Aerosoft Systems Inc., a software company (ISV) for Aviation Maintenance Applications, has its headquarters in Canada and offices in the United States and Austria.
One of the development platforms for the company is the IBM iSeries in RPG.
To enlarge the market share and also to modernize the application, PKS was chosen to be the partner for this strategic approach in 2003.

The primary goals were to provide both a more modern look and feel to existing iSeries applications and to allow these same applications to run on different platforms while using a single source code base. Consequently, the primary challenge was to find a single solution which would not force a ‘migrate once / never go back’ approach because existing customers still use their legacy iSeries systems. Maintaining two separate code bases would be far too costly. Conversion had to have a high level of ‘automation’ and repeatability for all on-going releases of base code.

PKS provided a framework which allowed Aerosoft to maintain a single code base for a complex ERP application while still providing the flexibility to deploy the same application to multiple platforms including iSeries, Windows and Linux.
These benefits were further enhanced with the ability to deploy the user interface to a web browser making this solution more attractive to their customers. This further extends the topology and moved the application delivery footprint to a global one (including ASP) while retaining ‘robust’ IT platform(s) and disciplines within the ‘data centre’.
The other key reason was that the initial investments for migration to the ‘thick client’/Windows UI (as well as ‘server side changes’) would survive the migration to the WEB (Thin) client implementation.
The entire application was ‘migrated’ and tested at a detailed level with issues found being resolved by both recoding the underlying application and augmenting the PKS framework where necessary.

• visual benefit of the framework
• maintain a single code base while still providing the flexibility to deploy the same application to multiple platforms
• extended life for high cost applications and potential increase in customer base due to platform flexibility (-> these benefits do come at a price)
• interface level integration to other applications – in particular for the WEB(thin)client migration: provides both ‘life-span’ to legacy applications but also provides opportunities for customer specific application extensions which were not possible before.
• WEB/Internet ‘delivery’ also provides a much more efficient ‘transport’ (relative to “RDT / Citrix methods of extending Windows over Internet) while retaining the hardware, platforms and disciplines necessary for mission critical applications in the ‘Data Centre’ and also allowing end-user deployment worldwide (into 3rd World locations)

“As a general methodology to extend the life of ‘expensive’ legacy applications I would endorse this approach. The endorsement hinges on the addition of ‘Webifying’ the application for a true thin client deployment.
”Deploy over the WEB efficiently  / effectively or perish” should be the motto of all applications regardless if the ‘WEB’ will have an Intra or Internet deployment requirement for a company / mission critical application.
We intend to pursue a strategy of 100% web enabled applications. PKS have provided the framework to meet our goal.”