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The Challenge

The company, over the years, had developed software solutions to cater to the requirements of the target corporate clients in financial services, manufacturing, consumer services, public services, and healthcare. The software platform was originally developed for the IBM AS400 utilizing RPG as the main programming language.

To keep pace and parity with the broader marketplace, the company sought to transform and modernize the AS400 RPG applications and to reduce the costs of operation and maintenance.

The company wanted to be more nimble and have better consumer implementation, integration, and user experience with the applications.

The requirements were to shift to a prescribed web-based user interface that had been designed by the client, assist with module and domain design and functional layout to further cloud, microservices, and agility.

As the products could be delivered to clients via SaaS, ASP, and direct to consumer models, downtime and interruption were to be kept to a minimum. The marketing team also needed modernization activities to take place in a specific time period to align with product strategy.

Cost to Transition

The organization declared that the tool based modernization saved them 92% over a direct rewrite.

Cost to Operate

Reduction in IT infrastructure expenses of over $1 million annually.

30% increase in system change (improvements and features to core product) in the first year, further decreased operation costs.

Timeline

Manual rewrite and client migration were estimated to take 3 – 4 years.

Tool based modernization took 8 months to complete all products. Intermediate deployments throughout.

Customer Experience

Web-based product delivery increased UX with the application.
Preserved legacy look and feel.

Reduced deployment complexity with the transition from terminal services to web delivery model.

Architecture

Cloud-ready and scalable application.

Modernized Java application with web-based UI.

REST, XHR (Ajax) capabilities.

Modern 5-tier architecture with RDBMS backed data tier

Intangible Benefits

Increase in the speed of new feature delivery.

Modern, best practices realized in new system architecture.

No wasted years recreating business processes, systems, and data.
Improved data access and scaling.

Before
Costly Mainframe
Approximately 2.5 million lines of RPG code
DB2 and other flat data storage
Mainframe, green screen deployment model
100% manual testing

After
Open-source Linux and Tomcat server model
Java (framework driven) and Javascript code
SQL Server (RDBMS)
Web-based deployment model, supported by DevOps tooling
Thousands of automated tests