Niels Liisberg has spent over thirty years on a single platform - and used that time to change how the entire IBM i community thinks about modernisation. His starting point was never "replace the old system." It was always: what would it take to make this trusted platform join the modern world?

IBM i is the operating system that runs on IBM Power servers. It has been the backbone of banks, logistics companies, manufacturers, and public institutions for decades - rock-solid, but often perceived as hard to connect with modern APIs, cloud services, and web interfaces. Niels has spent his career solving exactly that problem.

Founder, architect, open-source author

His answer has been both practical and generous. He founded IceBreak - a native application server for IBM i that was the first to bring microservices, REST APIs, and web integration to the platform running entirely within its own environment. IceBreak became the architectural foundation for everything System & Method has built since. Around it, Niels also released a suite of open-source libraries - ILEastic, noxDB, and ILEvator - that let RPG programs speak JSON, host API endpoints natively, and call cloud services directly. These are not weekend experiments. They are production-grade tools used by developers across Europe, North America, and beyond.

IBM Champion, eight years running

IBM recognised this contribution through their Champion programme every year from 2019 through 2026 - a seven-year milestone that fewer than a handful of people globally have reached. In 2025 he became an IBM Redbooks Silver Author, recognising work that materially advances how IBM technology is understood and deployed. He also sits on CEAC - the Common Europe Advisory Council - where he helps shape the platform's direction at a European level.

"Companies are no longer looking to replace IBM i. Simple calculations of total cost of ownership make it - more than ever - a healthy decision to integrate the platform into modern infrastructures."

Niels Liisberg, IT Jungle, January 2023

That conviction shows up in everything he builds. IBM i is not a platform Niels is preserving - it is a platform he is advancing. With thirty years of proven reliability as its foundation, and modern APIs, microservices, AI tooling, and cloud connectivity as its frontier, the question for him has never been whether IBM i has a future. It is how fast that future can be built.

Now: Bringing AI into the picture

His most recent work takes that philosophy into the age of AI. Blueprint - the newest engine in the Sitemule suite - is an MCP server purpose-built for IBM i. MCP (Model Context Protocol) is the open standard that allows AI assistants such as Claude or GitHub Copilot to call external tools directly within a conversation. Blueprint plugs into that standard and gives an AI assistant access to something no database schema alone can provide: the actual business logic living inside decades of RPG programs and CL procedures.

The problem Blueprint solves is one Niels has observed throughout his career: hand an AI only a table schema and ask it to write a meaningful SQL query, and you will get a technically valid but operationally wrong result. Field names on IBM i are cryptic by design - a legacy of 10-character limits from punched-card days. Business rules live in RPG programs, not in database constraints. A pricing engine might chain five service programs together before arriving at a final figure. Without understanding that call chain, an AI produces a query that looks authoritative but silently misses discounts, surcharges, and contract overrides that exist four levels deep in the code.

Blueprint exposes what the system actually knows: table definitions enriched with human-readable descriptions, the source code of RPG and SQL programs, inter-program call trees (both top-down and bottom-up), and cross-referenced search across the entire source repository. An AI working through Blueprint understands not just what columns exist, but what they mean and how the business transforms them - inheriting decades of institutional knowledge in seconds rather than months. It is, in Niels’s own framing, “the missing brain behind your IBM i data.”

IceBreak - the architectural heart of everything

IceBreak is Niels’s founding product and the architectural heart of everything System & Method builds. He created IceBreak as a native application server for IBM i - the first of its kind to run entirely within the ILE environment, without relying on Java, PASE, or any external runtime. It brought microservices, REST APIs, encryption, multi-threading, and web integration to IBM i years before those concepts were mainstream on the platform. Every architectural pattern that later appeared in ILEastic, noxDB, and ILEvator was proven in production through IceBreak first.

Today it remains the commercial-grade, enterprise-supported core of the Sitemule platform: hardened, scalable, and actively developed. It is not a legacy product running on a legacy platform. It is a modern application server on a platform whose reliability has been validated across three decades of the world’s most demanding production environments.

Conference speaking

Niels is a permanent fixture on the COMMON circuit - the international conference series that brings together the IBM Power and IBM i community across Europe and beyond. Whether in Scandinavia, the Benelux countries, the UK, or at IBM THINK in North America, he shows up not just as a speaker but as someone who actively shapes the agenda: running workshops, joining panels, and engaging directly with developers and architects trying to solve real modernisation problems.

He frequently hosts webinars - not product demos, but genuine technical sessions where he shows what IBM i can do today and where it is heading next. The message is consistent: this is not a platform in maintenance mode. It is a platform being actively extended into AI, cloud integration, microservices, and modern developer tooling. The sessions attract practitioners who want to see the future of the platform demonstrated by someone who is building it.

Beyond the formal conference programme, he organises and participates in meetups and community gatherings - informal events where IBM i developers exchange ideas, share code, and build the kind of peer network that keeps a platform vibrant across generations. It is the same instinct that drives his open-source work: the belief that knowledge shared multiplies in value rather than diminishes it.

Career & credentials

• 2026: IBM Champion 2026 (8th consecutive year)
• 2025: IBM Redbooks Silver Author (awarded May 2025)
• 2024: CEAC Member, Common Europe Advisory Council - active participant in COMMON events across Europe and overseas
• 2023: Formal title: Chief Architect · IBM Champion · Quoted by IT Jungle on IBM i industry direction
• 2021: IBM Champion 3-Year Milestone · IBM Certified Developer IBM i 7.x (C9002700) · IBM Certification Exam Developer - helping define how IBM i developer competency is assessed worldwide
• 2019: First IBM Champion award at IBM THINK, San Francisco - received the Champion needle in person
• 2017: Chief Software Architect & Partner, System & Method A/S
• 2011: External consultant, Saxo Bank
• 1998: External consultant, A/S Dansk Shell (4 years)
• 1995: Software Architect, System & Method A/S - beginning of a 30-year IBM i specialisation
• 1989: System Analyst, IFM Systemer ApS - first professional role in Danish enterprise software