User Interface and SOA Integration

Fujitsu, working with our Legacy modernization partner Rocket Software delivers a highly efficient and cost effective service to convert and amalgamate legacy screens from many platforms, into a single cohesive experience for your end user community on the Web.

The typical modern enterprise includes an increasingly complex array of multiple generations of applications, including mainframe, Windows client/server and Web. These typically have been built with disparate styles and ways of functioning and often have difficulty in talking to each other, frequently leaving the user community with the stress of using applications with little in common.

The cost, risk and feasibility of replacing such mission-critical applications with a new co-ordinated set of applications is often out of the question. Instead of redeveloping applications, more and more organizations are realising that it makes more economic and strategic sense to reuse and repurpose existing assets that the organization has invested in over many years.

There are 4 main options if your organization is facing the above challenges

1. Do Nothing – A business decision may be taken to live with the current issues
2. Replace – Find replacement application with similar functionality but better web compatibility and transition to them and alter your business processes to adapt to the changes, also undertake functional gap alleviation application changes
3. Rewrite – Rewrite the current application with functionality that matches your business processes
4. Modernise – Enhance the interfaces of current applications to work effectively on the web with GUI screens and Web Services without needing to change the underlying application

This offering focuses on the “Modernise” Option.

Why Fujitsu?

Fujitsu and our partner Rocket Software offer a quick, easy and functionally rich way of converting and amalgamating legacy screens and data from many platforms into a single, cohesive Web experience for your end user community. That user community may be your internal resources, partner resources or even the public. Using Rocket’s LegaSuite™ product we can build Web user interfaces and Web services that improve user productivity and business process performance and enable standards-based integration. You gain productivity and quality from the proven, reliable systems you already rely on in a fraction of the time it would take to implement a replacement system.

The following bullets are just a subset of what LegaSuite can do without any changes to your underlying systems:

• Turn green screens into a browser-based UI that looks and behaves like your own branded web application. This makes interaction with systems much easier, especially for the generation currently entering the workforce who may never have seen a green screen and are yet very familiar with web browsers.
• Combine screen-based business logic and data, not just from one application or platform, but from many applications and platforms, into a composite application, making the problem of multiple, functionally dissimilar applications effectively disappear.
• Create new “cross application” workflow including email generation and desktop integration without changes to the existing systems.
• LegaSuite can enhance current functionality, for instance: - New help functionality - Upload and download to other applications such as Excel and Word - Improved data entry validation - Widgets, such as calendars, drop down boxes and lists of values - Tabbing screens to improve navigation - Single sign-on for multiple systems and behind the scenes navigation - Consistent application behaviour, look and feel
• LegaSuite can be deployed on a cloud to reduce the need for on scalable site hardware.

LegaSuite automatically transforms business logic and data from existing applications into standards-based interfaces like Web services, JavaBeans, and .NET assemblies. With LegaSuite, creating services is an automated process, so projects get done in a fraction of the time and with significantly less cost and risk than other modernization methods.

• Add a services layer that allows you to integrate legacy business logic and information with newer applications and technologies
• Unlock the value in your host applications in a timely and secure manner
• Use your existing staff and make zero changes to existing applications

Fujitsu's Legacy Modernization service for LegaSuite is undertaken in conjunction with our partner Rocket Software. The resources that undertake this work are part of our normally a mixture of Fujitsu and Rocket staff in this way we can build on the depth of experience inherent in each of the organizations. The team is able to undertake the Legacy Modernization either on specific client sites or in our offices depending on the needs of the client.

Examples of where the LegaSuite toolset has been used in the past are available on request.

Critical questions

1. Are your users still using green screen technology?
2. Are your systems built in different styles and different platforms, yet users need to cross between one and another in their day to day work?
3. Do you systems closely match the required functions in your organization and yet could be enhanced by further workflow, front end functionality and integration?
4. Would you like to amalgamate the functions of several systems on the single screens?
5. Would you like to expose parts of your systems to the general public, but can’t because of the ‘look and feel’?
6. Would you like to expose parts of your legacy systems are web services easily?