Application modernization is a lot like climbing a mountain. The top of the mountain is where you want your applications to be, but the terrain below is extremely rugged. You need a guide with the right plan of attack to take you to the top. Read on to find out why you should embark on this journey with LANSA.
By choosing LANSA, you’ll leverage 30+ years of experience modernizing legacy IBMi (otherwise known as IBM i) applications. It comes from doing this type of work every day, week after week, 52 weeks a year. The LANSA platform allows you and your applications to remain on the top of the mountain even if you encounter a seismic shift in your server technology. Also, we support multiple platforms and interfaces, which means you can continue to invest in your IBM i today with the added insurance that your applications will be cross-platform tomorrow.
As mentioned earlier, the right partner is one with a proven track record of providing modernization strategies tailored to clients’ business needs. So, take some time to see for yourself our areas of expertise, who our customers are, and the benefits they’ve achieved. In the meantime, here are some more reasons you should modernize with LANSA.
Build More Efficient and Accelerated Business Line Applications that Support Cross-platform or Flexible Deployment and Integrations.
Developing line-of-business applications with LANSA is as easy as it gets. Visual LANSA lets you build desktop-like business applications using the same language for both the server-side and client-side. Here, meeting user interface requirements and integrating with business line systems is easy. This is because Visual LANSA enables business logic distribution across servers and browsers. You can build applications for virtually any device; mobile (IOS/Andriod), desktop, tablets, etc.
Visual LANSA is a low-code rapid application development platform, which means that it generates efficient code for most parts of your application. This way, you can increase productivity while ensuring efficient application build. What’s more, Visual LANSA works with a pre-defined meta-data repository and business rules engine. In other words, you can further increase productivity as you don’t need to spend time coding business rules and data definitions in your programs. This setup also means that all applications use the same definitions. So, if you need to implement a data attribute change, you only need to do so once. This reduces operational and maintenance costs.
Simplicity and Scalability
LANSA is an array of low-code modernization solutions and experts. It doesn’t get simpler. With easy-to-understand and navigate low-code solutions and experts ready to guide you through your modernization journey, using LANSA is easy. At the beginning of your legacy application modernization journey, LANSA’s professional services develop tailor-made strategies, unique to your business needs. This way, if your focus is on achieving short-term results or quickly satisfying a business need, you can easily do so and scale as your business allows.
For some of our customers, it begins with extending their IBM i functionalities on a graphical user interface. Using aXes, they can add a new user interface within minutes without a single code line. Going forward, they can add more functionalities as their business time frame allows.
Modernization
As stated earlier, LANSA has been helping enterprise technical teams modernize and expand the functionality of legacy systems for 30+ years. Modernizing with LANSA allows you to leverage a professional service team with a proven track record that’ll employ tailored strategies unique to your modernization needs to help you achieve your business, financial, and technical goals.
With smart modernization tools that minimize risk, increase productivity, and speed up time to market, amongst other numerous benefits, you can better position yourself for current and future business needs.
Price: (ROI vs. price)
When it comes to enterprise-level investments, cost calculations are dependent on the possible return on investment (ROI). Not only is LANSA cost-effective in terms of pricing, it has a proven track record of high ROIs. When comparing prices for a modernization project, metrics like time to value and total cost of ownership are crucial in determining the actual costs. With LANSA, you can gain quick results while maintaining a low total cost of ownership.
Ongoing Project Support
LANSA offers extensive support with numerous online video materials and documentation for each solution. To top all that, its support team of experts is always on deck to guide you through any questions you may have.
Regulation
For many industries, regulation changes are the order of the day as authorities seek to ensure what’s best for consumers. However, this puts pressure on corresponding organizations to quickly adapt to become regulatory compliant. This could mean building new business solutions to automate processes. LANSA is your best bet at remaining relevant and thriving in such a competitive market if you fall under such industries.
Visual LANSA enables rapid application development up to 10X faster than any traditional development technique. Also, you can leverage other LANSA solutions to interface directly with all your data sources and ultimately satisfy regulatory requirements.
POC
When thinking about investing in legacy application modernization solutions, ensuring it meets your business requirements is imperative. To gain your vote of confidence, LANSA offers a proof of concept (POC) where you can see these business requirements. Note that this is different from a demo or an external evaluation with no support.
Getting LANSA’s proof of concept means you get to work with an experienced team to realize your vision. Other perks include gaining front row seats to how LANSA can generate results (from start to POC delivery). The POC you’ll receive is tailor-made, and here’s its four-step process, LANSA will;
- Initiate a discovery call with you to scope your business requirements.
