ASNA announced ASNA Wings today, a revolutionary product that will modernize System i RPG character-based user interfaces. Wings is a member of the ASNA Monarch family of RPG modernization products. It uses IBM’s Rational Open Access RPG Edition to enable the modernization of the user interface portions of native RPG programs. 

IBM’s Rational Open Access RPG Edition, announced earlier this year by IBM, provides a clean separation of concerns between existing RPG logic and display files. Using Open Access as its conduit, ASNA Wings converts green screens into browser-based replacements. The RPG continues to remain and execute on the System i. 

“We are very excited about ASNA Wings,” says Eduardo Ross, ASNA’s vice president of Technology. “With ASNA Monarch we offer full RPG application migration to .NET—and we’ve successfully migrated millions of lines of RPG to .NET with it. ASNA Wings, though, isn’t a migration product—it’s a modernization product. It provides a much lighter and faster process to transform the dreary 5250 character-based user interface into a modern, responsive, browser-based user experience.” 

Many customers will be quite happy with the user interface modernization that Wings offers and stop there. But unlike any other Open Access-based product on the market, ASNA Wings customers can later leverage their Wings-modernized user interfaces and use ASNA Monarch to migrate the rest of the RPG application to .NET. 

“With Wings,” Ross continues, “ASNA is able to offer System i installations a staged application migration path. Many of our customers’ needs will be achieved simply with the superb user experience improvements that Wings quickly provides. However, some will have a long-term strategy of one day moving their RPG applications from the System i to .NET. A Wings customer can, at an optional, later stage, fully migrate their RPG application portfolio with ASNA Monarch. The very screens created with Wings are used by that Monarch migration.  No other vendor can offer such investment protection with their Open Access-based products.” 

ASNA Wings will be available Q4, 2010. For more information, please see www.asna.com/wings. 

About ASNA 

Amalgamated Software of North America, Inc. (ASNA), a division of BluePhoenix Solutions (NASDAQ: BPHX), provides a proven solution suite of flexible products and services allowing its clients to gradually or in totality modernize, integrate, migrate, and extend System i assets to the .NET and/or SQL Server standard at a reasonable cost and in orders of magnitude faster than rewriting or replacing with a package.  These solutions result in a safe, risk limiting extension to the life and value of the IT assets while achieving an extraordinary ROA (Return on Assets).  ASNA’s experience since 1982 with singular focus on the midrange market, coupled with its automated tools and abundant successful modernizations puts ASNA in the position as a market leader in the midrange modernization and migration space.  For more information, visit  http://www.asna.com/.