AS/400 System Experience

Many of the members of the PSGi team worked together at Marcam Corporation which created the PRISM process-ERP solution as well as the AVANTIS Maintenance Management solution - both ran on the AS/400 System.

Though now known as the IBM i Series, many people still refer to these systems as the AS/400. Regardless of the name, PSGi has extensive experience supporting the platform and the software solutions that run on it. You can learn more about our full range of IBMi Managed Services here and more about our story and experience below.

During the 16 years of customer support leadership and software development experience, Larry Dube as Vice President of Global Customer Support at Marcam, helped increase customer support revenue by 50% and increased overall worldwide customer satisfaction from 43% to 95%. He established successful new teams for tool development, technical services, and technical support. Eager to provide superior and services to companies employing the PRISM application, Larry along with Terrie Tadsen and Ed Kelly founded PSGi in 2005. They assembled a team of experts in all facets of AS/400 ERP solutions and system management. The average experience on the PSGi team with PRISM, the IBM i platform that it runs on, and the manufacturing industry is 18 years. No organization anywhere has as much experience with these sets of skills.

Using this expert knowledge as a basis, and partnering with individuals of similar expertise on other applications, PSGi now provides customer support for ALL IBM i-based enterprise business solutions including but not limited to PRISM, JDE World, PRMS and Warehouse BOSS.

Members of the PSGi team trace their technical roots to the IBM System/36 - announced in 1978 - which was the grandfather of the well known IBM AS/400.  The AS/400 was introduced in 1988, ran the OS/400 operating system, and despite being renamed several times by IBM is still an often-used internet search term to this day.  IBM i, the current evolution of this operating system, is a descendent of OS/400 and together with the “Power” hardware it runs on it has uniquely competitive features such as these:

  • Subsystems provide backward compatibility with earlier IBM systems so migrations to newer IBM i releases require no application re-installs
  • Designed as a "turnkey" operating system, IBM i requires little or no on-site attention from IT staff during normal operation providing one of the lowest TCO (total cost of ownership) of any system on the market
  • Much of the software necessary to run the IBM i including the DB2 SQL-compatible database is included and integrated into the base operating system eliminating the need to purchase and install separately
  • Hardware and software maintenance tasks are integrated
  • “Wizard-driven” system administration even before that term was defined
  • Automatic “self-care” policy automatically schedules all common system maintenance, detects failures and even orders spare parts and services
  • Organizations using IBM i on a Power box often have sticker shock when discovering the higher cost of system maintenance on other systems

The development skills that PSGi has on our team include:

  • RPG
  • HTML
  • Java
  • PHP

Having “cut our teeth” on the System /38, AS/400 and subsequent systems, PSGi brings vast experience not only developing and supporting applications but also providing system administration and hardware and IBM i operating software support.  We bring these capabilities to PSGi’s IBM i and Business Application Managed Services offering.