Northdoor, an IT consultancy and provider of solutions primarily to the financial services industry, has launched a System i legacy modernisation service in the UK and Ireland. The service is intended to enable firms to unlock additional value and extended life from System i applications.

The company says that System i applications written in RPG can be affected by such things as skills shortages and high maintenance costs, plus no in-built support for innovations such as web-services or the creation of a service oriented architecture (SOA). It also suggests that green-screen user interfaces can lead to poor productivity and user dissatisfaction.

“Despite the limitations of some System i applications, many companies are rightly reluctant to replace them as they are reliable and encapsulate extensive and proven business logic,” says David Ballard, consultancy director at Northdoor. “But there is a way to extend the life of these investments for many years to come. System i applications can now be modernised to present user-friendly and productive Windows interfaces and to allow new functionality, including web services, to be incorporated via modern technologies such as Microsoft .NET and Java.”

Northdoor’s service combines the expertise of its own consultants with the Rapid Application Modernisation Process (RAMP) software tool from LANSA, a new Northdoor business partner.

“There are no re-engineering costs with our service which is also better than a screen-scraping approach which makes an existing application interface look pretty but doesn’t do any more,” says Ballard. “With our approach users achieve 90% of the benefits of a re-engineering exercise for 25% of the cost. It’s also incremental, meaning you can add components when you need them.”

The Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music (ABRSM) is an existing customer of both partners. “We find Northdoor’s System i expertise invaluable and have high hopes for our imminent use of LANSA,” says IT director, Eugene O’Donnell. “I am convinced that Northdoor’s modernisation offering and LANSA’s toolset will benefit us.”

“Northdoor is a respected and influential player in the System i community,” comments Martin Fincham, general manager, LANSA EMEA. “Its domain expertise in the financial services sector is unrivalled, as is its knowledge and skills associated with the System i platform. We are delighted it will be employing LANSA with its clients as the preferred approach to legacy application modernisation.”

Others in the industry endorse the views on the dilemma facing some System i users. LANSA rival ASNA’s Derek Cooper, for example, says: “iSeries-based companies have two strategic choices when it comes to deciding where they want to be in 2010. One of these is Java/WebSphere, pushed hard by IBM, and mostly taken up by large companies who have sufficient resources. Moving an RPG operation across to Java can prove very costly and time-consuming. Consequently there are many companies who, after dabbling with screen scrapers etcetera, are still waiting for a more suitable long-term modernisation solution.”

 
“The second option is .NET,” says Cooper. “At first glance .NET looks no friendlier than Java. But, dig deeper and you’ll note Visual Studio 2005 includes an RPG compiler. Plus any .NET based application has the luxury of fast, secure and scalable record-level access to DB2/400 -- this is not OLE-DB based. So not only does .NET become more attractive than Java but .NET applications can access data in exactly the same way native applications do.”

Northdoor has provided System i, iSeries and AS/400 expertise to organisations in Britain and Ireland for over 18 years. It has extensive RPG, .NET and Java skills and was recently selected to become an IBM Premier Partner. While its key territory is the South of England, it does cover the rest of the UK.

“We operate a consultancy-led approach with no stakes in the ground,” says Ballard. “We always look at the best solution for our clients’ problems and come up with the best answer.”

Frank Booty, industry reporter