IBM i Clients Prepare For IT Modernization with Fresche Legacy

MONTREAL, CANADA--(Marketwired - 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 Increased business agility is one of the major benefits of moving away from outdated legacy programming languages such as RPG, which has been identified as nearly obsolete by leading IT analyst research firm Gartner, Inc. When performed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.

"Clients are often concerned about the cost and complexity of migrating applications," said Chris Koppe, VP Corporate Strategy at Fresche. "That's understandable, because when it comes to modernizing legacy applications, the larger the environment, the higher the effort and cost. That's where the Fresche Discover™ Service can really make an impact. It provides a 360-degree view of the client's legacy landscape. A thorough analysis of each client's system lets us identify sections of code or applications that the client no longer uses. Excluding those elements can have a substantial impact on cost reduction."

"Fresche's offerings really stand out because of our niche expertise in legacy management and our ability to provide companies with strategies and solutions you can't find anywhere else. This is what we do, and we ensure that it's done right, from start to finish."

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.

Fresche Legacy's President and CEO, Andy Kulakowski, echoed the importance of the initial analysis. "Our assessments provide a highly precise mapping of business function to application object to data: what you have, what you're actually using, and what needs modernizing. We also take into account the client's current and future business goals, resources, costs, dependencies, and competing projects. We believe that the best way to modernize is to first analyze the total environment and then develop a comprehensive, business-aligned strategy," he said. "Once the strategy and associated plan is in place, we handle the full lifecycle of the project from concept to maintenance. And with our disciplined and unique legacy management and transformation methodology, we can ensure the success of each project. It's all part of our promise to add value to our customers' business. We don't just say it - we back it up with 100% customer referenceability."

About Fresche Legacy

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.

I.T. can make you smile.

To find out how, please visit: www.freschelegacy.com