For almost two hours, practical demonstrations, feedback and technical discussions led to a shared conclusion: the future of IBM i does not necessarily depend on rewriting it, but on integrating it naturally into a standardized, interoperable ecosystem.
Modernizing an IBM i system is not just about technology; it is about the tools, methods and skills you decide to mobilize. Performance is not the issue—Power still outperforms many architectures—but the shortage of RPG expertise is. By contrast, finding a .NET developer who knows Entity Framework Core, Git and REST architecture is immediate. In-house applications are often frozen for fear of breaking them. By linking IBM i to this standardized world, NTi Dataprovider lets companies keep their application assets while adding today’s required skills.
Rémi presented a .NET application developed in Visual Studio, version-controlled with Git and deployed in a container. The app reads from and writes to DB2/400, runs CL commands in real time, and uses .NET to manage user authentication via ASP.NET Identity—no driver, no proxy, no IBM i-version dependency: a connector built to last.
On infrastructure and performance, running .NET apps on Power needs neither huge resources nor complex setup. Laurent Mermet detailed the stack: a Power 9 server with several partitions, including a lightweight Linux partition for .NET containers. Each instance uses about 200 MB of memory and a fraction of a CPU while delivering high performance. Everything runs in a partitioned, isolated, secure environment. During tests, inserting 10 000 rows into DB2 took under five seconds. The internal network, managed by PowerVM, offers minimal latency between partitions with strict isolation. All of this is entirely decoupled from traditional Windows Server— proof that .NET is no longer a Windows-only technology but a universal platform ready for cloud and on-premises alike.
Compatibility was another key point. NTi works from V5R4 to V7R6 and with every .NET version from the classic framework to .NET 9. Built on ADO.NET standards, it plugs directly into Entity Framework Core and Dapper, in both Code First and Database First modes. It can execute stored procedures and RPG programs and stream large data volumes in or out. Where some tools crash when multiple BLOB files are returned, NTi handles them cleanly by segmenting transfers.
Several customer cases were shared: a successful migration from PHP to .NET for a truck manufacturer seeking technical coherence; a management portal for an Italian sports league, interfacing with IBM i and handling millions of requests per second; and a ticketing system with live QR scanning, DB2 ticket validation and real-time multi-user management.
There has never been a better time to rethink your IBM i information system.
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