Luminary's Propositions - shedding light...

In software services, businesses are now looking for the kind of genuine and rapid return on investment that only an experienced yet highly flexible and agile software house can provide. Businesses demand no-nonsense professionalism, and the flexibility to accommodate existing IT infrastructure and legacy systems.

Luminary Solutions is a software services provider specialising in Systems Integration, renewing legacy applications and developing new custom applications.

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The Luminary team has experience in developing systems and designing flexible n-tiered architectures across a wide range of technologies to enable the integration of disparate technologies and data sources for presentation by a seamless integration layer to the desktop, browsers and mobile devices.

Specialist services for Ingres and OpenROAD users

Most organisations with a large investment in Ingres-based applications can reduce costs or make significant new returns on that investment.

Luminary is a wholly owned subsidiary of Ingres Corporation and has one of the largest team of Ingres application experts in the world. We can help give new life to existing systems in various ways:

Migrating to Ingres 9. Ingres 9 is released as Open Source with a pay-as-you-go support subscription pricing model. The cost of ownership can be considerably cheaper than with previous versions and, of course, is dramatically cheaper than closed-source proprietary alternatives. Luminary has worked with various Ingres customers to migrate them to Ingres 9 quickly and safely, so they can reduce their software licence costs. The Ingres TCO calculator provides an indication of the reduction in software licence costs that can be gained by moving to Open Source.

Successful and risk-free migrations involve thorough planning, risk assessment and testing of applications and database environments. Luminary has extensive experience of undertaking migration projects, for applications ranging in size from small departmental systems to major enterprise class systems.

Integrate your Ingres apps with JEE or .NET. With specialisms in Java and .NET as well as Ingres, we are uniquely placed to advise on how best to integrate and enhance your systems. Whether this is at the database layer, the business logic layer, or the presentation layer, we can help you minimize risk while delivering new value from old systems.

Application Support and Maintenance. All database systems need time and effort to support and maintain. This often ties up valuable internal resources that you would like to be able to use on other projects.

We have extensive experience of taking over the support and maintenance of existing Ingres systems in a carefully managed process controlled through Luminary's SystemCare methodology.

OpenROAD Cosmetic Facelifts. Many OpenROAD applications are starting to look dated, with a Windows 98 look and feel. Yet the applications may be functionally rich and serve a mission critical business purpose. A cosmetic makeover may be all that is required to make the applications more acceptable to users and to make them integrate better visually with other apps.

Luminary has developed tools and techniques for applying a brand new 'system identity' to even the largest OpenROAD app in a fraction of the time required by manual methods.

Deploy OpenROAD apps to Internet Explorer. Deployment of large, monolithic OpenROAD applications can cause a real headache. Re-structuring an application so it can be deployed as an OpenROAD eClient can deliver real savings, due to the automated and seamless way the eClient handles application updates. This can completely relieve the burden of patch management for the OpenROAD runtime installation, thus greatly simplifying the deployment of application changes.

We have extensive experience of working with both large and small applications to exploit the deployment benefits offered by this technology.

Migrate ABF or OpenROAD to a Service Oriented Architecture. One of the key challenges when integrating disparate systems is how to re-use as much of your existing application logic as possible, but still allow new systems and new technologies to gain access to this valuable resource.

One approach we have used successfully with customers such as the U.S. Government and DS Limited, is to take an existing monolithic application (whether written in ABF or OpenROAD) and split the logic out into layers for presentation, business logic and data access. Through a combination of using the OpenROAD Application Server, careful design of the interfaces between these layers, and using a set of custom-built migration tools, we can rapidly expose the business logic as fully fledged Services for use by a range of technologies such as Java, .NET, the Internet, or other OpenROAD applications. This gives you a fast, low-risk, incremental approach for re-using and rejuvenating applications that would otherwise be consigned to the 'legacy' bin.

ABF code rescue. ABF applications often contain a rich set of business logic that has been carefully developed over many years. However, re-using any of that logic can be difficult, without re-writing it, due to the limited interfaces supported by ABF. We have helped customers move these applications forwards without having to rewrite them, either by transforming the entire application at once, or by incrementally rescuing ABF and migrating it to technologies such as OpenROAD. The very similar syntax makes migration to OpenROAD straightforward, while its open interfaces make it easy to re-use newly exposed 4GL SOA logic from JEE and .NET technologies.

Systems integration, application development and support

Luminary is expert at developing new systems using a range of application technologies such as Java and .NET, integrating disparate systems, and supporting and maintaining these systems to provide long term value.

Systems Integration. Organisations will no longer tolerate the perennial system rewrite proposed by IT service providers, but to remain competitive they need the support of IT systems more than ever. They demand cost effective back office systems integration and rejuvenation, delivering 'new' applications to browsers and mobile devices. At the very least, some form of cross functional integration is required in the areas of control, monitoring and reporting.

Luminary is expert at integrating multiple systems using different technologies, from Java and .NET to Ingres and OpenROAD, and delivering this value rapidly.

Application Development. The Luminary team has many years experience of delivering new systems and functionality to blue chip customers. With specialisms in Service Oriented Architectures (SOA), Java, .NET, Ingres and OpenROAD, whether extending existing systems or creating new ones from scratch, you can be sure that we will deliver.

Support and Maintenance. Luminary staff are skilled in the long term support and maintenance of major operational systems. Our SystemCare methodology helps to ensure there are no surprises by structuring project initiation and knowledge transfer, and formalising SLAs and metrics.

Mobile Enablement. The mobile enablement of existing back office corporate data and systems can significantly improve or increase the speed of existing business processes. We have the methodology, the design patterns and prebuilt templates necessary to deliver high ROI mobile solutions.

Business Open Source

Tough economic times call for a new approach to software development and demand that organisations find better, faster and more affordable ways to develop new applications. Open source software is now being recognised as a suitable platform for mission critical, enterprise scale deployments.

Luminary is well placed to help companies implement business open source solutions and works closely with open source partners such as RedHat, Alfresco, JasperSoft and Mulesource to deliver immediate and lasting open source benefits.

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