Golden Path Digital, a leader in enterprise modernization solutions, today announced the launch of AS/Forward, an advanced intelligence and automated transpilation platform engineered to solve the most critical challenge facing the IBM i community: the Workforce Cliff. By combining deep codebase forensics with automated RPG-to-modern-language migration, the platform provides a secure, high-speed bridge for organizations transitioning away from legacy dependencies without disrupting core business operations.
For decades, the IBM i platform, formerly known as the AS/400, has served as the backbone of global commerce. These systems power mission-critical operations in banking, logistics, and manufacturing, handling trillions of dollars in transactions daily. However, the ecosystem is facing a systemic threat. Recent industry data indicates the average age of an RPG developer is now 55 or older. As this veteran workforce reaches retirement age, companies are losing the tribal knowledge required to maintain and evolve these complex systems. The Workforce Cliff is not a future risk; it is a present-day reality for thousands of enterprises. AS/Forward was built to ensure that decades of institutional logic are not lost when these experts retire. The platform emphasizes Codebase Clarity as the foundational phase of any modernization journey, performing deep-tissue dependency mapping and impact analysis to uncover hidden relationships within the codebase. This phase generates automated, natural-language documentation and audit-ready descriptions of business logic, providing IT leadership with an X-ray view of their entire estate. According to Golden Path Digital, this transparency ensures that stakeholders can make informed, data-driven decisions rather than navigating the transition in the dark.
A hallmark of the technology is its ability to convert legacy RPG into a wide array of modern, industry-standard programming languages, including Python, Java, Node.js, JavaScript, C#, and .NET. This multi-language flexibility is a strategic necessity for the modern enterprise. By moving core business logic into languages with massive, global talent pools, organizations can finally break their reliance on a dwindling supply of RPG specialists. This shift allows companies to integrate their legacy systems with modern DevOps practices, cloud-native architectures, and AI-driven development workflows. The result is an agile IT environment capable of responding to market changes in days rather than months.
The industry has long been plagued by Big Bang modernization failures—projects that take five years, cost tens of millions of dollars, and ultimately fail to deliver. AS/Forward provides a stark alternative through its incremental de-risking approach, enabling a program-by-program migration strategy. This bridge methodology allows organizations to move at their own pace, validating every individual workflow in a production-like environment before fully decommissioning legacy components. This approach reduces the risk of business interruption to near zero while providing a clear, measurable path to full modernization.
The financial benefits are transformative. Traditional consulting models typically cost between 5 million and 20 million dollars per project. Because it leverages high-fidelity automation, AS/Forward typically delivers a cost reduction of 10x to 50x compared to these legacy models. Speed-to-market is equally critical; while manual rearchitecting often requires a 5-to-7-year commitment, organizations using the platform can achieve their modernization goals within a 12- to 24-month timeline. To meet the stringent requirements of regulated industries, the architecture is designed to be completely provider-agnostic, allowing organizations to run the engine locally via Ollama or within secure, private cloud environments like AWS Bedrock. This design ensures that sensitive proprietary logic and customer data never leave the client firewall.
AS/Forward represents a paradigm shift in how the enterprise approaches the IBM i legacy. It moves the industry away from high-stakes, multi-year gambles and toward a model of strategic control and operational clarity. As the window for a controlled transition begins to close due to the aging workforce, this platform provides the tools and the roadmap necessary to secure the operational future of the enterprise for the next generation.