- Leverage call data to develop POC
- Confirm your expectations are met during the development process
- Deliver POC with a 14-day test option.
What Does LANSA Products Do?
Boost Efficiency with Scalability and Agility
LANSA offers numerous IBM i modernization solutions that increase efficiency by making you more agile with the ability to scale to your growing business needs. In other words, you can quickly solve your pressing needs and add more functionality as your business time frame allows.
A perfect case study of increased efficiency with LANSA is Francis Marion University. They have a lot of useful data and business logic in their student administration systems. However, these systems ran on RPG code which displayed 5250 green screens and ultimately hampered their efficiency as they found it difficult to incorporate modern solutions.
According to John Dixon, chief information officer at Francis Marion University, “When I joined Francis Marion as their first CIO in January 2007, it became apparent our users wanted an up-to-date presentation of university information. As a short-term strategy, I decided to implement a GUI interface to our existing ERP system. We reviewed several applications on the market for accomplishing our goal and decided that LANSA’s RAMP product offered the most flexibility and easiest deployment.”
Using RAMP, they could satisfy their short-term strategy, giving them room to scale as their business needs grew.
Gain Greater Insights
Data is crucial for informing innovative strategies and gaining competitive advantages. IBM i systems store truckloads of data. But that isn’t enough. An actionable strategy for gaining insight from available data makes storing data even more valuable for your business.
However, data collected in legacy systems are often siloed and disconnected, making it difficult for users to leverage data for better decision-making. LANSA’s Business process integration (BPI) solution helps you integrate internal and external systems. You can also leverage Visual LANSA to develop new applications that drive insights from existing data.
Improve security and reduce risk
IBM i systems are known for their robustness, integrated database, and security. However, due to the incompatibility between legacy 5250 applications and modern security compliance, it may not be so secure after all. LANSA modernization solutions allow you to securely extract and share data, add new functionality, and build new applications. It uses an integrated meta-data repository and business rules engine to ensure security.
Optimize IT costs
As mentioned earlier, LANSA uses a single-language system, which makes for a simple learning curve. This language system gives you the luxury of leveraging your existing developer skills to build modern web, desktop, and mobile applications. You can also web-enable your existing IBM i applications using LANSA’s aXes. The applications you modernize or build are also easy to maintain. Thereby optimizing IT costs and providing a compelling user experience.
ITT-TDS is a transportation and logistics services arm of ITT Industries, a global industrial manufacturing company with a multi-billion dollar annual turnover. They leveraged LANSA’s IBM i modernization solution to improve a business process and increase efficiency. They achieved their short-term goal and ended up saving IT costs while doing so.
Speaking to LANSA’s media and marketing team, Tom Restaino, Manager, Information Technology/Operations at ITT-TDS, says, “We used to get many lengthy phone calls a day regarding freight bills. Now customers and carriers can make their own inquiries anytime they want. We expect that at least one of our full-time customer service staff can now spend time on other business practices.” And in the first year of implementation, they recorded a 4.3 million dollar audit reduction.
Innovate Faster
In our new economy, businesses must innovate faster than ever before. This can include building and deploying applications more quickly, faster time to market, incorporating modern technologies, etc. Visual LANSA allows users to create new web, desktop, and mobile applications ten times faster than any traditional development technique. Therefore, speeding up your delivery and time to market.
What’s more, LANSA enables you to empower your employees (citizen developers) to build and deploy business solutions with little to no coding knowledge. This way, your IT department can focus on more technically demanding tasks.
Many enterprises leverage LANSA application modernization solutions to innovate faster and lead a very competitive market. One of those success stories is Baustoff Union. By progressively modernizing their 1997 ERP solution and incorporating mobile applications, using LongRange, LANSA’s mobile app builder, they could speed up delivery. For example, they now guarantee delivery of stock orders within three hours of a customer placing an order.
Create an Agile and Strategic Workforce
Creating an agile and strategic workforce involves having the ability to keep up with modern-day business demands. These demands range from internal and external data integration to quickly building applications critical to becoming more efficient and agile. To achieve this, you must empower your developers with the right tools and environment to efficiently and rapidly create business solutions.
LANSA’s professional services and modernization solutions are a match made in heaven. Here, you have the luxury of sharing development and maintenance workload with experts. Hence, providing your developers with the perfect environment to thrive.
Nulogx, a leader in transportation management solutions, has benefited from this perk for many years. Using LANSA’s rapid application development platform for its TMS-O transportation management solution, Nulogx has delivered leading-edge software solutions for its customers.
Do you want to join businesses like Nulogx, Baustoff Union, etc., and thrive in your market? contact LANSA today.
