IBM is bringing its Rational message to the UK's midrange masses at a half-day seminar on Tuesday, June 16. "The Future of System i Development" event will be held at IBM's London South Bank site and will feature Todd Britton, Big Blue's worldwide spokesperson on application transformation.

In February 2008, IBM called time on both WebSphere Development Studio Client and its Advanced equivalent and replaced them with Rational Developer for System i (RDi) and Rational Business Developer for SOA. Speakers will look at where the new Rational products fit with the i and how they pertain to RPG and Cobol developers. There will be a focus on IBM's Jazz platform for collaborative application lifecycle management and products such as Rational Requirements Composer and Rational Team Concert. The seminar will also seek to answer questions about the stability of the new products and their OS i 6.1 licence implications.

"We believe it would be a great event for anyone involved with systems development," says Niki Middleton at IBM's UK Rational marketing team. "There have been a number of changes recently including the sun-setting of certain development tools such as PDM, hence the systems audience needs to be made aware of this and the new improved alternatives such as RDi, RDi SOA and so on."

Andrew Ireland from event co-host Binary Computer Services adds: "The key objective is to explain to customers what the implications are of the move of System i development tools from the System i group in Rochester to Rational. Additionally, we are looking to help customers position which solution best fits them. In the last 12 months, there has been a major overhaul of development tools for System i customers. System i is a major focus for IBM Rational, which can be seen in the wide portfolio of solutions being delivered."

For the full agenda and registration, see The Future of System i Development web pages. A similar event for System z mainframe users will be held on June 19.