Talsco Weekly: RPG Retirement Wave - 5-Year Outlook

Welcome to another edition of Talsco Weekly

IBM i Brief: 🏆 IBM Champion nominations now open. ⚠️ IBM i 7.4 sales ending, upgrade urgently.
AI: 🔄 HashiCorp links hybrid systems for AI growth. 🛗 GitHub Copilot significantly boosts dev productivity.
Career: 👨‍💻 Young talent bringing fresh skills to IBM i.
Development: 👨‍💻 RPG evolved from cycles to explicit code. 🔄 PHP/Node.js integration without latency.
Data: 🗣️ AI dashboard enables natural conversations with data.
ERP: 💼 Migration risks include knowledge loss, personnel exodus.
Leadership: ◼️ True leadership transformation begins from within.
Learning: 🔍 Security software tracks Windows access to IFS.
Modernization: 📅 Webinar addresses IBM i strategy solutions: how indecision has paralyzed decision making.

IBM i Brief

IBM is seeking tech advocates for its 2026 Champions program, offering VIP “blue jacket” recognition to those making an impact through knowledge sharing, mentoring, community leadership, and innovation.

The program rewards IBM technology experts who influence products and help others maximize their IBM investments. Nominations close November 21, with current Champions receiving renewal information in October.

A powerful community video highlights how Champions connect through their shared mission of helping others succeed.

⚠️ IBM ends IBM i 7.4 sales soon

IBM announced it will stop selling IBM i 7.4 and related system programs on April 30, 2026. This withdrawal from marketing signals the impending end of standard support, likely in September 2026 or 2027.

There are two charts here to look at that are quite interesting. 📊 Organizations using older releases will lose IBM i 7.4 as a stepping stone to current versions. Customers must now prepare to either pay for expensive extended support or upgrade to IBM i 7.5/7.6 on newer hardware.

Key Insights: The IBM i market can be segmented into two distinct groups:

A relatively small group of forward-looking customers (~25–40% on IBM i 7.4 and newer)
A much larger group of laggards (~60–75%) who are stuck on older OS releases

Action Steps: With IBM i 7.4 now withdrawn from marketing and nearing the end of standard support, those laggards lose a critical “stepping stone” path to modern versions (7.5/7.6).

This raises the urgency for upgrades, because falling further behind will make it harder and riskier to catch up, widening the gap between progressive adopters and those resisting change.

So, what is the IBM i market waiting for?

AI

🔄 HashiCorp bridges AI-infrastructure gap

HashiCorp, an IBM company, unveiled Project infragraph at its 10th conference, offering a unified control plane for hybrid cloud environments.

The tool creates a real-time infrastructure graph connecting systems, applications, and policies to help enterprises safely scale AI.

Key Takeaway: Advanced AI requires rethinking infrastructure 🤔

This article caught my attention, not necessarily because of its relevance to IBM and AI, but rather because of the following:

The path to AI adoption in enterprise can look a lot like the path to cloud adoption. “When we saw people go to cloud, at first, they treated it as ‘Hey, it’s just a managed data center,’” Dadgar said. “‘I’m just going to take my same mental model and the way I operate in my data center, and I’m going to move it to cloud.’ What we saw was that if that was your approach to cloud, you didn’t get any benefits.”

This perspective perfectly applies to AI implementation in businesses. Too often, organizations try to force AI into existing workflows and legacy systems, hoping for transformative results without transforming their approaches.

Just as with cloud adoption, the real power of AI emerges when we’re willing to reimagine processes and systems rather than simply digitizing or automating what we already do.

The question becomes not “How can AI fit into our current model?” but “What new capabilities and workflows can AI enable that weren’t possible before?”

What do you think?

🛗 GitHub Copilot elevates developer efficiency

GitHub Copilot is transforming how IBM i developers work by bringing AI assistance into daily coding practices. For those unfamiliar with this tool, here’s how it’s making developers more efficient:

Key Areas Where Copilot Helps:

Test generation: Suggests unit tests or test stubs when given requirements or code context.
Front-end development: Accelerates UI coding by offering component suggestions and boilerplate implementations.
DevOps support: Generates configuration files and scripts (e.g., for GitHub Actions or GitLab CI/CD) that can be used to streamline pipelines.
Code review assistance: Highlights potential issues, suggests improvements, and helps maintain coding consistency.

Getting Started Tips:

Provide Copilot with clear requirements and code context for better results.
Begin with smaller, well-defined tasks to learn how it responds.
Use it to reduce repetitive coding and free up time for complex problem-solving.

By integrating GitHub Copilot into your IBM i development workflow, you can accelerate coding, improve consistency, and focus more on innovation while leaving repetitive boilerplate to the AI.

👉 Note: VS Code is the editor; Copilot is the AI assistant inside the editor.

Have you tried GitHub Copilot in your IBM i development work? What has your experience been?

Career

👨‍💻 New generation revitalizes IBM i platform

Young developers are breathing fresh life into the IBM i ecosystem, bringing modern skills and perspectives to this established platform.

Despite its reputation as legacy technology, a growing number of millennials and Gen Z professionals are discovering IBM i's robust capabilities for enterprise computing.

