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October 26, 2022
Alex Woody
Rocket Software’s new IBM i portfolio manager, Puneet Kohli, has no illusions about how easy it is to grow sales of IBM i software. “This is not the kind of place where he wakes up one morning and the CIO says, ‘I’m going to buy a product at i,’” he says Kohli. But is there a well-thought-out strategy for achieving DevOps and application modernization in hybrid he cloud environments?
It’s been almost a year since Rocket Software founder Andy Youniss stepped down from the day-to-day management of the company he led for 31 years, paving the way for Vice President Milan Shetti to take over as CEO. .
Since then, the company has reorganized its three business divisions. Power Systems, Z Systems, and Database and Connectivity business units are gone. Instead, we have Application Modernization, Infrastructure Modernization, and Data Modernization business units. As head of his IBM i portfolio within the Application Modernization Division under General Manager P. Gary Gregory, Kohli’s job is to adapt Rocket’s broad existing product set to meet the ever-changing goals of his IBM i users. figuring out how to map base.
Kohli, who has been with Rocket for four and a half years, said during a recent trip to COMMON’s NAViGATE conference in St. Louis, Missouri, during conversations with customers, that three big customer goals revolve around DevOps. It seems that Application Modernization, and Hybrid His Cloud.
“We have customers who say they need to modernize their applications, they don’t have to look for DevOps, they just need to find the most cost-effective place to modernize their applications: solutions and modernization solutions,” Kohli said. increase. “This is the kind of change we are seeing in the market. [says] You need a vendor that can help you not only from a modernization perspective, but also from a DevOps perspective. Because you’ll be there eventually, whether it’s two years or five years. ”
This is one change Kohli detected. Another shift involves a shift in focus from the purely on-premises deployments that have dominated enterprise IT for the last 40 years to customers who are beginning to move some of their assets to cloud environments.
Rocket understands that moving to the cloud isn’t easy for IBM i shops. IBM i shops cannot migrate applications to the public cloud as easily as customers running core applications on Windows and Linux. It has a rich and reliable X86 infrastructure, and IBM Power runtimes (including IBM i and AIX) are virtually nonexistent against AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud (among other cloud providers). plug.
But with a strategy of avoiding IBM i shops and edges and moving some IBM i workloads to private cloud providers with IBM i runtimes, such as Skytap, Kohli says the cloud story is starting to resonate. I noticed that there is
“They say I have to go to the cloud,” he says. IT jungle“The CIO showed up and said we needed a cloud or hybrid cloud strategy.
As Kohli says, the cloud is positioned as a way to make the most of the remaining IBM i skills and expertise in IBM i shops. Many of these organizations are understaffed relative to their X86 peers, and those remaining in these organizations with IBM i expertise are being promoted to development roles and side is missing.
“I joined NAViGATE last week,” says Kohli, formally Vice President of Engineering. proceeded. This legacy application is now complete. you don’t know how to manage it. Operations personnel at least have the best knowledge to manage the application. ”
Having someone as both a developer and administrator may be appropriate for some smaller organizations. But among public companies subject to the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which requires separation of duties between Dev and Ops, this is a major prohibition. This is one of the factors affecting the current staffing shortage. It’s also a potential opportunity for vendors like Rocket, who ultimately want to sell their software, not just help their customers.
Rocket has a Git-based DevOps solution that supports the entire IBM i development lifecycle called Aldon DevOps. This is one of the mid-range he marketplaces with the most long-lived and complete application modernization solutions using LegaSuite (acquired from Seagull Software). Add to this iCluster, a proven software-based high availability and disaster recovery solution, and you have three offerings that can meet the diverse development, management, and application protection needs of your IBM i shop.
“If you’re a customer and you’re planning to move your workloads to the cloud, or even start refactoring your workloads, you need to start thinking about how you’re going to manage all your dependencies. We don’t even know where the dependencies are or if the source needs to be compiled and deployed to the endpoints, and that’s where our DevOps solution starts to help,” he says.
“And with LegaSuite for Application Modernization, we can pretty much scan our application and create a blueprint that shows the most frequently used code paths,” continues Kohli. “And from there you can generate APIs to connect to ERP systems and other frontends. That’s how they all play together. On the backend side, you manage the source and manage the dependencies. On the front-end side, we build APIs so that we can connect.”
The company is finding some traction with this approach. A product called Rocket Process Insights, launched a year ago, also helps identify the most used areas of monolithic IBM i applications and is therefore a good candidate for modernization with LegaSuite.
For companies managing HA and DR with iCluster, the ability to move backup systems to IBM i systems running in a private cloud (or move IBM i data to an X86-based cloud storage repository) is a great addition to the cloud.
Application modernization, DevOps management, and hybrid cloud don’t always go together, but Rocket has found this approach resonates with clients and prospects. A key component is the cloud, which has proven to be a necessary element of customer engagement.
“Absolutely everyone is thinking about it,” Kohli says of Cloud. “I think it is inevitable. Yes, we all agree on the model that is where we are going. Is that a three-year journey or a five-year journey? Depends on how important your is, whether your application is not rooted, and how skilled you are in knowing what your application and business logic are doing.
“Our strategy is to believe that hybrid cloud is the way to go,” he continues. “Not everyone can migrate their i-systems and Z-systems to the cloud. I would like to.”
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