The request usually sounds simple from the business side. A new mobile app for the sales team. A partner that wants real-time inventory data. A cloud service that needs to check order status. Someone asks how long it will take to connect that new system to what’s already running on IBM i, and the honest answer, more often than not, has been weeks or months.
That gap between how simple the request sounds and how long it actually takes is the real bottleneck. It’s worth understanding why it exists before talking about what closes it.
The Familiar Timeline
One organization’s experience with this is fairly representative. A banking institution dependent on its core software provider was waiting four to eight weeks for each requested change, with real cost attached to every modification. In an industry where competitors were launching new digital services in days, that timeline wasn’t just slow. It was a competitive liability.
Nothing about that organization’s IBM i platform was the actual problem. The platform was, and still is, doing exactly what it was built to do: running core business logic reliably. The bottleneck sat entirely in how that logic reached anything outside the system.
Why This Keeps Happening
RPG programs and Db2 data were built for a specific kind of interaction: green-screen sessions, batch jobs, program-to-program calls within the same environment. None of that was designed with REST, HTTP, or a mobile app in mind, because none of it needed to be at the time it was written.
Bridging that gap the traditional way means custom middleware, hand-built service layers, and integration work that has to be re-created from scratch for every new connection a business needs. Each new mobile app, each new partner feed, each new cloud service becomes its own standalone project, requiring specialized skills that most IBM i teams don’t have sitting idle.
That’s why the timeline stretches into weeks or months even for what should be a routine request. There’s no repeatable pattern, just repeated custom work.
Closing the Gap
This is the specific problem Profound API is built to solve. It’s a low-code platform that connects directly to Db2 for i, RPG programs, and ILE procedures. Through a visual, dashboard-driven interface, existing business logic and data sources get turned into production-ready REST APIs in minutes, not months.
Every API is automatically documented against the OpenAPI specification as part of that process, so the services are discoverable and testable without someone writing documentation by hand afterward.
It also isn’t limited to IBM i data alone. Profound API supports MySQL, MariaDB, SQL Server, and Oracle as well as Db2 for i, so the same approach covers a broader data estate rather than solving the problem for one system and leaving the rest unaddressed.
What This Looks Like Once the Bottleneck Is Gone
Back to that banking institution, after implementing Profound API, service development time dropped from eight weeks to 45 minutes, a roughly 179,000-times improvement in turnaround.
The platform now handles more than 2,000 transactions per second, and the organization attributed a 23% revenue increase directly to the speed at which it could ship new services once vendor dependency was gone.
The underlying systems didn’t change. What changed was how fast the business could act on them.
A similar pattern shows up in Witra Logistics and LERROS Moden’s fashion warehouse operations. Task Force IT-Solutions, a member of the Profound Logic Futurization Alliance, needed to connect a high-tech automated sorting system to the client’s IBM i on Power platform in real time, without disrupting operations already running reliably on it.
Using Profound API alongside Task Force’s own CMOne toolset, the team built REST interfaces that let the sorting system and IBM i on Power exchange data continuously. Daily processing capacity doubled from 6,000 to 12,000 SKUs, delivery volume rose 30%, and delivery times to point of sale dropped. As Witra’s Managing Director Daniel Löffelsender put it, “the system has made working significantly easier for our team.”
In both cases, the fix wasn’t replacing what already worked. It was giving what already worked a way to reach further.
Who This Actually Changes Things For
For RPG developers, this doesn’t mean learning a new discipline. It means exposing programs you already know as modern REST endpoints without becoming a full-time API specialist to do it.
For developers working outside RPG, whether in Node.js, Python, or whatever a given project calls for, it means building against a documented, standard interface without needing to learn RPG to consume what it exposes. And for the business leaders asking for the new mobile app or the new integration in the first place, it means getting an honest answer measured in days, not quarters.
Where This Fits Into a Broader Strategy
Extending a proven system outward instead of replacing it is a specific instance of a larger idea. Futurization is our pioneering approach to transforming IBM i applications without abandoning the business logic they contain, treating a platform’s age as an asset to build on rather than a problem to route around.
Profound API is one concrete way that shows up: decades of RPG and Db2 investment, made reachable by whatever modern system needs to call it, without a rewrite and without a multi-month integration project standing in the way.
If your organization has a version of this bottleneck right now, a business initiative waiting on an integration that’s taking longer than it should, that’s worth a direct conversation. Reach our team at Futurization@ProfoundLogic.com or explore Profound API at profoundlogic.com/profound-api.