IBM i, i Series & AS/400 Consulting
Your IBM i Still Runs The Business. The Challenge Isn’t The Platform
It’s Making Sure You Have The People, Skills, And Roadmap To Keep Getting Value From It
Your iSeries still runs the business. It posts the orders, prices the deals, closes the books. The people who know how it actually works are leaving, and the documentation never really existed.
Weidenhammer keeps your IBM i, iSeries, and AS/400 environments running, and helps you get more out of them than you probably know is possible. We pair seasoned RPG and IBM i engineers with deep practices in Azure, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, Power BI, e-commerce, security, and cloud, so you can extend the life of what works, modernize what doesn’t, and never lose the business logic decades of customization produced.
One reason IBM i remains so prevalent is that organizations have been able to build decades of business knowledge into the platform. Pricing rules, inventory processes, customer requirements, and operational workflows often represent millions of dollars of accumulated investment. The goal is not to preserve technology for its own sake. The goal is to preserve and extend the business value embedded with it.
Where in your operations does “only one person knows how that works” still apply?
Capabilities At a Glance
Seven ways we help you get more from IBM i. Each correlate to a deeper section below.
- IBM i Application Development – Custom RPG, ILE, and modern IBM i development from engineers who have lived in iSeries AS/400 the platform for decades.
- Modernization and Migration. Modernize iSeries applications in place, or move to platforms like Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central with the business logic and data intact.
- IBM i Managed Services, Hosting and Support – Ongoing application support, plus full IBM i hosting in our own data centers.
- Integration with Cloud and Modern Platforms. APIs, JSON, and event-driven integrations that connect IBM i to Azure, Microsoft 365, and the rest of your stack.
- E-Commerce and Portal Connectivity. Storefronts and customer portals wired directly to iSeries pricing, inventory, and order logic.
- Data Analytics Connectivity and AI Readiness. Reliable feeds from IBM i into Power Bi, Azure, Microsoft Fabric, and Snowflake so leadership decides on real numbers, and your data is ready for the AI tools coming next.
- Accelerated Support Takeover. AI-assisted discovery and documentation that lets us pick up an undocumented IBM i environment and stabilize it quickly.
Fifty Years of Clients Who Never Had to Start Over
Why This Matters Now
The pain we hear from operations, finance, and IT leaders running on IBM i is usually some version of this.
Your Bench is Shrinking
More people are leaving the iSeries very year. Half the reason is that companies can’t staff it, and many developers are retiring. The pace of retirements is increasing. When the last person who understands a critical program walks out, you don’t just lose a developer. You lose the only working documentation.
Replacement Looks Like The Only Option, But It Isn’t
Many organizations believe the only solution is to replace the system because they can’t figure out how to break the walls around it. Full replacements are expensive, slow, and high risk, especially when the iSeries quietly encodes years of pricing logic, customer rules, and edge cases no one wrote down.
Even When You’ve Decided to Migrate,
It Feels Impossible
Decades of undocumented business logic live inside the iSeries, and the tools and skills needed to navigate the platform, map the data, and execute a clean migration aren’t on your team anymore. Projects stall in discovery, or land with gaps the business notices immediately.
Your IBM i Feels Cut Off From
Everything Modern
Leadership wants Power BI dashboards. Sales wants an e-commerce site. Finance wants Azure-native reporting. The iSeries holds the data they all need, and connecting it feels harder than it should.
Audits, Security, and Compliance Keep Getting Harder
A platform that “just works” can hide configuration drift, weak access controls, and unpatched exposure. The longer no one looks,
the worse it gets.
You’re Paying Twice
Once for the iSeries, and again for the workarounds, spreadsheets, and side systems people built because the iSeries felt untouchable.
Which of these is costing you the most this quarter, in time or in dollars?
How We Help
IBM iSeries / AS/400 Application Development
Can we still build new functionality directly on IBM i? Yes. New RPG and ILE code, new business rules, new interfaces, all delivered to modern standards on the same platform your business already trusts.
Our engineers work fluently across RPG (all versions), ILE, CL, SQL, LANSA, CA2E (SYNON), Db2, RDi, and the YAJL JSON parser, alongside Python and Node.js where they fit on the platform. We hold to disciplined practice. New code goes in clean. We don’t paste a free-format band-aid over forty-year-old logic and call it modernized.
