Starting tomorrow January 27th we will be
engaging with Microsoft on a campaign aimed
towards helping companies and developers in the UK move their Visual Basic 6.0
applications to the .NET platform. This is not the first time we provide
migration solutions in that territory,
since we have lots of customers
there already (you can read some of our case studies and references here), but this is the first occasion
we join forces on a massive scale effort locally with 2 of our major partners:
Microsoft and Avanade. ArtinSoft will be providing tools, resources and
guidance, along with limited-time offers during this campaign. For example, we’ll
have a 10% discount on licenses of our Visual
Basic Upgrade Companion for the enterprise level, while launching the Visual
Basic Upgrade Companion Developer Edition at a special introductory price
of only £199. For those who require a turn-key solution, we have also partnered
with Avanade to deliver the most
comprehensive, cost-effective Visual Basic 6.0 to .NET migration solution. So
if you are based in the UK and still have Visual Basic 6.0 investments that
need to be leveraged, click here to learn
more about this campaign, and contact us as soon as possible to take advantage
of this unique opportunity.
It’s well known that financial institutions are under a lot
of pressure to replace their core legacy systems, and here at ArtinSoft we’ve seen an increased interest
from this industry towards our migration services and products, specially our Visual Basic Upgrade
Companion tool and our VB to
.NET upgrade services. In fact,
during the last year or so we’ve helped lots of these institutions move their
business critical applications to newer platforms, accounting for millions of
lines of code successfully migrated at low risk, cost and time.
Margin pressures and shrinking IT budgets have always been a
considerable factor for this sector, with financial institutions constantly
looking for a way to produce more with less. Some studies show that most of
them allocate around 80% of their budgets maintaining their current IT
infrastructure, much of which comprised by legacy applications.
Competition has also acted as another driver for legacy
modernization, with organizations actively looking for a competitive advantage
in a globalized world. Legacy applications, like other intangible assets, are
hard to emulate by competitors, so they represent key differentiators and a source
of competitive advantage. Typically, significant investments in intellectual
capital have been implanted in the legacy systems over the years (information
about services, customers, operations, processes, etc.), constituting the
back-bone of many companies.
In the past, they approached modernization in an incremental
way, but recent compliance and security developments have drastically impacted
financial institutions. In order to comply with new regulations, they are
forced to quickly upgrade their valuable legacy
software assets. Industry analysts estimate that between 20-30% of a bank's
base budget is spent on compliance demands, so they are urgently seeking for
ways to reduce this cost so that they can invest in more strategic projects.
However, many institutions manually rewrite their legacy
applications, a disruptive method that consumes a lot of resources, and normally
causes loss of business knowledge embedded in these systems. Hence the pain and
mixed results that Bank Technology News’ Editor in Chief, Holly Sraeel,
describes on her article “From
Pain to Gain With Core Banking Swap Outs”. “Most players concede that such
a move (core banking replacement) is desirable and considered more strategic
today than in years past. So why don’t more banks take up the cause? It’s still
a painful—and expensive—process, with no guarantees”, she notes. “The
replacement of such a system (…) represents the most complex, risky and
expensive IT project an institution can undertake. Still, the payoff can far
exceed the risks associated with replacement projects, particularly if one
factors in the greater efficiency, access to information and ability to add
applications.”
That’s when the concept of a proven automated legacy
migration solution emerges as the most viable and cost-effective path towards
compliance, preserving the business knowledge present in these assets, enhancing
their functionality afterwards, and avoiding the technological obsolescence
dead-end trap. Even more when this is no longer optional due to today’s tighter
regulations. As Logica’s William Morgan clearly states on the interview
I mentioned on my previous post,
“compliance regimes in Financial Services can often dictate it an unacceptable
operational risk to run critical applications on unsupported software”.
“These applications are becoming a real risk and some are
increasingly costly to maintain. Regulators are uncomfortable about
unsupported critical applications. Migrating into the .NET platform, either to VB.NET
or C# contains the issue. Clients are keen to move to new technologies in the
simplest and most cost effective way so that their teams can quickly focus on
developments in newer technologies and build teams with up to date skills”, he
ads, referring specifically to VB6 to .NET migrations.
So, as I mentioned before, ArtinSoft has a lot of experience in large
scale critical migration projects, and in the last year we’ve provided
compliance relief for the financial sector. With advanced automated migration
tools you can license, or expert consulting services and a growing partner
network through which you can outsource the whole project on a fixed time and
cost basis, we can definitely help you move your core systems to the latest
platforms.
Today Eric Nelson posted on one of his blogs a short interview
with Roberto Leiton, ArtinSoft’s CEO.
Eric works for Microsoft UK,
mostly helping local ISV’s explore and adopt the latest technologies and tools.
In fact, that’s why he first contacted us over a year ago, while doing some research
on VB to .NET migration
options for a large ISV in the UK.
Since then, we’ve been in touch with Eric, helping some of his ISV’s move off
VB6, and he’s been providing very useful Visual
Basic to .NET upgrade resources through his blogs.
So click here
for the full interview, where Eric and Roberto talk about experiences and
findings around VB6 to .NET migrations, and make sure to browse through Eric’s
blog and find “regular postings on the
latest .NET technologies, interop and migration strategies and more”,
including another interview
with William Morgan of Logica, one of our partners in the UK.
Since 2007, a team of ArtinSoft’s
experts has been working on a tool that helps automate a lot of actions commonly
performed by web developers, increasing their productivity and resulting in more
efficient pages. The outcome is Aggiorno, an
expandable plug-in for Visual Studio that produces SEO friendly, XHTML compliant,
CSS styled HTML and ASP.NET, which eases enormously the task of delivering web
standards compliant web sites. Based on a unique pattern detection and
transformation engine, Aggiorno’s beta version is currently available on a
by-invitation-only basis, so register now
and get early access to this revolutionary product!
OK. So finally, after months of encouraging my colleagues to post their thoughts and experiences on this
domain, I decided to start my own blog. Yeah, well, it probably should have started the other way around, but you know what they say: "Shoemakers’ wives go barefoot, and doctors' wives die young".
Having worked at
ArtinSoft's marketing and customer service departments for years, it's only natural to write about the market/business side of the software migration world (motivations, advances, tips, experiences, issues, achievements, statistics, etc.), specially around Visual Basic to .NET upgrades. But you should also expect some random stuff thrown in once in a while.