Migration From Powerbuilder – What Are Your Choices?

By Author: Ruth Jackson
Total Articles: 50
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This article should be of interest to you in case you need help to migrate from PowerBuilder to an alternative technology which provides much more options. Read on to know more.

It is common knowledge that PowerBuilder used to be a really dominant technology since its first appearance in the technology space in the year 1991 and its usage peaked manifold in the year 1998 with approximately 100,000 users. PB is an integrated development environment belonging to the SAP stable through its division called Sybase. PB has traditionally been used primarily to build critical business applications and is still used as an Integrated Development Environment of choice for companies operating in the financial and telecom sectors. However in recent years, Powerbuider development has seen substantial competition arise from evolved JAVA development tools and from Microsoft Visual Studio & is thus undergoing a declining mode in the growth chart.

The technology space is fast changing with newer & faster software ...
... and these often reduce the strategic value of legacy systems which have taken years to and have been associated with huge capital input to realize them. Maintenance & appropriate up-gradation is a big challenge faced by many companies today. This situation is very similar for all those companies who have built their applications on the PowerBuilder IDE. Either they have to upgrade to the newer versions of PowerBuilder (the current being PB 12.5) or they have to migrate to some other technology. There are several options to migrate to. For instance one can migrate from PowerBuilder to JAVA/J2EE, VB.Net or ASP.Net to name a few.

One may think what could be the reason companies are intent to migrate their existing PowerBuilder applications to alternative technologies. The reason is very evident. Increase in costs of maintaining existing application, decrease in number of PowerBuilder developers availability & stringent schedules for delivery are some of the prime concerns faced by the companies who had chosen PB for developing their business applications. If you are facing the problems mentioned above and would like to migrate to another technology then you would need to hire the services of a professional software development company who has expertise in helping you understand the intricacies of the existing business application that has been built on PowerBuilder IDE and should also be an expert in the alternate technologies as well for a smooth transition from one software system to another. Your software development consultant should have deep expertise in ASP.Net, VB.Net, JAVA/J2EE etc. so as to provide maintenance services after the migration process has been completed. Also you may decide to carry out the process as an in-house development project or you would like to choose an offshore software technology partner which gives you obvious cost advantage.

Mindfire Solutions is a 12 year old software technology services company who has expertise in all the technologies mentioned in this article & much more. You may take a look at our company profile if you wish to hire the services of a reliable software development company who has a reputation for providing reliable and professional services that are tailor made for our customers’ business needs.