LADWP Taps Fresche Legacy for RPG-to-.NET Conversion

October 2, 2012 Alex Woodie

The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power has signed a contract with Fresche Legacy (formerly Speedware) to convert key real estate management and water quality monitoring applications from RPG to .NET so that they can run on X64-based Hewlett-Packard servers instead of Power-based IBM i servers.

The LADWP is a major figure and a prognosticator in the western water wars of the last century. The city department owns vast swaths of land extending hundreds of miles north of Los Angeles into the Sierra Nevada mountains, and more importantly, the water rights that go with the land.

Much of the water draining off the mountains in Eastern California–everything from Lone Pine to Mono Lake (and, indeed, much of Mono Lake itself)–ends up the property of the LADWP. The fresh water it is channeled into protected underground tunnels that run south to L.A., but not before running through hydroelectric generators that provide the city with power.

Keeping track of LADWP assets across 310,000 square miles of mountain and desert terrain is no easy task. Fleets of cars, trucks, and helicopters, and a veritable army of workers in the field keep the aqueducts, valves, dams, pumps, turbines, and high-power lines in working condition. Back at headquarters, the real estate division of the $5 billion entity has relied on IBM AS/400s to automate business processes and store data. Custom-developed RPG applications simplified reporting on real estate holdings and water quality testing, and kept dozens of years’ worth of data at the ready.

The LADWP has decided that its time to migrate off the proprietary IBM platform, and instead run these critical systems on industry-standard HP servers. Fresche Legacy will handle the conversion of RPG code to Microsoft C#, which will “improve business process efficiencies, reduce IT operating costs, and give [LADWP] access to state-of-the-art IT capabilities to better serve its customers,” Fresche Legacy says.

“We are excited to have this opportunity to work with one of the largest public utilities in the U.S. as we continue to execute our core strategy to grow and expand our footprint in the IBM i (AS/400) market,” stated Fresche Legacy president and CEO Andy Kulakowski in a press release.

Fresche Legacy, which is based in Montreal, Quebec, is likely to use a newly acquired code converter on the LADWP job. Earlier this year, the company acquired the iModernize suite of RPG migration tools from the German company Sykora. The tool purchase was made at roughly the same time the company changed its name from Speedware to Fresche Legacy.