Earlier this year I left FedEx after 15 1/2 years of service. Every single day I used an IBM AS/400 terminal to interact with several systems to do my job, the bulk of my job was done via that terminal. Yeah, that's how old most of FedEx's tech is. A few months before I left they had just migrated one of our in-house systems over to Oracle likely as part of this. That said, the mission-critical system was having almost daily errors/downtime once migrated to Oracle soooo...
I imagine some of this is the simple fact that they need to replace these severely aging, no longer supported, IBM AS/400 servers throughout the company. They lost hardware support around 2020 and, if I'm not mistaken, haven't been made since like 2008 or something. That alone is going to save a pretty penny in new hardware and energy costs as well as free up physical space at often already crowded areas.
It'll also save time-lost costs. Any time power would go out at our building, the servers would usually be done for tens of minutes even with the generator kicking on. We'd lose a couple of hours a year usually to the servers that were in our building coming back online. A couple of hours, times 100~ employees at one site, equals a LOT of backlog being created which ripples through the company. While that few thousand dollars they're paying employees during that downtime isn't much, it would cascade and disrupt the freight handling. If a single package didn't clear customs in time, then it might end up as an overage and have to go to a bonded cage, that's now 2 extra movements added, that's freight planning for possibly multiple trucks that will be part of the delivery once the package landed in the United States, you might see a thousand or more shipments (that may or may not be single package shipments) now needing to be handled extra at a half dozen ports, even more sort facilities, and even more local facilities. That's just from 1 office losing power for say a half hour.
Moving those servers to a cloud provider should provide a much better uptime which should translate to a notable savings in the above situations.
IBM i on modern Power machines is fine as far as performance goes.
The hideous frontend of greenscreen RPG programs is optional, you could replace them with Java if anyone cared enough about UX for internal tools (they don't).
The hard part with that stack is getting RPG devs - most of them are 50+ and expensive.
I'm sure they'll save many millions.
Earlier this year I left FedEx after 15 1/2 years of service. Every single day I used an IBM AS/400 terminal to interact with several systems to do my job, the bulk of my job was done via that terminal. Yeah, that's how old most of FedEx's tech is. A few months before I left they had just migrated one of our in-house systems over to Oracle likely as part of this. That said, the mission-critical system was having almost daily errors/downtime once migrated to Oracle soooo...
I imagine some of this is the simple fact that they need to replace these severely aging, no longer supported, IBM AS/400 servers throughout the company. They lost hardware support around 2020 and, if I'm not mistaken, haven't been made since like 2008 or something. That alone is going to save a pretty penny in new hardware and energy costs as well as free up physical space at often already crowded areas.
It'll also save time-lost costs. Any time power would go out at our building, the servers would usually be done for tens of minutes even with the generator kicking on. We'd lose a couple of hours a year usually to the servers that were in our building coming back online. A couple of hours, times 100~ employees at one site, equals a LOT of backlog being created which ripples through the company. While that few thousand dollars they're paying employees during that downtime isn't much, it would cascade and disrupt the freight handling. If a single package didn't clear customs in time, then it might end up as an overage and have to go to a bonded cage, that's now 2 extra movements added, that's freight planning for possibly multiple trucks that will be part of the delivery once the package landed in the United States, you might see a thousand or more shipments (that may or may not be single package shipments) now needing to be handled extra at a half dozen ports, even more sort facilities, and even more local facilities. That's just from 1 office losing power for say a half hour.
Moving those servers to a cloud provider should provide a much better uptime which should translate to a notable savings in the above situations.