posted by jbrisbin on October 27, 2010 05:05 PM

It's not exactly accurate to use words like "legacy" when describing systems like IBM's i5 (it will always be the AS/400 to me). Our "legacy" systems are so critical to our ($1B) business it's not an overstatement to say that our restaurants could not transact business without them. The simple majority of our development time, energy, and money is spent writing new RPG code, introducing new green screen applications, and finding new ways to make the 400 work with the rest of our expanding private cloud infrastructure. Calling something legacy has usually implied that newer systems are taking the place of the "old" way of doing things. I suppose you could say that programmers use the word "legacy" interchangeably with "obsolete".

Our AS/400 is not going away. For that reason, it's silly to call it obsolete.

I've gotten some great feedback from the session on private cloud infrastructures I did at this year's SpringOne 2GX in Chicago. People are very interested in how these traditional systems can work with the new cloud services many are introducing into their enterprise. Plenty of organizations have decades of business knowledge and data tied up in "legacy" systems and they want to know how in the world they can get a fancy new cloud application server like tc Server to talk to their AS/400 (through more than SQL and JDBC).

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