How Apero Solutions Took Its Legacy App Mobile with Progress

Modernizing legacy apps to accommodate technology trends is a necessary but complicated undertaking. Existing legacy apps often consist of sound, valuable technology in which companies have invested time and money—“rip and replace” isn’t always the best approach. Still, the success of any business app hinges on user adoption, productivity and satisfaction, and companies have to leverage current technology to stay competitive. How do you do so while preserving the relevant and current features and functionality of your apps?

Companies are turning to Progress for help with app modernization. Using Progress OpenEdge 11, companies can move legacy suites to a service-oriented model, and expose existing business logic as REST services. This way, companies can retain as much of the existing code as possible—code that has already been debugged, tested and proven in production.

Apero Modernizes 30-Year Old App with Progress

Recently, Apero Solutions, an integrated wholesale and retail distribution provider, used Progress OpenEdge to modernize a 30-year old legacy system, without rewriting code from scratch; instead the company reduced costs by 30 percent by revamping existing technology. Apero both modernized and “future-proofed” its implementation of Latitude Distribution ERP, a character-based Progress OpenEdge wholesale distribution ERP suite, to enable rapid, simple integration of core business logic with any device, application or interface. Customers now enjoy a graphically rich user experience, as well as connectivity with virtually any other device or software. Additionally, the company can now offer both on-premise and cloud-based services using traditional and SaaS licensing models.

Users Benefit from Rich, New UI

Users experience many benefits from using the modernized ERP system. For example, user groups within the company’s biggest customer, Florida-based electronics distributor Intcomex, can now access the graphically rich web interface. The browser-based environment will provide all users new features such as performance charts and custom graphics.

“As part of our modernization project, we also wanted to explore possible applications in the mobile world,” said Oscar Perez, Lead Developer for Apero. “To do this, we started working with the Progress mobile development environment. We were amazed at how quickly we were able to create a product catalog mobile app to run on either Android or iOS.”

Want the Full Story?

Want to hear more about how Apero modernized and mobilized its legacy application? Watch the video or read the case study. To learn more about OpenEdge, visit www.progress.com/openedge.