The outcome you should expect: new capability shipped against your existing iSeries investment, without inheriting a worse maintenance problem next year.
Legacy System Modernization and Migration
How do we modernize without throwing away what works? Two paths, depending on what your business actually needs.
Modernize in place. We add maintainable interfaces around the iSeries so you keep leveraging functionality that would be costly to recreate. Your business gets new capability with no loss of what it depends on today.
Migrate when it’s time. We have ERP experience on Microsoft and Dynamics 365 Business Central, and we have done the hard part of extracting and transforming iSeries data for migration. iSeries files aren’t extendable, so applications end up with many small extension and lookup tables linked to the main files. Understanding those relationships, and locating where the data actually lives (even inside packaged applications like VAI) is what makes a migration succeed instead of stall.
Few partners can do both. We can.
IBM i Managed Services, Hosting and Support
Can Weidenhammer host and run our IBM i? Yes. We host IBM i in our own data centers, which is a capability few other providers offer. Beyond development and maintenance, we host and fully manage the box itself, so one team owns the application, the platform, and the uptime.
You get a single accountable partner for the IBM i. No finger-pointing between hosting, infrastructure, and application teams when something needs to move.
Integration with Cloud and Modern Platforms
Can the iSeries actually participate in a modern architecture? Yes, and it should. When the iSeries started, it was an island. Today it’s part of a chain of value. The iSeries no longer has to operate as a standalone system. It can participate fully in a modern architecture.
We build APIs and JSON interfaces directly on IBM i, and connect them to Azure, Microsoft 365, Azure Data Factory, Celigo, and whatever modern services your stack relies on. At FMS, we built functionality on the iSeries that feeds up-to-date data into Azure for the client’s customer-facing portal. Without it, FMS would not be where they are today, because the portal data would not have been accurate enough.
E-Commerce and Portal Connectivity
Can my e-commerce site really run off iSeries pricing and inventory? Yes. At Bradley Caldwell, the commerce application uses pricing routines built directly into their iSeries, and those routines are used seamlessly inside the storefront. Most IBM shops never learned to make that connection cleanly. We have done it in production for years.
That means the same business rules your operations team trusts on the iSeries are the rules your customers see online. No drift, no spreadsheets in the middle, no “why is the website price different” tickets.
Data Analytics Connectivity and AI Readiness
How do we get IBM i data into Power BI, Fabric, or Snowflake? Through purpose-built feeds and integrations that hold up to real reporting volumes. We work across Power BI, Power BI Paginated Reports, Azure Data Factory, Microsoft Fabric, and Snowflake, and we can move IBM i data into any of them.
Leadership stops waiting on Friday-night extracts. The numbers in the dashboard match the numbers on the iSeries, because the dashboard is reading them.
Accelerated Support Takeover
Can you take over an IBM i environment we don’t fully understand anymore? This is one of the most common reasons clients call us. Most legacy iSeries environments are ungoverned, undocumented, and business-critical after decades of incremental changes. We use AI-assisted analysis to accelerate discovery and documentation, guided by experienced IBM i engineers who validate and interpret the findings.
When a developer retires, or an in-house team falls behind on modern practice, we step in, learn the environment, the application, and the business, help stabilize the situation, and continue to move the project forward.
Why Weidenhammer
We’ve been doing this for nearly 48 years, and IBM i has been at the center of the practice for most of them. What makes the difference is not the tenure alone. It’s the combination.
Depth on the platform
We bridge the gap in the RPG talent market by pairing deep legacy knowledge with modern development skills, in-house.
Both sides of every integration
We build the iSeries application, and the e-commerce site, portal, or BI layer it talks to. Having both capabilities under one roof is rare.
We own the box too
Hosting IBM i in our own data centers means one partner owns the hardware, the operating system, and the application.
A foot in both worlds
We support your current systems where they are, and when it’s time to migrate, we operate across the old and the new and bring you through it.
Modern beyond IBM
Deep practices in Azure, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, Power BI, Microsoft Fabric, Snowflake, e-commerce, security, and cloud, so “modernization” is something we actually deliver, not something we hand off.
The Rare Partners Who Speak Both Languages
How An Engagement Usually Works
Discovery
A short, structured conversation about your platform, your team, the pressure points, and what “good” looks like for the business in the next 12 months.
