Catching trade winds with Professional Services

Drive new feature adoption

and accelerate your return on investment

The Business Problem

Business processes are rarely static. They are subject to the prevailing trade winds of economic and market forces. Sailing close to those winds is a challenge for most enterprises trying to keep pace with change.

Outdated IT systems and in particular, software applications are often the cause. They tend to lag behind the latest innovation.

Why? There’s always a trade-off between servicing your short-term customer needs and long-term investments in broader technology development. The former keeps the boat from drifting a few degrees off course, whereas the latter charts the course to new and blue horizons.

Invariably, short-term priorities dominate, even though the long-term strategic needs are crucial to maintaining a competitive edge.

Neglecting ‘the strategic’ in favour of ‘the tactical’ works during the summer breezes, but you increase the risk of being blown onto the rocks when the winter storms eventually appear.

Is your business becalmed?

As a software development manager or project leader, you walk a tight rope between maintaining mission-critical legacy applications and rewriting them from scratch. You know the market asks for browser user interfaces; tight systems integration via Web services; and support for Software-as-a-Service business models.

How do you achieve that? Should you rewrite, buy-in or augment what you already have? Rewriting in most cases doesn’t make economic sense – the cost and time-to-market simply make it impractical. Buying-in packaged applications simply won’t cut-it either – they lack the specifics. Yet can you find the resources you need to augment your existing applications?

Put the wind back in your sails with Professional Services

The Solution

Our Professional Services provide expert hands on deck to help you face unexpected headwinds. Who better than ourselves to give you the impetus to reach your professional goals?

No need to worry whether you can afford new full-time employees, no need to spend time and money trying to recruit. And there’s no learning curve to overcome; once briefed, our team of experts will hit the ground running.

Just when your boat’s beginning to rock, our Professional Services provide the ballast that steadies the heave and puts the wind back in your sails.

Working alongside you and your development team, we offer a range of short and long-term engagements covering software development; on-site, on-line or custom training; consulting; and implementation services.

Description of services

No two company’s visions, requirements, or budgets are alike. That’s why Professional Services provides you a set of flexible on-site or off-site solutions, no matter how complex or unique your situation.

Scope

Modernize your apps

Recompilation – short term
- Recompile existing code to support the latest release
Modernization – long term
- Refresh the user experience, implement Web services (RESTful or SOAP), feature design, database migration, infrastructure migration

Development

Develop new applications

Testing

Develop automatic test scripts to validate correctness and scalability

Training

On-site, on-line and custom

Programs

Detailed description of programs

A program is a pre-defined set of tasks that enhance your application without fundamentally changing its business logic. Here is a list of the current programs:

Migrating from GDC to GBC

Web browsers have become the de facto user interface platform for business applications and are increasingly preferred for their simplified administration. They enable access to applications from ‘anywhere’ without the need to install ‘client’ software on the user’s device. This in turn enables updates to the installed base with a minimal deployment effort. Given that the application no longer has a client component, it resides entirely on the central server.

We will assist you with this important transformation and implement the Genero Application Server (GAS) with the necessary security measures imposed by Web browsers. We can also help you improve the user experience by customizing your user interface using HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript.

Migrating from ‘vi’ to Genero Studio

Improve developer productivity by changing your current ‘vi’ and ‘make’ command-line driven environment to a graphical user interface framework with Genero Studio.
Your team will produce fewer bugs and cut more reliable code more quickly in ‘Code Editor’ using its code completion and real-time syntax highlighting.
You’ll get a ‘big picture’ view of your source files via Structure Views and Dependency Diagrams that will identify dead branches.
Forms and Reports can be drawn rather than coded using graphical designers. You’ll correct your code with the graphical debugger that provides greater visibility of all variables and their values in a running program.
Trace and Coverage will determine the frequency of execution of each line of your application and Code Analyser will identify performance bottlenecks.
Code Beautifier will make your applications easier to read and accessible to the entire team. These features and more will result in increased productivity of the development team.
We’ll analyse your existing environment and assist you towards transforming it with Genero Studio. Even the most diehard ‘vi’ protagonists will get value from the move.

Updating Genero

Using the latest Genero release has many advantages, which include:

New language and user interface features,
The latest security patches,
Support for the latest databases and operating systems.

You’ll feel safe in the knowledge that known bugs have been resolved, and that your next upgrade will take place with minimal disruption.

We’ll assist you with migrating your system to the latest version of Genero, and modify your system where applicable to take advantage of the latest features.

Updating the infrastructure

Do you need to move your application to another operating system? Do you need to move it to another database? We’ll assess the implications and make those changes where necessary.

Enhancing the User Experience

Does your User Interface look like it was written in the last century? So much can be done to revitalize your application without touching a single line of business logic!

Use new widgets, containers, presentation styles, and web components to quickly refresh the appearance. Dig deeper by using multiple dialogs, dynamic dialogs and new language syntax to increase the generic nature of your code, so reducing code length.

With your guidance we will transform the appearance and potential of your application.

Enhancing with Web Services

If you need to expose business processes to the outside world or fetch information ‘on the fly’ from external systems, Web Services is the answer. We’ll assist you with the definition and implementation of Web Services and configure your Application Server to publicize and consume them.

On-boarding to Genero Cloud

Moving from an ‘on premise’ to an ‘off premise’ Cloud environment requires a certain amount of ‘on-boarding’. It is not always as simple as copying binaries and data from one location to another. On-boarding entails careful analysis of the application to ensure that performance does not suffer in a world where once ‘free’ resources such as CPU, memory, disk and network bandwidth cost money! We’ll assist you with identifying configuration, application, interface, and resource issues that may need to be adjusted to cater to Genero Cloud.

Writing Genero Report Writer Reports

Whether you are moving from IBM Informix 4GL, ACE Reports or a third party reporting tool, we’ll help you migrate to Genero Report Writer and enhance the appeal and impact of your business reports at the same time. This includes taking advantage of resources such as fonts, images, colour, barcodes, charts, and relative and absolute positioning. We’ll assist you with the development infrastructure and runtime environment for maximum performance. That may include the writing of templates, data transformations and library calls to save, preview, print and stream reports. Where performance is important, we’ll assist with the design of distributed processing options to ensure your reports do not needlessly consume server resources.

Internationalization

You want to expand into new markets, but those markets require support for different languages, character set encodings, currency and decimal symbols. We’ll assist you with enhancing your application to ensure you cover the basic needs you did not envisage when you first developed the application.

QA Automation with Genero Ghost Client

Quality Assurance testing can be automated with the Genero Ghost Client to quickly capture errors. An automated testing framework enables you to simulate user-input and perform many tests in a very short period of time.

We’ll assist you with implementing a unit test framework that will not only validate the correctness of your application, but will also benchmark its scalability under load conditions that are difficult, sometimes impossible to reproduce in the lab.

On-shore and off-shore

Projects are defined and managed with the help of the regional support team that interface with the core services team in Chennai, India. This team has broad skills and deep knowledge using a variety of technologies: