Portolan Commerce Solutions - Migration and Serverization

The Situation:

Founded in 1990, Portolan Commerce Solutions GmbH of Ilsfeld is one of the leading vendors of business solutions. iEVM, its flagship product, is a modular software packet for medium-sized companies and subsidiaries of transnational enterprises, which can be used on the IBM iSeries and Microsoft Windows platforms. Available in 19 different languages and 27 country versions, iEVM is an internationally oriented accountancy suite for financial accounting, asset management, enterprise consolidation and controlling. It can be used either locally or decentrally on the web. With around 100 employees, Portolan serves more than 1,000 customers in 50 countries around the globe.

Portolan’s executive board had made a strategic decision for the Windows platform, thus making migration to that platform one of its goals. New development had initially been considered, but the resources necessary to keep to the time timeframe of nine months from the start of the project to its release just weren’t available. A very early project launch was decisive and had top priority. Parallel to this, a graphical interface was needed to supplement the existing green screen in order to meet the market’s demands in this area as well.

The Solution:

PKS had not only been a longstanding partner of Portolan for years already, but was also able to offer the right modernization tools and the new graphical interface. With these tools, Portolan is able to continue development of the entire application in iSeries, then automatically migrate to Windows and thus also offer a version for this inexpensive platform. At the same time, the new Oracle database performs without any problems. The front-end is identical for all platforms and no double maintenance or administrative expenditures are incurred.

iEVM was transformed to real server code with the help of the PKS Server Builder.
Above all, the client extensions included comfort improvements; in the case of e.g. the subfiles, these comprised the function for dynamic extensions, re-sorting columns, and displaying graphical components that make usage more comfortable. All programmer constructs were seamlessly supported and either implemented by Portolan itself or by PKS as a built-in extension in its software.
  
The entire project had a volume of 15,000 sources and was completed right on time within nine months.

The Advantages:

• NT/WIN = high-grade, high-quality approach
  
• Attractive: able to offer everything (platform, user interface)
  
• Investment security (signed and new customers)
  
• GUI = employee motivation (generational change!)
  
• Parallel green screen + GUI
  
• Reduced development and maintenance costs thanks to a single-source strategy
  
• Further use of existing applications
  

The Customer:

“Portolan and PKS: that’s a clear-cut, concise path. Together we’ve created more than just a compromise between the worlds of SAP and Windows: we’re high performance, stable and fast! And with NT/Win, we’re on a high-quality, high-grade track—not to mention the benefit of being able to offer everything from one source.”

Frank Peter Pawlak
Procurist & Sales Director of Portolan Solutions

Portolan Commerce Solutions GmbH
Ilsfeld, Germany
www.portolancs.com

Employees:
> 100