IBM’s AS/400 was first introduced way back in 1988, but a quarter of a century later, the midrange platform still plays a crucial role in IT for electronics retailer Dick Smith. Here’s how it plans to eventually get rid of the aging system and replace it with a cloud-centred platform using different best-of-breed components.
Paul Keen, general manager for IT at Dick Smith, outlined the company’s plans at a media briefing yesterday hosted by connectivity software provider MuleSoft. Keen has been working at Dick Smith since November last year. He said he was attracted to the role because of the rapid growth Dick Smith had experienced after being sold by Woolworths in late 2012 and listing as a public company a year later.
During the period of Woolworths’ ownership, technology had not been an investment priority. That helps to explain why the AS/400, a system which IBM still sells in a modernised form under the System P branding, had lasted so long. Dick Smith has two AS/400s running its enterprise resource planning and point of sale systems, one for its Australian operations and one for New Zealand.
Another factor was that despite relying on a green-screen interface, the machines get the job done. “It works. It really does work,” Keen said.
The biggest problem associated with the system is finding staff who know how to work with it. “It’s one of the really prime reasons [to move] — it’s a really huge risk,” Keen said. Training staff members to use the system generally takes 6 months, though Keen said once the skills are in place, the system is efficient to use.
The long-term vision is to replace the AS/400 systems with individual best-of-breed software packages to run individual tasks, with a centralised Amazon Redshift data warehouse for long-term storage. Dick Smith has begun that process, shifting its payroll operations and with reporting underway. “All data lives in Amazon Redshift,” Keen said. It’s a process of “removing legacy by stealth”, with the AS/400 remaining in place until everything is switched. In-store point-of-sale is likely to be one of the last elements to shift.
Another key motivation for the switch is the need to be able to rapidly integrate with other external services. In recent years, Dick Smith has had to roll out rapid integrations with eBay and Catch Of The Day, something that would have proved tricky without the shift to using more efficient integration tools. “If you want to innovate fast, you need to integrate fast.”
That doesn’t mean the AS/400 will be disappearing in a hurry. “It will take years,” Keen said. “It will be a natural evolution.”
Comments
5 responses to “How Dick Smith Will Ditch Its AS/400 For An Amazon Cloud Solution”
It’s all fine and dandy, but Dick Smith have some serious management issues.
For the short ( couple month) duration of working there I never received any payslips.. They need to fix things before they go changing things again.
Also, no group certificate yet!
It is quite bizarre that a retailer that sells all the latest tech gadgets has been relying on a 25 year old mainframe to do business. It reflects very badly on Woolworth’s management.
With Woolies now gone, at least Paul Keen is now doing something about it.
You have no idea how much it costs to install and move systems like this.
Its not a simple as Install a new version and move the data from one to another. These have had years and thousands of hours of work done to them.
These systems back in the day would have been 100’s of millions worth of investment in hardware and customisation to get them to the stage the company could use it, so spanning this over 25 years per year is almost 4mill per year. These systems tend to be used for a long time due to the amount of investment initially and on-going.
This is why Cloud is such a great thing, upgrading and maintaining systems in the future has cut these costs down a lot.
“This is why Cloud is such a great thing, upgrading and maintaining systems in the future has cut these costs down a lot.”
I think you are over-selling cloud a bit. Yes, you may not have to upgrade the OS yourself, but you will be spending way more on software/coding changes. How many complete re-writes, cloud OS changes (will Amazon and/or AWS even be around in 25 years?) or API changes will happen to the cloud in the next 25 years?
After that Dick Smith needs to redo its terrible website. For a major tech retailer, it really is pretty bad.