Fresche biz for Speedware: LA's AS/400s
October 2, 2012
Fresche Legacy, the company that rebranded itself from its Speedware roots this spring, has announced a project to migrate mission-critical apps at the LA Department of Power and Water away from legacy AS/400 servers. The utility's target to take systems off what IBM now calls System i: HP's hardware running Microsoft's .NET framework.
This represents the freshest line of business for this well-known 3000 vendor. Ever since 2010, it's been partnering with HP to transform these IBM servers to HP's Intel-based systems, usually running Windows Server.
Fresche continues to serve and pursue the HP 3000 customer in a couple of ways. It's got an application support business that takes over customers' maintenance and management of MPE apps and systems. Francois Desrochers, who was once part of the Robelle labs, is working at Fresche these days. Not long ago, Fresche put out a general call for such 3000 experts -- by advertising on the PowerHouse mailing list.
The other means to engage 3000 customers comes from supporting the Speedware tools already sold into the installed base. The automated development toolset continues to run production-grade applications, and Fresche president Andy Kulakowski said 3000 tool support continues with no end-date in hand.
The company also employs a tool that it acquired to migrate these AS/400 customers. ML-iMPACT, renamed as iModernize, allows System i sites to automate conversions from legacy RPG and CL languages to Java or C#.NET. At the LADWP, that's software serving a record number of customers across an enormous stretch of California.
The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power is the nation's largest municipal utility, providing safe, secure and reliable water and electric service to almost 4 million residents in Los Angeles. LADWP’s real estate division owns and manages more than 310,000 acres in the Eastern Sierra.
Fresche Legacy flies the flag of a company employing "experts in application transformation and application support services for IBM midrange and mainframe systems, including the IBM i (AS/400) platform... with proven experience with RPG and the IBM i environment.
"We are excited to have this opportunity to work with one of the largest public utilities in the US," said Kulakowski, "as we continue to execute our core strategy to grow and expand our footprint in the IBM i (AS/400) market." Fresche will work on LADWP applications based on RPG which serve the utility's real estate division.