Partner400 is a Management Consulting company led by the combined talents of Jon Paris and Susan Gantner.  Between them Jon and Susan have more than 50 years of experience in IBM midrange systems and are two of the most experienced educators in the IBM i arena.

In addition to their teaching work, Jon and Susan write a weekly blog column which you can find at ibmsystemsmag.blogs.com/idevelop. They also act as technical editors and authors for IBM’s Systems Magazine and write a monthly column for the companion Extra newsletter.† In recent years they helped to found the System i Developer education consortium which runs the popular RPG & DB2 Summit events. You can find more about these conferences at the System i Developer web site (www.System i Developer.com).

Susan and Jon are also award-winning speakers and co-authors of the popular IBM Red Book Who Knew you Could Do That with RPG IV?  

Susan Gantner

Susan's career has spanned over 30 years in the field of application development. She began as a programmer developing applications for corporations in Atlanta, Georgia, working with a variety of hardware and software platforms.  She joined IBM in 1985 and quickly developed a close association with the Rochester laboratory during the development of the AS/400 system. 

Susan worked in Rochester, Minnesota for 5 years in the AS/400 Technical Support Center.  She later moved to the IBM Toronto Software Laboratory to provide technical support for programming languages and AD tools.

Susan left IBM in 1999 to devote more time to teaching and consulting.Her primary emphasis is on enabling customers to take advantage of the latest programming and database technologies on IBM i.

Susan is a regular speaker at COMMON conferences and other technical conferences around the world and holds a number of Speaker Excellence medals from COMMON.

Jon Paris

Jon's IBM midrange career started when he fell in love with the System/38 while working as a consultant.  This love affair ultimately led him to joining IBM.

In 1987, Jon was hired by the IBM Toronto Laboratory to work on the S/36 and S/38 COBOL compilers. Subsequently Jon became involved with the AS/400 and in particular COBOL/400.

In early 1989 Jon was transferred to the Languages Architecture and Planning Group, with particular responsibility for the COBOL and RPG languages.   There he played a major role in the definition of the new RPG IV language and in promoting its use with IBM Business Partners and Users. He was also heavily involved in producing educational and other support materials and services related to other AS/400 programming languages and development tools, such as CODE/400 and VisualAge for RPG.

Jon left IBM in 1998 to focus on developing and delivering education focused on enhancing IBM i application development skills. 

Jon is a frequent speaker at User Groups meetings and conferences around the world, and holds a number of speaker excellence awards from COMMON. .

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