Environment Review
We use AI-assisted tooling plus seasoned engineers to map your IBM i: applications, integrations, data structures, dependencies, and risks. You get the documentation you wish you already had.
Recommendation
A practical plan. Stabilize it first, modernize where it pays, migrate only where it makes sense. No “rip and replace” by default.
Delivery
Day-to-day support, new development, integrations, or migration work, run by a named team with a single point of accountability
Continuous Advancement
We keep finding the next thing your iSeries could be doing for the business, and we ship it
What’s Next
If your IBM i still runs the business, and the people who built it are running out, the right next step is a conversation, not a quote. Talk to our IBM i practice lead about your environment. We’ll tell you honestly, where we’d start.
What would change for your business if your iSeries stopped being the thing you worry about, and started being the thing you build on?
Frequently Asked Questions
No. The installed base is large precisely because customers never had to rewrite everything to keep moving forward, and the dollars invested in those systems still yield a return. What is shrinking is the supply of people who can support it well. The platform is not the risk. The staffing model around it is, which is why most IBM i modernization and AS/400 modernization conversations start with talent, not technology.
Yes. IBM continues to invest in the platform with regular operating system releases, new Power hardware, and a published roadmap that extends will into the next decade. The platform you’re running is not at the end of life. The talent market around it is the part that needs attention.
The platform itself has one of the strongest security models in enterprise computing, with object-level authority, integrated auditing, and a single sign-on path to the OS. What gets people in trouble is the configuration drift: default profiles, over-permissioned users, unencrypted exit points, and unpatched PTFs accumulated over years. A proper security review usually finds real issues, and most are straightforward to close once they’re visible.
Yes, often better than the alternatives it’s compared to. IBM Power hardware running IBM i routinely handles high-volume transactional workloads, real-time pricing, and large-batch processing on a fraction of the cores a comparable x86 architecture would need. Performance is rarely the real problem. Integration and accessibility are.
You have options. IBM i can run in IBM Power Virtual Server, in partner-hosted environments (including ours), or stay on premises. The right answer depends on capital plans, disaster recovery posture, and how much infrastructure work your team should still be doing. We can walk you through the trade-offs without a predetermined answer.
Fewer every year, and that’s the honest answer. The senior bench is retiring, and most modern computer science graduates never see the platform. The practical path forward is a partner that has both: experienced IBM i engineers who can run the platform today, and a path to support and modernize it as your in-house bench thins out. That is what our iSeries consulting and RPG development services are built to provide.
Both options are valid, and the right answer depends on what the business needs in the next two to five years. IBM i modernization and AS/400 modernization are not the same decision for every shop. Modernize in place when the iSeries logic is a competitive advantage and replacement would be costly to recreate. Migrate when the business model requires a platform the iSeries cannot reasonably support, in which case ERP options like Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central become viable with proper data extraction and transformation.
Yes. We operate our own data centers and host IBM i environments for clients there, with one team accountable for the hardware, the platform, and the applications.
Yes, and we do it regularly. We have built iSeries-side functionality that feeds current data into Azure for customer-facing portals, and we have wired e-commerce storefronts directly to iSeries pricing routines. The iSeries is not an island anymore.
You bring us in before they leave, ideally, and we run an accelerated discovery. We use AI-assisted tools and experienced engineers to document the environment, stabilize support, and then advance the platform forward. When that hand-off is not possible, we still pick up undocumented environments and get them under control.
iSeries files are not extendable, so applications usually rely on extension and lookup tables linked to main files. We map those relationships, summarize and transform the data, and locate where it lives, even inside packaged applications like VAI. That work is the difference between a migration that lands and a migration that gets quietly rolled back.
No. Our iSeries consulting and RPG development services support mid-market manufacturers, distributors, and services businesses that depend on the platform, alongside larger clients. The engagement model adjusts to the size of the team and the criticality of the system.
Initial discovery and stabilization typically begin within two to four weeks of engagement, depending on access and documentation. AI-assisted discovery shortens what used to be months of reverse-engineering into weeks.
Related Content
Ready to Modernize Without the Risk?
Where is technical debt creating the greatest challenge for your organization — in maintenance costs, delivery speed, or system reliability? Schedule a complimentary AI-Augmented Delivery Assessment with Weidenhammer. We’ll evaluate your current applications, identify modernization opportunities, uncover potential risks early, and provide a clear roadmap for moving forward with confidence.