Imagine this: There’s exactly one person at your company who truly understands the inner workings of JD Edwards on iSeries: how it starts, how it fails, how it recovers. And one day soon, they’ll be retiring.
This is the reality for many organizations. According to Fortra’s 2025 IBM i Marketplace Survey:
- 60% of respondents identify IBM i skills as a top concern when planning IT strategy, ahead of application modernization or HA/DR planning.
The iSeries skills gap is real:
- More than 56% of IBM i professionals have 30+ years of experience, indicating imminent retirements.
- In fact, by 2025, the average RPG programmer will be around 70 years old, and few younger developers are entering the field.
The situation is clear: Your iSeries ERP system might run fine today, but if that one admin walks away, does anyone else know how to bring your ERP back online?
This is the emotional and operational tension this blog explores, and why it’s such a critical topic as you evaluate modernization with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.
The Talent Time Bomb
Often, legacy platforms get abandoned. Quietly. Over time. And this is evident with IBM i (formerly AS/400), where the shrinking talent pool is creating a slow-motion crisis in organizations running JD Edwards.
According to Fortra’s IBM i Marketplace Survey:
- Over 50% of organizations report difficulty hiring IBM i and RPG expertise, and nearly 1 in 4 expect a “critical” shortage in the next three years.
And the trend is only accelerating. Consider:
- Nearly 56% of IBM i professionals are over age 50
- Fewer than 2% of U.S. computer science graduates have any exposure to RPG programming
- Many organizations rely on just one or two people to manage their entire iSeries infrastructure
This is a loss of institutional knowledge. These administrators know every script, every patch workaround, and every trick under the sun that keeps JDE running smoothly. Once they leave, that background goes with them.
So, this all becomes a question of when and not if. And unless you’re actively planning for it, your organization may be left with a mission-critical system…and no one left to operate it.
Why This Isn’t Just an HR Problem
When a key iSeries admin retires, it’s easy to think, “We’ll just hire someone new.” But for organizations running JD Edwards on IBM i, that’s often easier said than done.
As more RPG developers and IBM i professionals retire, there are fewer and fewer replacements available, especially for roles requiring deep system familiarity.
Legacy systems are more vulnerable when only one person knows how they’re configured:
- Patching may be irregular or manual
- DR procedures are undocumented or untested
- Audit trails are insufficient for compliance reviews
When the sole admin leaves, companies often resort to expensive stopgap measures:
- Emergency consultants with limited context
- Temporary outsourcing at premium rates
- Deferred maintenance or delayed audits
According to recent findings, hourly contract rates for legacy RPG/iSeries consultants range from $175 to $275/hr, often for tasks your former admin handled in minutes.
Some questions to keep in mind:
- If a job fails or a database crashes, who restarts it?
- Who applies the quarterly OS patch?
- Who can trace integration failures across legacy and modern platforms?
When no one knows how your ERP infrastructure works, business continuity becomes guesswork.
This is bigger than HR. It’s about securing your systems, protecting your operations, and preparing your enterprise for a future that’s no longer built on 1980s architecture.
The Hidden Costs of Delay
When it comes to legacy infrastructure like iSeries, most organizations don’t act until they’re forced to. But inaction isn’t harmless, It’s expensive, in ways that don’t always show up on a balance sheet.
Emergency costs:
- Once your last admin retires, knowledge transfer stops.
- Hiring external RPG experts post-retirement often results in 6–12 week onboarding, during which problems mount.
- Emergency support rates for legacy iSeries systems often exceed $250/hr, and availability is increasingly limited.
Technical debt:
- Outdated OS versions stay unpatched
- Security holes remain unaddressed
- Workarounds pile up, undocumented
Business risks:
- Unplanned downtime from misconfigurations or system failures
- Missed regulatory filings (SOX, FDA, FSMA) due to system gaps
- Inability to integrate with modern tools, apps, or analytics systems
A report estimated the average cost of unplanned application downtime at $5,000 per minute, far more for large enterprises.
Infrastructure Replatforming Without ERP Disruption
JD Edwards continues to be a powerful, Oracle-supported ERP with a stable roadmap through at least 2035 for EnterpriseOne 9.2. The real issue isn’t the application. It’s the aging iSeries infrastructure underneath it.
Replatforming JD Edwards from iSeries to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure gives you the best of both worlds:
- Retain your JDE investment (customizations, reports, integrations)
- Eliminate aging hardware risks
- Modernize underlying OS (usually from IBM i to Linux or Windows)
- Enable integrations with AI, analytics, and mobile tools
Why OCI?
OCI is purpose-built to run Oracle workloads like JD Edwards:
- Pre-tested JDE reference architectures
- Built-in DR, backup automation, and security compliance
- Cost-optimized Linux environments
- Native integrations with OCI Observability & Management, AI, and API services
Modernizing JD Edwards infrastructure, especially from iSeries, is a high-stakes move. The wrong partner will treat it like a simple lift-and-shift. The right partner will understand every nuance of your ERP, your integrations, and your people.
