Montreal, Canada – May 9, 2013 Fresche Legacy, a legacy management company providing services and solutions to understand, maintain, modernize and transform legacy applications, recently completed three IBM i (AS/400) assessments for major clients in the US and Europe. The assessments were carried out for a large auto manufacturer, a leading US pharmacy services company, and a large IT services company in Europe. As part of Fresche’s Discover™ Services offering, each assessment identified strategies to modernize and transition the client’s IBM i applications to meet growing IT demands and better support the organization.
All three clients had expressed similar goals: they wanted to identify ways to modernize or transition their applications and develop a plan to reduce risk, improve agility and address shortages of skilled resources associated with supporting applications on the IBM i platform. Increased business agility is one of the major benefits of moving away from outdated legacy programming languages such as RPG, which has been identified as nearly obsolete by leading IT analyst research firm Gartner, Inc. When performed properly, IT modernization can better support business initiatives to address changing market needs. Moving to a modern platform also lowers overall IT costs for infrastructure, software licenses, development, testing, and maintenance.
As the first step in planning a transition, the discovery service helped each of the clients examine key business goals and objectives as well as their total IBM i environment, including applications, interfaces, data sources, software and utilities. The Fresche Discover™ Service leverages a unique utility that was purpose-built for analyzing legacy environments. The utility was used to uncover critical application environment details including both active and unused components. This facilitates cost savings, since applications or code that clients no longer use won’t factor into the planning or transitioning costs. These savings are often substantial. The assessment also provided a tailor-made modernization plan based on each client’s unique circumstances and future business goals.
A precise analysis of each client’s IT environment, beyond controlling costs, is also the essential first step to enhancing and modernizing applications to ensure they will respond to current and future business needs.
As experts in legacy management, Fresche Legacy (formerly Speedware) provides services and solutions to analyze, maintain, modernize, and transform legacy applications. Since 1976, Fresche has been helping companies improve financial performance, increase market competitiveness, remove risk and add value by making them more agile, flexible and efficient. Specializing in application support and transformation services for the IBM i (AS/400), IBM mainframe, and HP e3000 systems, Fresche provides a single point of responsibility from concept to maintenance, and guarantees the results.