Oracle expert Günther Stürner in interview with Bernd Frost, Head of Consulting PITSS GmbH
Oracle expert Günther Stürner
in interview with Bernd Frost,
Head of Consulting PITSS GmbH
In the service of successful customers
Bernd Frost is a member of the management team at PITSS GmbH, Stuttgart, and is responsible for the consulting division.
PITSS is one of the leading software houses specializing in the analysis and modernization of Oracle Forms and Oracle Reports systems. PITSS products and services are offered worldwide.
Why and how to modernize legacy applications efficiently
PITSS is awarded a BMBF funding project for digital software documentation
Günther: PITSS was founded in 1999 by Andreas Gaede, the current CEO, among others. May I first ask what the abbreviation PITSS stands for?
Bernd Frost: The abbreviation stands for Professional IT Software and Service. At the very beginning of PITSS, our colleagues used to answer the phone in the pronounced form, until the long name was replaced by the abbreviation “PITSS”. Today, our customers no longer know what the letters stand for. What is much more important, however, is that the idea behind this name has been pursued without interruption and continues to describe what we do and is well expressed in the vision and mission statements: “Software develops Software” and “Simplifying Complexity”.
Just one year after PITSS was founded, the product PITSS.CON was launched on the market. With PITSS.CON it was not only possible to analyze and visualize ORACLE FORMS software but also to optimize it. With each release, additional functions were added, initially functions to automate the ORACLE FORMS upgrade and later the migration to ADF, and relatively early on the migration to ORACLE APEX was supported and parallel solutions for the modernization of ORACLE reports.
Günther: As Head of Consulting, you are responsible for the second ‘S’ of PITSS, Service?
Bernd Frost: Yes, my area is the projects that we carry out for customers. From quotation to acceptance. From small projects to very large projects; from projects around the corner to projects in the USA or anywhere else in the world. We may not be a very large company, but our software products and services are not only in demand locally.
Günther: You worked in the consulting environment at IBM for a long time. What motivated or inspired you to take over the consulting division at PITSS?
Bernd Frost: This is a mixture of my personal history and what PITSS offers as a company. The founders of PITSS and I developed an ERP system based on the ORACLE database and ORACLE FORMS together in a software company in Stuttgart in the early years of our IT careers and implemented it for customers. Although our professional paths parted, we always stayed in touch and so I knew the high and low lights from the history of PITSS and they made me want to work together again.
In addition to the emotional excitement of being able to go “back to the future”, there were also objective reasons: The performance of a product like PITSS.CON opens up incredible potential, especially when used in projects. In addition, it is much more exciting and satisfying to work on a success story in a small company than in a much larger one.
Günther: What kind of projects do you carry out with your teams?
Bernd Frost: In January 2023, Gartner published the article: “How to Choose the Right Approach for Application Modernization and Cloud Migration” (Note on the source: 23 January 2023- ID G00772600- By Stefan Van Der Zijden, Howard Dodd”)
It mentions: Rehost, Replatform, Rearchitect, Rebuild, Replace.
As PITSS, we not only have the right products and services for each of the alternatives mentioned, we also have and had projects that we execute with our method and with our expert teams. We have also coined an additional term, Regain, to express the fact that we also have the right offer for customers who do not yet want to start with one of the other steps. By this we mean projects that focus on the optimization of Forms applications. Here, existing Forms applications are analyzed with PITSS.CON, weak points and errors are localized and corrected. This also applies to Oracle Reports applications. We proceed in the same way here.
This process can be imagined as a ring process that can be repeated periodically. Ideally, this process is integrated into the development process. Here we are usually involved in the initial projects as a consulting partner and the subsequent optimizations are carried out by the customers themselves. Regain is intended to reference this: The customer regains full control over their application.
The use of our PITSS.CON product suite plays a decisive role in all projects.
Günther: So the customer has bought your “toolbox” and uses it himself?
Bernd Frost: Yes, this is a typical scenario that many customers use in exactly the same way. The customer buys our product and uses it with their team. In the beginning, many customers want support from PITSS experts or for us to take over certain tasks. Later, expert support is often sufficient.
