Answer
Release cadence is one of the clearest signals a vendor is still investing, so buyers should ask to see the actual release history for the last two to three years, not a roadmap slide. A product with sparse or purely maintenance-level updates, PTF-equivalent fixes with no functional improvement, is telling buyers something about where it sits in the vendor's priorities, even if sales materials say otherwise. It is also worth asking directly whether the vendor's long-term roadmap keeps the product native on IBM i or is quietly steering customers toward a cloud or other-platform successor product, since that answer changes what buyers are actually committing to.
Partner ecosystem health matters as much as the vendor itself. A product can be actively developed but still risky to buy if the pool of implementation and support partners who know it well has shrunk to one or two firms, since that concentrates delivery risk badly. Buyers should ask for customer references in a similar industry and company size, and should ask those references specifically about support responsiveness and whether recent updates have been reliable, not just whether they are happy with the original implementation from years ago.