AIX and i/OS – Shortage of skills!

Do you have internal AIX and i/OS skills? Well I am sorry to say that you are a dying breed! That is not to say that the technology has had its day. Far from it – with new technologies coming into play such as IBM Pureflex – the iSeries and pSeries platforms will be here for a good while longer. Many people still see the technology as more cost effective, secure and resilient than its x86 or Linux counterparts. But the skills are what has been lost over the past decade. Many of the AIX administrators took up VMware and many of the iSeries skills are now in the +50 brigade. The ones that are left have been kept as core administrators in a reduced Unix server organisation (post virtualisation and consolidation). Also many have had to learn and adopt to the growth of technologies and learned a plethora of new skills such as VMware, Red Hat, Citrix, Tivoli, Websphere…….

The truth is that many organisations that have been running a legacy application on iSeries or pSeries do not have the skills in house to manage these systems on a day to day basis. Also, these systems are still core to the business running production environments, core ERP systsems etc. So what of the future? Firstly – you will need to buy in the skills as and when you need them – for upgrading of LPARs, hardware upgrades, patching, operating systems hardening, performance optimisation or even daily monitoring. Alternatively – you can get them managed completely on your behalf. Pass across the SLA to a company like Recarta and ensure that you will not get caught out. We are slowly seeing ERP applications move into a cloud based approach – where you can buy your resources monthly and be assured that your core applications are running in secure, resilient and under the eye of iSeries and pSeries specialists.

Sounds good. This leaves the IT department to cope with the huge task ahead of learning and deploying BYOD, PCI compliance, security, networking, low latency applications, business analytics etc which are key to driving the business forward and securing the companies’ future.

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