Surprise! IBM i recently announced 7.1 end of life is scheduled for April 2018. If you hadn’t heard yet, you’re not the only one; IBM released this information somewhat quietly and it hasn’t made a big stir in the tech community just yet. While this is big news for anyone running IBM i 7.1, it’s an even bigger deal for JD Edwards World customers.
Depending on which hardware platform your organization is running, an OS upgrade may trigger a hardware upgrade as well. Certain hardware platforms are capped at a certain operating system level, and many hardware platforms are capped at IBM i 7.1. So, if you’re running hardware that is capped at 7.1, you will have to update your hardware as you are updating the OS.
That means that depending on what version of World your organization is running on IBM i 7.1, you might need to update World as well as IBM i in order to stay in compliance and on a certified OS. Any JD Edwards World version under 9.1 is not supported on any IBM i version past 7.1, so if you’re updating IBM i from 7.1 but running an older version of World, you’ll need to update that as well.
Still with us? Good, because if you move forward with your IBM i OS upgrade without upgrading World, you’ll have an unsupported platform and Oracle support won’t be able to answer your questions, fix bugs, or provide patches. That’s not a position you want to be in.
Here’s a chart from IBM Support to help you figure out your minimum requirements.
In the world of IT, April 2018 is just around the corner. Given that it can take a few weeks for an OS project to go from planning to execution, then the project itself can take a few months depending on how complicated it is…have you started yet? Now add in a JDE upgrade on top of that, and you needed to start yesterday.
No matter what versions you’re currently running, our recommendation is to update to IBM i 7.3 and JD Edwards World 9.4.
As with any OS upgrade, you have to think about more than just JD Edwards. Any third-party tools, integrations with eCommerce, EDI tools, or any other logistics of tools will need to be evaluated. Anything that is running on IBM i will be affected, so make sure that you verify whether or not those software tools will need to be upgraded as part of this project as well.
If you’re just starting to think about this yourself, then there is a good chance that no one else in your organization is thinking about this project. You need to start getting the idea in front of decision makers and start getting people on board now; you don’t have time to wait on this one.
A few more helpful resources:
Are you ready to get your IBM i and JD Edwards World upgrades started? Contact our team to start a tech assessment to see what your platforms need.
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