We get a lot of requests for a demo. And there are a lot of vendors who will demo “at the drop of a hat”. It’s even possible, and reasonable, for the vendor to record that kind of demo and make it available to run anytime. After all, a canned demo is a canned demo — so there’s no real difference between a recorded one and a live one. Over a Webex, you don’t have the opportunity to look under the covers anyway.

But, looking under the covers is exactly what a customer needs to do. We produce modernized code that looks like programmers wrote it for a new development effort — there is no trace of the old Natural or COBOL or other legacy code unless we’re asked to include it as comments somewhere. And of course the new programs have a completely different structure from the legacy code. That a big and important difference.

The two big risks in modernization are performance and maintainability. If you’re coming from a mainframe environment, probably the users are used to snappy screen response, even if there are thousands of users. If you give them a system that is slower than they are used to, do you think they will be happy? Of course not.

If you translate the old code line by line, there are shared functions and classes that can become a bottleneck in the new application. Performance problems typically surface at user loads of dozens, or perhaps hundreds, of users. The other issue is maintainability, which we talked of in another blog post.

But it takes a technical assessment, and looking at code, to understand the difference. If you just go with the fanciest demo, and the slickest sales pitch, and the discounted price, the rude awakening could be 6 months down the road. We won’t always do a slick demo, but we will explore all the technical issues with you and show you all the code.

Some of our best customers went down the wholesale code translation path first. We invite you to join them and experience the benefits of our freshly written, high performance code for your mission critical applications.