For a long time, telling someone your company still runs on IBM i came with an apology built in. “Still” did a lot of work in that sentence: it implied delay, technical debt, a decision nobody quite remembers making on purpose.
That framing has always been backwards. IBM i isn’t something these companies are stuck with. It’s infrastructure they’ve chosen to keep, invest in, and build on for decades, because it works. And unlike a lot of the “legacy is holding you back” narrative floating around IT media, this isn’t a claim that requires taking anyone’s word for it. The companies below have published case studies about it.
Behind the Brand. The Companies Still Running (and Thriving) on IBM i
Ryder Cut Delivery Cycle Times and Saved $30,000 a Year
Ryder Last Mile runs the systems that third-party freight carriers across North America depend on to get packages delivered. For years, that meant a low-code, screen-scraping layer built on top of green-screen applications, workable, but increasingly brittle as delivery expectations climbed.
“Historically with our applications, we used a low-code, screen-scraping solution to emulate green-screens on a web-browser,” said Barnabus Muthu, IT & Application Architect at Ryder. “However, it was not intuitive or scalable.”
Muthu’s team used Profound.js, part of the Profound AppDev suite, to expose Ryder’s IBM i databases through APIs and rebuild the front end as a genuine web application without touching the underlying RPG business logic. The result, RyderView, replaced paper-based field processes with a mobile app and gave freight managers real-time dashboards instead of waiting on email reports.
The numbers: delivery cycle times dropped by an average of 1.1 days per site. Service-to-invoicing time was cut in half, from 48 hours to 24. Retiring the old screen-scraping tool saved $30,000 a year. And simplified processes gave every site back roughly 10 person-hours a week.
Trimble Transformed Three Product Lines Without Losing a Customer
Trimble builds transportation management software, including its Innovative, TL2000, and TMT product lines, and has run that software on IBM i for its customers since long before “modernization” was a category anyone marketed. By 2013, the green-screen interfaces behind those products had become a real business problem: they slowed down training for newer hires and made the software feel dated next to Trimble’s non-IBM i offerings.
“Younger staffers are more familiar with a Windows-type environment, where point-and-click interfaces are a way of life,” said Matt Mullins, Director of Development at Trimble.
Trimble’s 21-person IBM i development team used Profound AppDev‘s Visual Designer, DDS Conversion tool, and RPG Open Access handler to move their applications off the 5250 stream and into the browser, adding drag-and-drop dispatch tools, interactive mapping, and mobile access along the way. None of it required replacing the RPG logic underneath.
“The ease of use and the ability to do mass conversions of our green screens was a huge selling point,” Mullins said. Jim Rohde, VP of AMS Development at Trimble, put the business case plainly: the new capabilities meant “greater user productivity and increased business agility for our customers, without the business risk of replacing their existing maintenance operations software.”
The Rest of the Roster
Ryder and Trimble aren’t the exceptions in Profound Logic’s case study library. They’re the most recognizable names on a longer list of companies that have built or rebuilt mission-critical operations on IBM i with Profound AppDev, including 21st Mortgage, Piggly Wiggly Alabama Distributing Company, May Trucking Company, Winsupply, Western Power Sports, Wheeling & Lake Erie Railway, and InVue Security.
The pattern holds just across the border, too. Van-Kam Freightways, a nearly 80-year-old Western Canadian less-than-truckload carrier, had run IBM i for 35 years before digitizing its terminal operations. Every freight terminal used to track truck and trailer locations on a wall-mounted whiteboard with physical tags, a process as manual as it sounds.
“We moved from a completely manual whiteboard system to a fully digital POOL using a single screen with multiple tables,” said Jim Higgins, Lead Developer at Van-Kam Freightways. “It’s far more accurate and no longer depends on someone remembering to move a tag.”
The Same Story, Across Every Industry
It’s worth being precise about what these results are proof of. Ryder, Trimble, Van-Kam, and most of the companies above built their results with Profound AppDev: Profound UI, Genie, Atrium, and Profound.js, transforming interfaces and extending IBM i outward while leaving proven RPG business logic exactly where it was. That’s Futurization™, our approach to treating decades of IBM i investment as an asset to build on rather than a problem to route around, in its most established form: real companies, running real infrastructure, choosing to extend it instead of replace it.
It’s also not the ceiling.
CoderFlow takes Futurization deeper into the codebase itself. Where Profound AppDev reimagines how users interact with IBM i applications, CoderFlow orchestrates multiple AI agents to work directly in RPG, COBOL, CL, and SQL, compiling, testing, and validating changes against a team’s own standards before anything reaches a developer for review.
For an organization that has already proven it can extend its IBM i systems outward without disruption, the natural next question is how fast it can move inward: resolving technical debt, clearing backlogs, and futurizing entire portfolios of RPG programs at a pace a four-person team could never manage program by program. This is Agentic Futurization, powered by CoderFlow, the same coexistence philosophy that got Ryder and Trimble their results, extended to the code itself.
The Takeaway
None of this required leaving IBM i behind. Ryder didn’t migrate off the platform to fix its delivery visibility problem. Trimble didn’t rewrite its RPG logic to futurize its interface. The banking institution above didn’t replace its core system to compete with fintech challengers on speed. In every case, the platform wasn’t the obstacle. The gap between what IBM i could do and what the business needed to reach was the obstacle, and it closed.
If your organization is running IBM i and wondering what the next chapter looks like, we’d like to hear about it. Reach out to our team at Futurization@ProfoundLogic.com or explore Profound AppDev Profound API, and CoderFlow.