MIPS savings
Fast cuts down the overall costs of Mainframe environments, reducing substantially the expenses generated by the hardware in the maintenance and programing processes. The savings come, mainly, from the reduction in the compilation errors in the Mainframe. Taking these savings into account, along with the improved productivity of the developers, Fast makes for a rapid return on investment, reaching ROI in less than a year in this kind of systems.
Reduced number of errors
As source code is generated from templates that have been validated and tested by the main software architects of the installation, Fast reduces the amount of programing errors by 30%. In addition, Fast includes several tools to validate the source code before it reaches production.
Improved Productivity
One of the main benefits of Fast is that it increases the productivity of the developers between 30 and 50%, as it enforces systematic code reuse in the most repetitive and error prone parts of the applications, for example, data base access, reading/writing to files, error management... This way the code written by the developers is reduced to 40% of the total application code.
Modernization of the development process in legacy environments
In many legacy environments, such as IBM mainframes, the development tools available to programmers (i.e. TSO) do not provide the common productivity features currently available in modern Integrated Development Environments. These features include, for example, code completion, verification, function search, etc. This issue implies two different kinds of cost overruns: low productivity of the programmers and extra MIPS consumed due to avoidable compilation errors.
Technology rationalization
In legacy systems it is common to find a pletora of tools and technologies deployed in them, and even different versions of them, each implementing different modules of the same applications. This is the case, for example, of report generators like Easytrieve or EARL in IBM mainframe environments. Despite being very specific, these tools often imply paying high licensing costs.
Obsolescent technologies modernization
Many legacy applications were developed with technologies that are not supported anymore by the providers, for example Delphi, Clipper or Visual Basic 6. This fact implies a severe risk for the owners due to technology obsolescence. With our Alight tool we are capable of deploying a solution to automatically modernize these applications, migrating them to a newer more up-to-date technology such as Java or HTML5+Javascript.