Logiciel iModernizes☺ to Lower Costs, Win New Business
Headquartered in Ecuador, Logiciel offers integrated IT solutions to support companies in the financial sector, primarily in banking. Logiciel offers development, maintenance and consulting services related to the financial applications used by its clients, including Bank of Pichincha and Ecuador Internal Revenue Service. Logiciel’s own IT infrastructure and development environment are integral to the company’s ability to offer products and services to its customers at a competitive rate.
Business Challenge
From its debut in 1988, the AS/400 quickly became the logical option for many large corporations. Fast, dependable and secure, the platform was adopted by many financial companies and their vendors. Throughout the financial industry, numerous mission-critical applications have been created in legacy languages such as RPG specifically to run on the AS/400 platform. Because of the popularity of the AS/400, competition was tight, and vendors such as Logiciel knew they had to maintain close control over costs to retain clients while still ensuring reasonable profit margins.
Recently, the industry saw a movement to more modern platforms, languages and open systems. The prime reasons were lower costs, greater flexibility and the opportunity to achieve tighter integration with other systems. Closed proprietary systems and legacy languages such as RPG were not easy to integrate into the modern environments increasingly favored by the financial industry. Logiciel immediately recognized the need to modernize: it had to keep pace with the industry it serviced, and more importantly, needed to adopt open systems itself to reduce internal costs, increase business agility and remain competitive.
The Fresche Solution – iModernize
We supplied Logiciel with the technology to convert its systems from the AS/400 to an open platform. To help Logiciel increase the speed of the process, reduce the risk of manual error and minimize associated costs, we provided iModernize, our AS/400 modernization solution that includes all of the tools needed to automatically convert applications and databases. In most cases, automated conversion is far superior to re-writing or purchasing a packaged application. In addition to speed and reduced manual error, the converted system functions exactly as it did before, so you lose no valuable business logic or functionality and you maintain your core business culture. The modernized system is less costly, much easier to work with and more agile.
For Logiciel, converting applications and databases from the AS/400 to Windows and carrying out development in .NET would do all of the following:
- Reduce the expensive AS/400 legacy skill set that Logiciel relied on
- Reduce the high cost of maintaining an aging AS/400 environment
- Keep Logiciel in line with evolving industry standards
- Enhance the ability of the development team to respond quickly to client needs at a competitive cost.
We not only provided the tools, we also offered training on iModernize to help Logiciel complete the migration on its own. We continue to offer coding suggestions to help the company increase its business performance. In addition, we share techniques to help ease maintenance pressures and resolve any technological issues that Logiciel encounters. Fresche Legacy provides not only tools, but a complete modernization partnership as well.
The Wrap
With Fresche Legacy’s iModernize toolkit and modernization expertise, Logiciel was able to successfully transition to an open platform. They successfully converted from RPG to .NET and were able to run their applications on open systems, using either Oracle or SQL Server as their database. Logiciel's market instantly broadened - Once the applications were migrated, they used the opportunity to enhance and optimitize these applications to build-in key-market differentiators. They wanted to be a disruptive force in their market, and succeeded.
About iModernize
Fresche Legacy’s iModernize is a toolkit that automatically converts RPG, COBOL and CL code to native .NET or Java without risk of manual error. The solution includes the following:
- Automated code conversion
- Automated database and data conversion
- Integrated test automation
- Automated command language conversion
- Automated user interface migration to Web-based GUIs.