OCEAN TechCon ’23 Recap
The Value of Connecting in Person with the IBM i Community
I recently had the pleasure of attending the OCEAN Conference at the Community Center at the Marketplace in Tustin, California. As always, it was a great opportunity to connect face-to-face with our peers in the IBM i community.
There’s immense value in getting together in person for these types of events. It provides a forum to hear directly from IBM experts and IBM i users on the front lines of tackling modern business challenges.
Speaker Highlights
- Steve Will emphasized the importance of viewing our IBM i applications as valuable assets that can be leveraged in new ways. We should constantly evaluate how these assets can help us accomplish our business goals.
- Mike Pavlick advised everyone to break down monolithic programs into reusable components. This makes it easier to expose functionality through APIs and prevents "knowledge silos" where only a few developers understand a huge, complex program.
- Liam Allen wisely noted everything starts with user experience. Keep the end-user perspective in mind first when approaching development projects.
- Many of the customer conversations we had at our booth reinforced these themes.
What’s on Everyone’s Mind
APIs are top of mind for many users looking to open up their applications to new channels and integrate disparate systems. Adopting a component-based architecture facilitates API enablement.
We also heard about many initiatives to implement modern tools like Git, Jenkins, and Azure DevOps. These technologies allow teams to align IBM i development with techniques used for other platforms. They also aid in recruiting developers familiar with the latest methodologies.
It was energizing to connect with so many users actively pursuing technologies to create new value from their IBM i applications. The desire for modernization and advancement in the community is palpable.
Let Me Know How We Can Help
If you’re considering new initiatives around APIs, DevOps, or application modernization, I encourage you to reach out. We would be happy to offer guidance on how to move forward. Sometimes, having an outside perspective can help motivate and advance internal projects.
I look forward to connecting with everyone again at the next community event! The ability to learn from each other is such an invaluable advantage of being part of the IBM i ecosystem.
Transcript
Hi everyone. This is Dan Magid from Eradani, and we just concluded our time here at the OCEAN Conference at the Community Center at the Marketplace in Tustin, Southern California. The conference was a great reminder of how valuable it is to get together in person with members of the IBM i community.
There were a variety of informative sessions with recognized IBM experts, both from IBM and from IBM i business partners. And most importantly, we got the chance to hear directly from IBM i customers who are on the front lines of solving business problems and taking advantage of new opportunities around their IBM i applications.
During the expert panel, Steve Will made the important point that IBM i users need to look at their software applications as assets that could be leveraged for new purposes to further the goals of the business.
And Mike Pavlick picked up on that and advised IBM i users to refactor their applications to make functions more reusable instead of burying important capabilities in huge monolithic programs.
Liam Allen reminded everyone that everything starts with the user experience, that you should start with what the user is trying to accomplish, and ensure that perspective guides your development efforts.
All of that dovetailed perfectly with the discussions we had with customers at our OCEAN Expo booth about their API enablement efforts. They recognize that APIs are designed to make the value in your software assets available to others via defined, easy-to-access interfaces.
By doing that, they significantly increase the value of what you have built, and API enablement becomes easier the more you componentize your applications. We heard from many users that we’re building new user experiences for their applications in languages like JavaScript, net, PHP, Python, and Java, using APIs as the access mechanism to the underlying programs and data.
Other users were taking advantage of APIs to integrate applications on disparate platforms like Windows, Linux, or cloud-based applications. We talked to users who were looking to replace their old batch-oriented FTP, SFTP, and EDI data sharing technologies with real-time access using APIs. Some users even told us that they had to adopt APIs simply to be able to do business with their major customers.
We also heard from many users who were using or starting to look at modern development tools like Git, Azure DevOps, and Jenkins. They recognized that by adopting those tools, they could more easily recruit new developers who had learned those tools in programming classes or had worked with them in non IBM i development efforts.
It also allowed them to integrate their IBM i development with development on all of their other enterprise platforms. Hearing about all these initiatives from IBM i users made it clear that IBM i users are aggressively pursuing new technologies to advance the value of their applications.
If you’d like to learn more about how APIs might benefit your business, or how you can take advantage of the latest tools like Git, Jenkins, and Azure DevOps for your IBM i development, give us a call. We’d love to talk to you in person as well.
