Five ways Monarch is your best RPG migration choice

ASNA Monarch migrates IBM i RPG applications to .NET. Migrating your RPG application to .NET ensures that your RPG system of record will persist for many years in the hands of younger, plentiful programmers. Here are five reasons why ASNA Monarch is the very best choice for migrating your RPG application:

1. ASNA has unparalleled migration experience

We’ve been doing IBM i RPG migrations since 2005. In the two decades since, we’ve not only learned where the hot spots and potholes are, but we’ve also established the high bar for:

the best ways to plan and perform an IBM i RPG migration
how to succesfully integrate your RPG team with your C# team
solid strategies to deliver, test, and maintain your migrated application

No other vendor brings the proven expertise and hands-on experience that ASNA does to make your RPG migration a shining success.

Read more about ASNA Monarch and how it can help you avoid a business disruption when your RPG programmers retire or contact us now about what ASNA Monarch can do for your business.

2. Stepwise migrations

Application migration is a challenging, and usually, intimidating task. Its scope and complexity make it very hard for many managers to grasp where and how to start an application migration. To mitigate this seemingly overwhelming task, ASNA Monarch provides a stepwise approach to RPG migration. ASNA WingsRPG empowers you to migrate your RPG applications in manageable steps.

WingsRPG transforms IBM i green-screens (display files) into modern, attractive, browser pages. ASNA WingsRPG quickly and effectively gives your users the user experience they desire, with no disruptive changes to your RPG programming logic.

For customers wanting to ultimately migrate their RPG to .NET, WingsRPG is often a superb first, independent, migration step. Display files (and any customization or other changes you’ve made to them) can later be easily used by ASNA Monarch during a full migration. ASNA WingsRPG empowers you to migrate your RPG applications in manageable steps.

Wings provides a superb first-step into a full RPG application migration

3. Flexible migration choices

An ASNA Monarch migration offers the most flexible migration possible:

Choose your language

ASNA Monarch migrates your enterprise RPG application to either Encore RPG or Microsoft C#. Encore RPG is a .NET language with an RPG freeform-like syntax that has high fidelity with C# idioms and the .NET Framework. Encore RPG makes a great initial migration target language because the RPG programmers initially recognize their code and C# programmers can also easily understand it.

If your RPG programmers are retiring, could it possibly make sense to migrate your RPG application to another form of RPG? It many cases, yes. Read more about Encore RPG and why it might make sense for you. Once the RPG programmers are signed out for the last time and the application is fully in the hands of C# programmers, it is trivial to convert an Encore RPG migration to C#.

Choose your database

ASNA Monarch targets either the IBM i DB2 database or Microsoft SQL Server. Some migration customers keep their IBM i; in this case, we often migrate only the interactive parts of the application and leave the other bits, including the database, on the IBM i. Other customers are sunsetting their IBM i and want everything migrated. In this case the entire application is migrated to .NET and the database is migrated to SQL Server. In the first case, where the customer is keeping the IBM i, Monarch can later migrate the database and the rest of the application to .NET and SQL Server.

4. A migration workflow that fits

Successfully migrating an IBM i RPG application requires many complex and precise steps. Between planning and deployment there is a lot to do. The ASNA Services Team can help you with all aspects of a an RPG migration, including:

Evaluate your current RPG application. Before staring the migration, it’s important to evaluate the existing application to determine things such as: is all of the application source code available, what source doesn’t need to be migrated, and what application functional gaps need to be resolved (eg, EDI processing, email, PDF document management, and third-party automation tools).
Creating a migration roadmap. An application migration without a good plan is doomed to fail. This step creates the migration roadmap which establishes the migration plan, testing, and deployment schedule. This roadmap guides the entire migration.
Project management. ASNA has full-time project managers that ensure the migration plan and budget proceeds as planned with no unpleasant surprises.
Perform the migration. Migration engineers (either yours or ours) use ASNA Monarch and the migration roadmap to create the application migration deliverables. These are performed and delivered in phases, as defined by the roadmap.
Testing the migrated application. As the migration phases are delivered, they are tested to specifications provided by the customer.
Deploying the migrated application. The migrated application, and optionally its database, are deployed either on premises or in the cloud.
Post-migration application customizing and enhancing. After a Monarch migrated application is deployed, it can then be further customized and enhanced in many ways.

How your application moves through those steps is up to you. Our migration team can help with any or all of the migration steps needed. ASNA can adopt any migration workflow that works best for you. We have a full-service migration team with experienced migration engineers with IBM i and .NET knowledge. We also have a Monarch mentoring team.

5. .NET is a superb enterprise migration target

An ASNA Monarch migration is built on the foundation of Microsoft .NET and its many superb and reliable components. There are myriad reasons why .NET is a superb choice as an enterprise migration target. Here are three of them:

.NET is a comprehensive, scalable, and secure ecosystem. It provides a unified platform for creating Web applications, APIs, and services. It works well with either on-premises work and, through Microsoft Azure, is cloud-ready.
Integrated and cohesive developer and DevOps workflows. Superb GitHub (owned by Microsoft) integration, broad testing and QA facilities, and cohesive deployment options eliminate the need to stitch together a Dev/DevOps environment from disparate components.
Enterprise-grade security. With built-in advanced security features and compliance tools, Microsoft’s .NET platform protects enterprise data. It has many features (including Azure Sentinel, Microsoft Defender, and Security Compliance Manager) that provide robust solutions for safeguarding against cyber threats.

There are many other ways that using ASNA Monarch to migrate your enterprise RPG application is your best choice. Send us an email with the link below for more information.