Career developers and administrators in the IBM i and IBM Z world sometimes experience angst that our prized integrated server platforms are becoming one more cloud island in the Archipelago of the Cloud.

I received pushback on a mailing list when I suggested that the future of IBM i is to become "just another database" in the corporate cloud, serving its data up through APIs, through enterprise event streams such as Kafka, and other data sharing channels.

Some are afraid that transforming the role of the integrated server platforms is an existential threat to those platforms, but I think not. There are various assessments to be made while weighing apples vs. oranges in the economic argument for i and Z.

One assessment is the inherent value of the platform itself: preservation of investment, power consumption, heat profile, security, reliability and the like.

Another assessment is the cost and viability of sustained development and the ability to deliver innovation at the pace required by the modern enterprise.

The specific discussion that spawned this meditation rests on the latter assessment. It had to do with bringing people onto the team with no IBM experience but possessing web skills.

In my view, the greatest existential threat to these platforms lies in resisting the transmogrification of these platforms into very rich, secure and powerful back ends feeding web front ends running on disparate platforms such as Power Linux. Nostalgia for the green screen, as well as the enthusiast's passion for hosting all assets (such as the web application) directly on the integrated server platform, both challenge the economic equation that keeps these systems viable.

I say, welcome the newcomers. Welcome the new metaphors. Our job is to keep the data safe, accurate, and accessible to authorized channels of distribution. Encourage the user-facing and enterprise-facing application architects who come to relieve of us that responsibility, while our formerly "ruling-class" integrated servers take their rightful place as "good citizens" in more "democratic" modern enterprise cloud.

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