Günther: You mentioned other cases of use
Bernd Frost: Let’s stay within the scope of the term Regain. This also includes the Forms upgrade. These deployments were the bread and butter business of PITSS years ago and, as mentioned above, one of the first functions of the PITSS.CON product suite. At this point, it is worth explaining a little about how PITSS.CON works.
Only when the customer systems are understood in detail is it possible to display correlations, automatic optimization steps, and a highly automated upgrade. To create this understanding, PITSS.CON reads the source files of the customer application. A parser breaks these down and stores everything in the PITSS.CON DataCube. All PITSS.CON products work based on the data – we like to say “the knowledge” – in the DataCube.
With this knowledge, we can:
- Perform and visualize source code analysis, as well as dependencies between different application components.
- Optimize code to increase maintainability and reduce the associated costs, e.g. detect and automatically remove unused code. In applications that have grown over many years, a dead code share of up to 30% is not uncommon. Detect redundancies, display them and simplify their removal, and also automatically move business logic from the FORMS modules to the database.
- Generating new code is what our code modelers do. The simplest case is the Forms to Forms Modeler, which generates the code in a higher FORMS version. However, we can also generate code fragments in other technologies and thus significantly accelerate migration and modernization projects. Code modelers in other technologies are ORACLE Reports to Jasper Reports and FORMS to APEX.
- Recognize and visualize business processes in customer applications and thus create the basis for improving the business processes that are mapped in an application.
With these skills, we can significantly improve efficiency in all the above-mentioned types of migration and modernization projects. It’s not just me saying that, you can read about it on our homepage in the References section.
Günther: So by migration and modernization projects you mean a [a2] technology change from forms or reports to another new technology?
Bernd Frost: Exactly. Many Forms customers are currently considering migrating their Forms applications to Oracle APEX. When it comes to reports, the preference is for JasperReports.
Günther: Such migration projects are not the most straightforward. Why do customers take such a step?
Bernd Frost: Forms applications are widespread in the Oracle environment and it is often the core systems that are implemented in this technology. FORMS is a technology that has been around since the 1990s and, although it has always been developed further, the question now is whether it will continue to be the appropriate technology in the long term.
We know from customers that there was some uncertainty as to whether FORMS 14 would actually come and how long the technology would be in maintenance. ORACLE has now answered this question. Since core systems with many hundreds of FORMS modules of varying size and complexity cannot be converted to a new technology at the snap of a finger, the answer to the question: “Should we use the time that FORMS 14 gives us to switch to a new technology gradually and in a planned manner?” is a clear “yes”. We are only talking about operational reliability for the time being.
In addition, APEX provides functionalities out of the box that are not available in FORMS. The use of application parts on mobile devices is a good example. Features such as artificial intelligence are provided by ORACLE in APEX, no longer in FORMS. The customers who want to use something like this to increase efficiency both in application development and in the business processes supported by the application need to take action. And since APEX follows a similar approach to FORMS, it is only logical that APEX is seen as the new target technology. In addition, the business logic that has already been implemented in the ORACLE database can simply continue to be used. This makes the switch even more attractive.
But it is true that migration projects are demanding and yet they are usually much cheaper and less risky than a completely new development. In addition, the involvement of customer personnel in migration projects can be significantly lower than in new development projects. This not only saves costs, but customers can continue to concentrate on their business and still bring their IT applications up to date. With our approach, our first-class products, and the experience of our teams, we can ensure that we complete the project at the contractually agreed time and that an operational and modern system can be handed over to the customer at that time.
One more thing is important. We do not have to carry out these projects as big-bang projects. Parallel operation of existing Forms and new APEX modules, old and new, is possible. This is also often requested by customers and is recommended by us as a procedure. It works!
Günther: How do you proceed with such projects? If a customer contacts you today and says that they have a Forms environment that is used as a central company application by a large number of users and plans to replace this entire system with APEX. What steps do you take?
Bernd Frost: First, we analyze the application with the help of PITSS.CON. Then we know how complex the application is and what special features are built into it. From this, we can derive the migration effort. We present the result to the customer and recommend how PITSS would carry out the migration if we were commissioned to do so. This is a standardized process that we can carry out within two weeks.
