PITSS.CON–Oracle Forms Migration

Alliance Technologies, Inc. utilizes our partnership with PITSS to provide our certified professional services for PITSS.CON in order to automate migrations of Oracle Forms applications.

Successful FORMS upgrade in just a few days

With PITSS.CON (short for PITSS Converter), you can automate your migration processes in any Oracle FORMS version, and make a real improvement to your company's productivity. Tool–supported migration with PITSS.CON is impressively quick and avoids any risk of manual error.

The All–in–One Manager for your FORMS applications

PITSS.CON is not only a powerful migration tool; its enormous range of services also provides the highest levels of efficiency in the area of MAINTENANCE/ DEVELOPMENT. Performance improvements in the areas of analysis, maintenance and development in addition to multi–language and version management provide an average efficiency increase of 30%.

Oracle Forms Migration Overview

Companies often have character-based applications developed on Oracle Forms/Reports Version 3. They may also be utilizing Oracle Forms/Reports Version 6i, but still in Client/Server mode. In the latter case, they may have already completed a painful and risky upgrade project. It is also common for Oracle Forms/Reports companies to have migrated to 9i, but hesitate to perform the final step to upgrade to the very latest Oracle Developer version due to budget constraints.

The ideal situation for most companies, would be to find an easy and cost efficient way to upgrade their unsupported Forms/Reports applications to the latest release and position themselves for future improvements/releases of their Oracle Forms/Reports applications.

Challenges in Oracle Forms/Reports Migrations

When companies upgrade to newer versions of Forms/Reports, there are several challenges and risks involved. In order to prepare their applications for the future, they will need to go through two major steps:

1. Upgrade the old application to a web technology-based environment.
2. Protecting the investment for the initial upgrade by reusing the knowledge and information learned throughout the process for future upgrades.

Forms/Reports Migration Solution

To address the main challenges of an Oracle Forms/Reports Migration and reduce the risks associated with the project, a company should:

1. Introduce Oracle's latest release of Oracle Developer and Oracle Application Server 10g.
2. Use PITSS.CON to systematically/automatically upgrade the application from the older version of Oracle Forms/Reports.

PITSS.CON can highly automate the web enablement of a company's older Oracle Developer applications. PITSS.CON not only automatically supports multiple languages, but provides a direct upgrade from earlier Oracle Forms/Reports applications to the most recent release. PITSS.CON will also allow continuous utilization of a company's IT development staff by extending the use of their existing application instead of redeveloping them from scratch using unfamiliar technologies.

Time and Cost – The Two Driving Factors

Enterprises need to reduce their budgets. IT departments, Independent Software Vendors (ISV) and everyone developing an application, need to streamline their development efforts and do more with less. The two main budgeting factors herein are time – e.g. life time of your application, expenditures for your development team, support team and other organizations involved in the development and maintenance of your applications – and costs; both internal as well as external.

Time

Saving time enables companies to cut down their budgets for future development projects. Development time can be saved in two ways:

1. Increase the efficiency and productivity of your development staff
2. Extend the life time of your application without having to sacrifice application modernization and requirements for global availability.

Cost

Reducing costs, in most cases, is the most decisive factor when running development projects. Cost savings can be calculated in a simplified manner based on following components:

• License fees for new products or releases
• Support fees for above products
• Maintenance costs
• Man power

These cost attributes should be compared based on the different project approaches when upgrading and maintaining an Oracle Forms/Reports application. These different approaches can be summed up as follows:

• Manual Approach
  • The approach of analyzing, changing and maintaining an Oracle Developer application manually causes the budget to increase dramatically. (ie Oracle Forms application with 300 Oracle Forms modules may easily require one or more man years until completion)
• Disparate Task Tool Approach
  • Version and source file control and administration
  • Analysis of code dependencies
  • Impact analysis of code changes
  • Case tools with E/R diagram capabilities etc.
• Using one, fully integrated migration/development tool
  • PITSS.CON

Using the Fully Integrated PITSS.CON Tool

PITSS.CON is designed so all components are fully integrated with each other. Work done in one component can be reused in another.

PITSS.CON covers and supports all phases of a development life cycle. It therefore eliminates the need for any other supportive tool allowing you to save license and support fees of those tools. PITSS.CON is easy to learn as it uses Oracle Forms technology, a technology currently being used for existing application development and support.

"We researched that it would have taken 70 people around 1 year to convert our Forms 6i client server to 10g manually. Afterwards we still would have been uncertain about various impacts, which could translate to approximately additional 6 months of tuning. Our assessment with PITSS.CON is that it will be somewhere between 4–6 months for similar level of resources. So with PITSS.CON we save around 30 man years of work; that means we save about $1.5 million easily in one year. That's brilliant."

Moshe Ben-Habib, Manager Database Administration at MOL America

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