Case Study: Hutchins Systems

The Challenge

Since 1986, Hutchins Systems Inc has been providing credit reporting solutions to small and large software vendors, banks, savings and loans, and many other businesses. Hutchins is the developer of Credittime 2000 Metro 2 Credit Reporting Software for reporting consumer and businesses’ accounts to Equifax, Experian, Innovis and TransUnion. Credittime 2000 was written in Visual Basic 6.0 which is on Microsoft’s end-of-life and end-of-support list. Beyond the fact that VB6 is obsolete, the monolithic application architecture of VB6 limits the agility that a small company like Hutchins needs to remain competitive. 

It’s Time to Move to the Web

David Hutchins received information from Microsoft indicating that Visual Basic 6.0 applications would no longer be supported.  This put Hutchins in a quandary since his business was based on an application written in VB6.  He knew he needed to migrate to a modern platform but he couldn’t afford to alienate his customer base by making them learn a new application. His application currently does a great job of meeting his customers’ needs; therefore, he didn’t want to go through a costly manual rewrite which had a high likelihood of failure and an even higher likelihood of changing all of the wrong parts of the Credittime 2000 application. Because Hutchins is a small company, every penny counts; therefore they needed the most cost effective, least risky option for moving to a web application.

WebMAP Offers a New Agile Architecture on Modern Platforms – with Familiar Look and Feel

Hutchins approached Mobilize.Net with very specific requirements: 

• Move the application to a modern platform to enable agile, rapid development
• Maintain a familiar look and feel so that long-time customers wouldn’t be disoriented
• Provide an architecture that expands options – Hutchins can move the application to a SaaS model in the future.

With those requirements in mind, Mobilize.Net was able to assess the Credittime 2000 codebase, convert it to HTML5, then refine the code to work optimally on the web. Using WebMAP, the Hutchins application was migrated to HTML5 and n-tier architecture quickly and efficiently. “WebMAP draws on cutting-edge transformation technology to automatically refactor monolithic code into model-view-controller or n-tier architecture,” Tom Button, CEO of Mobilize.Net said. Additionally, the UX team pulled together a look and feel that would enable customers to continue to run Credittime 2000 without disruption.

New app lets Hutchins be competitive 

The new web version of Credittime 2000 gives Hutchins much more flexibility including:

• Ability to easily add customers without requiring a complicated and slow installation
• Opportunity to quickly add functionality and instantly deploy to all customers
• Option to move to a SaaS model which will enable infrastructure cost savings.

For more information about automated legacy migration software and services from Mobilize.Net, or to request information on migrating your applications, contact us and a software modernization professional will get back to you. Please send an email to info@mobilize.net