The customer then decides whether to purchase only our product and, if necessary, start-up support or whether to have the migration carried out by PITSS, or a mixed form. If the customer decides to have the migration carried out by PITSS, we clarify the parameters: Big bang or cluster-wise migration, migration or modernization, and duration. With these parameters and the results of the analysis, PITSS submits an offer and the project starts after the contract is signed.
We use our tried and tested method in the project. As befits a proper method, it not only contains a description of what is to be done and in what order but is also backed up with a description of the “how”. This enables us to quickly integrate new team members into the project.
Günther: And how much does it cost? How do you determine the price? With fixed-price projects, you have to be very sure of what you’re doing!
Bernd Frost: The price depends on the factors mentioned above. In the analysis, we determine the complexity of the application in so-called weight points. This is comparable to story points from SCRUM. The main difference is that PITSS calculates the weight with an algorithm that is applied to the detailed data of the application stored in the PITSS Data Cube. In SCRUM, the developers estimate and assign the story points along the Fibonacci sequence. There is no other way to do this for new developments, but it can be done much more precisely when migrating an existing application.
This also enables us to offer fixed-price projects if the other parameters also fit. If the scope is clear and the desired duration is of a magnitude that we can cope with, then we can offer a fixed price with a clear conscience.
Günther: Other companies are also active in this market segment. What is the main difference in the PITSS approach compared to the competition?
Bernd Frost: I would like to start by emphasizing once again that we are talking about the migration or modernization of an existing application. Today, this application is used to map a company’s business processes. The application should also map the business processes after the migration or modernization.
Why am I emphasizing this? There have always been consultants in IT who explain to customers that they are making a big mistake if they do not put all business processes to the test at the same time as the IT measure and ideally change/optimize them. Not a week goes by without LinkedIn showing me articles with this advice. If this is done, work is initially carried out against an unknown scope. The new business processes first have to be developed and coordinated within the company. Then you are in a new development project and no longer in a migration or modernization project.
PITSS calculates the cost of migration based on the existing application using an algorithm that has been continuously improved over the years. We take into account the optimization measures that can be carried out with the help of the PITSS.CON product suite: Removing dead code and redundancies, moving business logic to the database, ignoring FORMS code that is no longer necessary in APEX because APEX has standard features for it. We also include the savings from the generation of code fragments in the target architecture, which is achieved with the PITSS.CON FORMS2APEX Modeler. This results in a complexity figure that you can rely on. Multiplied by a velocity, we calculate the effort required. Depending on whether the customer wants to carry out the migration themselves or we do it, we set a different velocity.
Of course, our experience means that we are faster than a customer team that first has to familiarize itself with the system. Of course, we can also take modernization components into account. If it is already clear before the start of the project that some business processes need to be changed, then we can use PITSS.CON Profind to identify the code of the process to be changed and surgically separate it cleanly from the application and implement it differently in APEX. But then only exactly the necessary parts. This is much more efficient than tearing everything down and redoing it.
Above all, the customer can continue to receive a fixed price for the migration parts. We only offer time and material as a service for what needs to be re-specified together and therefore the implementation scope is not yet clear. Last but not least: With us, the customer has the choice of carrying out the project themselves with PITSS.CON or commissioning us to carry out the project.
Günther: So the PITSS.CON toolset is something like the magic ingredient in such projects?
Bernd Frost: Simply: YES, the reason for the “YES” has, I hope, become clear from all that has been said before. PITSS.CON makes the difference, starting with the accuracy of the project calculation, through the reduction of work and duration of the project and thus directly in the reduction of project costs. In addition, the tools integrated into the Code Modeler help with quality assurance and progress control.
Even if I repeat myself: PITSS.CON is not a tool with which only PITSS is able to accelerate projects. PITSS.CON is a product that enables the customer to carry out the project themselves. Of course, I’m delighted when a customer commissions us for the migration. But I am also pleased when PITSS.CON enables a customer to be successful on their own because this confirms the PITSS strategy mentioned at the beginning. We cannot carry out all upcoming migration projects ourselves. But with PITSS.CON, we can help all upcoming migration projects to succeed.
Günther: That’s a nice way to end! Thank you very much and good luck for the future.