrinking IBM i talent pool has accelerated over the past decade as more talent leaves this arena.?

Further, many organizations offered early retirement as a cost-saving measure -- a move that has made an already difficult situation worse.

We understand in 2015 that IBM top brass acknowledged dwindling IBM i talent pool contributed to revenue shortfalls.?

Despite a system that had been around for over three decades, the veterans leave for greener pastures.

The problem was, and continues to be, that fewer young professionals want to master the same set of skills.

Mistakes Made When Attempting To Close The IBM Skills Gap

What makes this challenge so difficult?

The answer is straight-forward. Managing IBM i is very different than managing Window, UNIX or Linux platforms, where the key building blocks are very similar.

Moving an IT professional with training on one platform to the IBM i project is akin to asking a car mechanic to start fixing commercial jets. Both machines have engines and run on fuel. But the similarities end there.

Struggles To Reassign, Train, Recruit And Retain IBM i Talent

That's not to say businesses haven't tried to find a fix to their talent woes.

One typical approach we see is shuffling IT workforce to pick up the IBM tasks as an add-on to existing responsibilities. On the surface this might appear to work. Nonetheless, serious troubles arise the moment something goes wrong -- or the new IBM i admin makes a mistake -- and you have no one around who knows how to fix it.

Another struggle is recruiting for the talent that does exist or investing heavily in your current team to skill up. In both cases, you are exposed losing prized IBM talent to the next highest bidder. Or simply investing an unrealistic, and unsustainable, portion of your budgets on retaining your top skills in house.

IBM i Cloud Hosting Offers A Better Solution

It doesn't have to be this way. Just think of your talent challenge like the cloud.

A key value of cloud hosting your critical IBM i applications is that the providers include IBM administration talent as part of their service. Consider that your business does not differentiate itself with infrastructure … so why focus on it?

Instead, use the built-in cloud hosting scale and efficiencies, so that you can focus your team elsewhere, on more strategic and profitable goals.

Fixing your IBM talent is a lot like that. Instead of spreading your existing team thin, or duking it out for high-demand talent, you can partner with an IBM i cloud hosting provider?to fill the gaps.

You can either continue to host your IBM workloads on premises, and benefit from remotely monitored and managed IBM i services. Or, you can go for a full, cloud-hosted approach. While both solutions have their upsides, co-location and cloud solutions have a few added benefits. On one hand, your team no longer needs to perform any of the regular, manual maintenance and updates, such as switching out tapes or running backups. On the other, you get instant access to a series of gold-standard best practices and security features, such as redundancies, consistent backups?and seamless recovery options.

Conclusion

The war for IBM talent is nothing new. But there's simply no reason to try and close the gaps the old-fashioned way -- especially if your business is focused on increasing innovation, agility and resilience in the years ahead.

?If you are looking for access to IBM i expertise, the latest IBM technologies or a secure reliable resilient environment,?

Call me at 714-593-0387 or email me at?[email protected]. Let us know how we can help!

To learn more about us, and view our customer testimonials, please visit our website:?www.Source-Data.com