Enterprise Modernization

Business Challenges

Today's enterprises are faced with enormous budgetary and compliance pressures making it difficult or nearly impossible to be innovative. Some of the challenges they face include:

• Legacy systems that have been battle tested and well documented, but do not integrate well with new systems
• External demands from customers and suppliers for more flexible IT frameworks based on SOA models.
• Employees with outdated skillsets that find it difficult to adapt to Web 2.0 technologies
• Regulatory compliances that create nightmare change management scenarios
• Waterfall based processes that do not move at the current speed of business and have high failure rates

What We Offer

Legacy Application Transformation

Using IBM Rational Host Access Transformation Services (HATS), we can transform your legacy 3270 mainframe or 5250 green screens into modern web applications, reducing training time for employees by as much as 75%. We can show you how you can leverage your existing assets without touching the source RPG or COBOL code to integrate with your B2B vendors and suppliers via web services. Rational HATS is not a screen scraper, but rather a tool that can dynamically create HTML pages from the entire 5250 or 3270 data stream using a rules based engine. If your choice is to replace your applications, but rewriting from scratch is cost prohibitive, Rational Migration Extensions can take your existing source code and migrate it toEnterprise Generation Languge, which you can then deploy as a rich web based UI.

Improve Developer Productivity

By migrating your team to a rich IDE from environments like PDM or SEU, your team can collaborate better and work smarter. IBM's has decleared they are not advancing their host based development environements, so to take advantage of new language features and processor architectures such as the new POWER7, you must move your team to the new developement environments. Integration of atomic version control systems and automated build and deployment tools will help protect your software assets and allow your developers to spend less time deploying and more time creating. New business languages such as EGL from IBM have been designed to help your developers easily migrate from RPG or COBOL to a modern language that is easier to learn than Java or .NET, yet builds upon their existing skills.

Agile Process Mentoring

Reduce risk and improve quality by implementing an iterative application development process. Migrate away from poor performing waterfall type processes and improve the success ratio of your projects using agile processes such as Scrum and Rational Unifed Process.

Application Lifecycle Management

Learn to manage your application beyond just a single development cycle. Incorporate best practices with an evolving business model to help improve your company's competitiveness in the marketplace, while maintaining compliance with legal and regulatory agencies. We can help you implement a collaborative application lifecycle management (C/ALM) systems to increase your project success ration, increase visibility of development projects, and improve collaboration between developers, business unit owners, and executives.

Our Successes

Strongback Consulting is recognized as a key design partner for IBM Rational HATS, and has numerous successful clients on both System i and System z. Watch this video to see how one of our Principal Consultants helped a customer achieve lower training costs and penetrate into new markets.