The company’s point of sale system had been developed and adapted to their specific needs over the years. However, since it was entirely developed on a more traditional database platform, it was becoming highly expensive to maintain and technically incapable of keeping up with the latest technologies. This created a potential risk for the company as it not only hindered their continued growth, but also limited their chances of maximizing the full potential of the new opportunities provided by more advanced technological platforms.
The company required a solution that would minimize the financial and technological impact of such a change on their business. The ideal solution would provide database platform independence as the company sought to standardize their applications in order to reduce license fees and make future software development much smoother. In addition, the ideal solution would have to be able to fully preserve and leverage the knowledge capital embedded in their point of sale application
After looking into different alternatives, the company came to the conclusion that the only viable option capable of meeting all their financial and technological requirements was an automatic conversion of their Informix 4GL-developed point of sale application to Java.
Mobilize.Net, the worldwide leader in automatic software migration technology, provided the only thorough solution that could fulfill all the needs and requirements of Mundo de Juguetes. Mobilize.Net migrated their Point of Sale application to Java 2, the benefits of which were abound and are detailed further below.
Mobilize.Net’s migration technology is applied in the least disruptive fashion in order to ensure that our customers’ daily operations suffer no transitional impact whatsoever during the process.
As mentioned above, Mundo de Juguetes also decided to migrate their database platform. Their aim was to standardize their entire system and thus reduce their operating and maintenance costs, i.e. to avoid having to operate and pay for two separate licenses for Oracle and Informix systems. Their choice was quite easy as they already had their other applications running seamlessly on an Oracle platform.
Mobilize.Net enhanced and expanded the Point of Sale application in many ways. To begin with, Mundo de Juguetes saved valuable time with the migration .As the graph below shows, the original Informix 4GL application took about two years to develop, test and adapt to the needs of the client, and it was estimated that it would have taken a whole year to manually re-write the application. With the aid of three programmers, the Informix 4GL to Java conversion took only three weeks. This means that in less than a month, Mundo de Juguetes was able to count on a completely modern and web-enabled application. It is also important to remember that the application’s database platform was also migrated: the entire application was migrated from an Informix database to an Oracle database. Two different migration projects were thus successfully completed in three weeks.
Besides having saved invaluable time for Mundo de Juguetes, the cost of this comprehensive Informix migration solution proved to be relatively negligible for the company, averting the potential risks associated with re-writing a completely new project from scratch. According to Gartner, it costs an average of $14 per line of code for a re-write, whereas Mobilize.Net’s migration technology was carried out at less than a fraction of this cost. In addition, the re-write option would have meant loss of the underlying investment in their knowledge capital. Mobilize.Net’s technology, however, kept this invaluable asset intact by allowing the company to carry over years of irreplaceable work and experience into a more flexible technological environment. What Mobilize.Net did was to breathe new life into the application. Now, this new scalable application has the possibility of expanding and helping Mundo de Juguetes maintain a competitive edge.
Freedom®, Mobilize.Net's automatic migration technology, helps programmers convert their legacy or more recent applications to the language of their choice to fully exploit the more modern, agnostic database platforms. The company’s conversion process from Informix 4GL source code to Java provided the following results:
Mundo de Juguetes, a leading chain of toy stores in Costa Rica, has diversified its operations into office stationery and school materials. Since its inception in 1974, Mundo de Juguetes has constantly set new market standards by providing highly personal customer services together with the widest selection of quality goods. One of the key factors in Mundo de Juguetes' success has been its uninterrupted investment in information systems focused toward "Business Intelligence", enabling the company to simplify the most complex tasks in such an industry: inventory control, loss prevention, logistics, etc.
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