3i Infotech Partners with ASNA to Extend OS/400 Apps

Published: May 22, 2006

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

If we have learned anything in the past decade, it is that there are many ways for companies to get their applications to the Web. While the technologies have become more sophisticated, the idea that OS/400 shops would abandon their RPG applications has by and large been proven wrong by history.

And so has the idea that everyone would just move to Java and live in this monolithic world created by Sun Microsystems and its partners in Java. Most OS/400 shops companies want to leave their core RPG applications more or less alone and continue to leverage their RPG skills while at the same time getting to the Web in new and innovative ways.

This is what the whole application modernization frenzy has been about in the past couple of years, and software development tool provider ASNA last week announced a partnership with services firm 3i Infotech that the two hope will make it easier for OS/400 shops to get their applications modernized.

3i Infotech knows a thing or two about application development and modernizing applications for the Web. In addition to being a services company, 3i Infotech has 22 different applications, including ERP systems, warehouse systems, and financial services systems, which are written in Java, .NET, or a mix of the two. One of the company's applications, according to Sharad Vajpayee, vice president of the Enterprise Solutions Group at 3i Infotech, is an OS/400 application that was, in fact, modernized using ASNA's Monarch and Visual RPG tools.

Having been through that experience, the $100 million Indian firm, which is one of the largest and fastest growing software firms in India (it has about 3,000 employees worldwide), 3i Infotech wants to leverage its experience to help OS/400 shops modernize their own applications using ASNA's tools. Specifically, the company has created a framework of processes and services for creating and extending applications called Orion, and 3i Infotech will use this framework and ASNA's Monarch, Visual RPG, and Datagate tools to help OS/400 shops move their monolithic RPG applications to the Web-enabled, service oriented architecture world of 21st century applications. The two are perfectly happy to help independent software vendors who have not yet modernized their applications do so as well.