This demographic shift is creating a bridge between traditional RPG programming and contemporary development approaches like open source, web services, and mobile integration, ensuring IBM i remains relevant for decades to come.

Development

👨‍💻 Understanding RPG's evolution clarifies its future

RPG cycle programming revolutionized development by handling implicit loops and report generation with minimal code. While efficient for its era, this approach now feels restrictive compared to modern free-form RPG.

Legacy cycle code continues running many IBM i systems, but its implicit logic creates maintenance challenges for today's developers. Understanding this evolution helps programmers confidently refactor older code while appreciating RPG's significant growth toward explicit, readable programming practices.

Curious to learn more about RPG cycle programming, why it worked then and why it doesn't work now?

🔄 PHP and Node.js unite seamlessly

This might sit a little outside of the IBM i, but I thought it might be relevant for the PHP and Node.js gurus in our community, and those who are genuinely curious about cross-platform integration.

Here is a php-node module bridges the gap between PHP and Node.js, allowing developers to embed PHP directly within Node.js applications.

This Rust-based solution routes requests to PHP instances running in Node's worker pool, leveraging multi-threaded processing without network latency. The integration enables gradual migration from legacy PHP applications while maintaining access to PHP's ecosystem alongside Node's performance advantages.

Data

🗣️ AI lets factory workers chat with data

The IBM i vendor community is stepping up. Here is a quick read about how one vendor is stepping in and leveraging AI in a natural way — allowing their users to chat with their data.

Crossroads RMC's NextTrack Analytics Dashboard, debuting at inPOWER 2025, transforms how shopfloor supervisors interact with manufacturing data.

Using natural language queries powered by GPT-4.1 on Azure, workers can simply ask questions like "Which machines are down?" instead of interpreting charts. The modernized version 3 dashboard replaces traditional visuals with conversational AI, enabling non-technical users to extract actionable insights from ERP databases directly from their tablets.

We are seeing this trend in the IBM i ERP where transformation starts with the ERP system you already trust.

ERP

💼 The Hidden Costs of ERP Migration: What They Won't Tell You

Many organizations are attempting to migrate away from their IBM i systems, only to discover the transition is far more challenging than initially portrayed. These systems, built and refined over three to four decades, carry significant operational inertia that's difficult to overcome.

During a recent check-in call with one of our consultants, we discussed the significant unintended consequences and downstream risks that ERP migrations frequently create.

This conversation highlighted several concerns that align with what we're seeing in the market.

📖“One particularly concerning risk is the potential loss of key personnel during these transitions. After enduring year-long stretches of 70-hour work weeks, valuable team members often choose to leave—taking their irreplaceable institutional knowledge with them. What's most surprising is how rarely consulting firms address these substantial risks upfront. This lack of transparency creates unrealistic expectations and can lead to costly project failures. Before embarking on an ERP migration journey, organizations should conduct thorough risk assessments that account for these human and knowledge-retention factors.”

Does this sound familiar to you?

Leadership

◼️ Discover true leadership by looking inward, not outward

Conventional leadership advice has it backward—focusing on external traits and techniques when real transformation begins within.

"Reality is always wiser than the stories we've made up about it."

The Patterns of Conscious Leadership offers sixteen doorways to shift from leading through projections to leading through presence.

Learning

🔍 IBM i monitors Windows file operations

Security software tracks transactions through the QIBM_QPWFS_FILE_SERV exit point when Windows systems access the IBM i Integrated File System (IFS).

The article highlights how basic operations like creating, opening, moving, and deleting files generate different exit point codes. Windows Explorer proves particularly "chatty," generating numerous transactions for simple actions.

This layered security approach provides defense-in-depth by monitoring and controlling file access beyond basic object-level permissions.

Modernization

📅 Webinar: "What Are We Waiting For? Breaking the IBM i Deadlock"

IBM i Strategy Webinar

Join us on October 15, 2025 for a candid expert panel tackling the question on every IBM i leader's mind: "What are we waiting for?" The IBM i talent landscape is undergoing a seismic shift.

Fast forward to 2030, how many RPG developers in your department will have retired, taking decades of institutional knowledge with them?

Yet many organizations remain paralyzed by indecision, caught between competing priorities and management objections of what to do next.

In this power-packed session, our panel of IBM i experts will:

Quantify the true cost of delaying your IBM i strategy
Provide actionable frameworks to overcome common management objections
Share proven approaches to transform talent acquisition from expense to strategic investment
Reveal why waiting for the "perfect moment" is the riskiest strategy of all
Demonstrate effective training & mentoring programs to accelerate knowledge transfer
Showcase how leveraging existing and modern tooling can amplify your team's productivity

Whether you're facing resistance to modernization, struggling to justify staff or technology investments, or simply trying to break through organizational inertia, this discussion will arm you with the insights and arguments needed to move forward confidently.

The talent crisis isn't coming—it's already here. Will you address it proactively, or wait until your options are limited and costly? Register now.

Join

Contact us

If you are an RPG programmer looking to explore opportunities or a client who is looking for a talented IBM i professional, please contact us.

We look forward to assisting you.

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Thank you!

Do you know of someone who could benefit from Talsco Weekly? If so, please use the social media buttons to spread the word. Thank you!