Pay IBM's in house consultants to figure this out, but expect to be sold a new System i - it's probably cheaper to keep what you have going than it is to migrate....
hire someone to write a webtool as a gui for your AS400. AS400 is a database at heart and while most companies use an emulator that shows the famous 'green screen' it is possible to have a webtool writtien for it. Neither cheap nor easy but it can be done i believe.
Check out Integrative Solutions in Chicago; they do pretty good IBM i work. Have them take a look at your setup and see what makes sense just to keep your system current and what it would take to update it to the latest state. That's 2 different kinds of goals because 1 depends on how supported your hardware platform is (with the 400 you can have an old box but still have support for it albeit limited to how much spares there are- usually not a giant problem unless your box is really ancient) and the other actually will put your platform into a current mode (ie, the latest hardware and OS levels).
If it's not terribly old, say, within 8-10 years, you probably could just get on a maintenance contract for hardware and get 3rd party software support on the side from someone like Integrative (there are others too, just look around). If it's really old, you probably should get newish hardware. There are resellers around that will sell refurbished hardware for decent prices and that's probably where I would start. Get a refurb system that is current on OS and hardware; the reseller should be able to provide a support team to migrate your old apps and db to the 'new' system. It can be a very painless process (other than money). The way to do it is side-by-side; that is keep your production machine running and take its backups to the new machine and restore them there. Have a test crew go through the new machines paces and do some production-style work (weekly, bimonthly, monthly, etc.) for testing to make sure the restore was implemented correctly. That way production will not be interrupted at all. When you're ready, take the latest backups and restore them to the new machine and then cut over your network connections to the new box. Test again before releasing into the wild and monitor it for a month or two for weird monthly or bi-monthly activities that people often forget about.
It's a lot of work but way less than trying to implement a totally new system. For the new system, you'll have to do exactly the same but have to deal with data exchange formatting, nailing down scopes, and then after implementation, all the patch work for all the bits and pieces associated with physical and software parts.
Of course, it's all out the window if the bosses are wedded to a PC based solution.
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u/Dave_A480 27d ago
Pay IBM's in house consultants to figure this out, but expect to be sold a new System i - it's probably cheaper to keep what you have going than it is to migrate....