About
One platform. One kind of work.
iLive Technologies builds modern web applications over existing IBM i systems.
That is the whole of what we do. The business rules stay in RPG, on the machine that already runs them. We build the layer your users see, and we run it wherever your security position requires: inside your IBM i partition, on a Linux partition on the same hardware, or on a cloud VM.
Method
How we work
- Fixed scope, fixed price, one step at a time. Each phase is scoped and delivered before the next is discussed.
- Your existing programs are not modified. The green screen keeps running on the same data while the new layer runs beside it. There is no cutover.
- Business rules stay on IBM i. We don't re-implement your logic in another language, so there is never a second set of rules to keep in step.
- Built in what your team already works in. We’d normally maintain it for you, but taking it in-house should stay your option, not a project in itself.
- Source delivered, no runtime licence. Nothing to keep paying for. Nothing that stops working.
Scope
Work we turn down
Mostly a disagreement about method rather than about destination. Being specific saves everyone a meeting.
- Big-bang migration off IBM i. We have nothing against leaving the platform; sometimes it is the right answer. What we will not do is move a thirty-year-old system in a single jump, against a go-live date and a rollback plan nobody really believes in. If leaving is right for you, it should still happen in pieces, each one running in production before the next begins.
- Unsupervised bulk code conversion. Automated RPG-to-Java or .NET conversion produces code that compiles, runs, and reads like RPG wearing different syntax. You have traded a language you cannot hire for against a codebase nobody wants to inherit. Converted code needs someone deciding, program by program, what should be restructured and what should be left alone, and at the volumes these tools are sold on, nobody is doing that.
- Screen-scraping presented as modernization. Rendering DDS display files in a browser is quick and there are products built for it. The workflow survives intact, so do the keystroke order and the 24×80 thinking; only the typeface changes. It shows well in a meeting and it does not change what anyone can actually do.
- Multi-year transformation programmes. Not because we are small, but because their record is poor. The longer the gap between starting and anything working, the more certain it becomes that the requirements, the people and the business have all moved. Our work ships in phases that each stand on their own, so it can stop at any point without leaving a hole.
If one of those is genuinely what you need, we will say so in the first conversation rather than in the third month, and tell you who does it properly.
Contact
Start a conversation
The first conversation takes about thirty minutes and costs nothing. A few details up front mean we can give you something useful in the first reply rather than asking the obvious questions back.
Prefer to write to us directly? contact@ilivetec.com