By Cassandra Balentine
Organizations look to business management software to support critical processes from budget planning and document management to legacy application modernization. Advanced Business Solutions US (Advanced) provides these services to the North American market.
Established in 1983 and headquartered in Atlanta, GA, the company offers payroll, human resources, customer relationship management, and document management solutions to drive efficiencies, deliver greater visibility, and gain control for local authorities, healthcare organizations, law firms, and private sector businesses including banks, manufacturers, retailers, charities, and travel companies.
Operating with a staff of 20, the company is a ten million dollar division of Advanced Computer Software Group Limited, a supplier of software and IT services to both public and private organizations, which is based in the U.K. A private company, it does not disclose its annual revenue figures.
Advanced’s solutions are developed to enable organizations to increase the accuracy and strategic value of financial plans, cut costs by streamlining business processes, and reduce the complexity, cost, and risk of application initiatives.
The Legacy System Struggle
To further support its offering, Advanced recently launched its Application Portfolio Analysis (APA), an application portfolio analysis solution with integrated services.
APA enables organizations to reduce the complexity, cost, and risk associated with application improvement initiatives to maximize the value of existing legacy systems. The solution provides enhanced technical and contextual analysis to accurately determine how applications are used to improve strategic decision making and investment prioritization.
Many organizations struggle with outdated legacy systems, which have been developed over several years by different programmers. The acceleration of disruptive technologies—including the cloud and mobile—further add to the difficulty of maintaining an optimized portfolio.
Jeff Shelby, director of application modernization, Advanced Business Solutions US, says Advanced has been providing legacy migration and modernizations services to the market for more than 30 years. However, now that companies are out of the 2008 recession, rather than struggle to maintain their existing portfolios, they are looking at the future of the application portfolios more strategically. “Our view is that when it comes to modernizing your applications, how you finish very much depends on how you start. We have the tools and expertise to help organizations with that process,” he explains.
Shelby notes that APA has been in development for about a year and is comprised of PathFinder Services and Application Understanding software tools.
PathFinder services provide customized modernization, rationalization, and decommissioning strategies to assist organizations in determining the current cost of ownership and operation of existing applications, their value to the business, and whether they need to invest in new application portfolio analysis initiatives.
The Application Understanding software tool allows developers to better understand, maintain, and enhance applications. With it, inherent relationships can be mapped, roadblocks identified, and suitable changes made. It provides a searchable database of information built from the language code and data structures of an organization’s application portfolio.
“APA provides enhanced technical and contextual analysis to accurately determine how applications are used to improve strategic decision making and investment polarization. The core Application Understanding Software has been around since the late 1990’s,” he offers.
Advanced Migration
Organizations with a broad portfolio of self-developed applications that are seeking to better understand their options and plan their future strategies to gain a competitive advantage are ideal candidates for Advanced APA. SW
Feb2016, Software Magazine
