eCube Systems
Modernizing Legacy Enterprise Processes to Improve IT Productivity

Today’s businesses face a broadening divide between the IT infrastructure demanded by emerging business needs and the infrastructure they have built up over generations. The smart enterprise is meeting this challenge head-on, by connecting legacy systems with today’s explosion of various endpoints to create a seamless, high-performing organization. “Integrating strategic legacy systems, and modernizing the tools used to maintain them increases productivity and flexibility for the firms that depend on them,” says Kevin Barnes, President and CEO of Montgomery, Texas-based eCube Systems.

eCube helps organizations maximize their return on technology investment by providing development tools, legacy evolution products, and consulting services that extend enterprise systems. “We help developers improve their productivity maintaining legacy systems with NXTware Remote and modernize the testing and deployment process with NXTmonitor,” adds Barnes. “We also simplify legacy modernization with integration products and services.”

We believe a heterogeneous enterprise encourages competition and stimulates innovation and lowers the price of computing

Today, eCube continues to extend the life cycle of valuable enterprise applications by supporting and evolving legacy custom applications and their underlying technologies to operate in the contemporary milieu. “In legacy development environments, developers are still using third-generation programming languages (3GL) and don’t have modern editors to help them catch syntax errors,” explains Barnes. “NXTware Remote provides intelligent editors for COBOL, FORTRAN, C, C++, Basic, and Pascal that run on the workstations in Eclipse—this means that developers can detect and fix syntax errors while they write code.” NXTware Remote simplifies the development of new and legacy business logic on remote platforms and supports almost any platform, including OpenVMS, HP NonStop, Z-series and various types of UNIX/Linux. On the DevOPS side, NXTmonitor manages the configuration, deployment, and automated execution of distributed applications with a GUI tool instead of writing scripts.

NXTmonitor effectively manages distributed applications through a real-time management console to monitor these applications on each platform.

The company helps organizations who own legacy systems modernize their systems so that they can leverage new technology with proven, reliable legacy systems. “Our solutions help clients integrate legacy systems with contemporary architectures,” asserts Barnes. “Specifically, our ARM (Assessment, Remediation, and Modernization) service provides customers with a blueprint on how to leverage their existing legacy solution and modernize it to extend its life and ROI.” By utilizing ARM and the phased approach, organizations can implement a gradual change to their legacy systems, delivering value at the end of each phase. With ARM, the clients’ can avoid the risk of an “All or nothing” approach of re-writing or migrating to another solution.

The value of eCube’s approach can be seen in their work with firms like Express Scripts who were running legacy middleware on old IBM hardware that was costing them over $15,000 a month in penalty charges. eCube was engaged to upgrade their middleware and rehost it on an up-to-date operating system. As a result, eCube was able to upgrade their system in 4 months and speed up their applications by 40 percent.

As Barnes states, their goal is to help clients maintain and grow their in-house applications and promote vendor neutrality, “We believe a heterogeneous enterprise encourages competition and stimulates innovation and lowers the price of computing.” The company is committed to helping customers leverage their existing technical equity because the eCube team believes that every business needs to have an in-house solution that gives them a competitive advantage in their space. “As more and more customers adopt continuous delivery, eCube’s productivity tools will help them meet their goals of continuous development, testing, and integration,” concludes Barnes.