ArtinSoft Case Studies and Customer Testimonials

IFDS Percana | ISV, Ireland

“We became aware of ArtinSoft because of its close technical relationship with Microsoft. We then compared the results of the VBUC’s trial version with those from other utilities and immediately noticed that the code generated was far better. And there were no proprietary libraries required, so we could convert our application without dependencies on code from another company. Because we are selling licensed software we have to own the intellectual property rights of every line of code in there, so we could not be in a situation where we will be using code from a third party library which we cannot control.

Another crucial part of the equation was the fact that ArtinSoft provided the option to customize the migration engine to meet our requirements. Building on the already good output of the VBUC was a really significant benefit, since we would be able to obtain a result that fully complies with our coding standards. And finally, the tech savvy of ArtinSoft’s team provided additional comfort that we were dealing with a company who could deliver what we wanted”

Paddy Keating - Chief Technical Officer, IFDS Percana

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Fluke | Technology, Netherlands

“We we’re able to migrate the VB6 code to .net with the MSDN license.

After the migration only a few thing needed manual modification.

So the software did a great job and saved us a lot of time”.

Marco Botermans, Fluke

Comparex | ISV, Germany

“We were in doubt whether we could migrate our complex application (100,000 lines of code) automatically, but after extensive proofs of concept and with professional support we could confirm its feasibility.

We used ArtinSoft’s Visual Basic Upgrade Companion to successfully convert our software from VB6 to C# .NET and are very happy with the results; after only three days of work we were able to compile our C# migrated application without any errors. We know there’s still work to do after compilation, but this is a big start. Thank you for this great migration tool! ”

Christof Graff - Development Lead, Comparex

Tiger Financial, LLC | Banking and Financial Services, USA

“It was amazing to see our Curo application compiling in .Net with just 5 days of onsite support from an ArtinSoft consultant – with the overall conversion taking about 12 weeks. The management team was impressed by how much time and money the VBUC saved us in migrating over 300,000 lines of code. If it wasn't for ArtinSoft, we would never have been able to squeeze an undertaking like this into the small window of opportunity given to us. Their assistance was critical to the success of the project and we were all impressed by their level of professionalism, dedication and service”

Terry Pittman - Chief Information Officer, Tiger Financial, LLC

SMC Software | ISV, South Africa

“The more I know of this product, the more impressed I am! Thus far I have experienced the intuitive interface design and logical assembly of the required configuration parameters for a smooth and successful migration, and it has been a revelation to us. The flexibility of the Custom Map Feature is also a powerful option. With the help I received from ArtinSoft, our first VB6 product was converted to Green Code in .NET 100%. And the useful notes and pointers inserted into the code make it simple to understand the differences in language functionality.”

Martin Summerley - Chief System Engineer, SMC Software

Avanade – DFDS | IT Consulting / System Integrators, Denmark

Avanade, a global system integrator, chose the VBUC to migrate a 550K LOC business-critical application for DFDS, a Danish shipping company. The fact that VB6 was no longer supported by Microsoft was substantially limiting DFDS’s ability to add new functionality, so Avanade used the VBUC to deliver a .NET version of the system on time and on budget, much faster and cheaper than writing a new application from scratch, and with a resulting code that does not use any proprietary libraries and that is back under Microsoft’s support umbrella, leaving DFDS in charge of their own destiny again.

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GT Software | ISV, USA

“We ran a proof of concept comparing the Visual Basic Upgrade Companion (VBUC) with other VB6 migration tools and we definitely preferred the way ArtinSoft’s product handled the conversion. We liked the highly integrated environment, the way it works with ActiveX controls and the fact that the provided optional helper classes were light and did not require a runtime. Compared to the other migration tools, the VBUC provided a superior look, feel, overall user experience and conversion efficiency.”

James Lewis Stevenson II – Software Design Engineer, GT Software

“A manual rewrite of our VB6 GUI applications would have been very tedious and extremely time consuming. And given our timeframe, we just couldn’t afford it. We estimate that using the Visual Basic Upgrade Companion (VBUC) will save us about 70% of the man-months required to do the port. While that’s really significant, we also expect that the process will be more organized and controlled than with other VB6 conversion tools.

Beyond the actual conversions, we were also very pleased with ArtinSoft’s support team; they possess exceptional technical savvy and very effective communication skills. They really understand the VB6 source and .NET target environments and the conversion process, while still being able to anticipate the roadblocks and issues which customers are likely to face. We just cannot speak highly enough of their support team.”

Stuart Nelson – Data Access Development Manager, GT Software

SSP | ISV, UK

“The Upgrade Wizard does a good job, but it is not flexible and it is more applicable to small scale applications. On the other hand, we evaluated your main competitor’s tool and thought the approach was too rigid, requiring embedding their runtime within the migrated application. Plus we were looking at the long term, refreshing the technology beyond just moving to a new platform, but being able to move forward and provide our customers with a solution that will work for the next 10+ years. To me that meant getting the application onto .NET without being constrained by someone else’s rigid approach.

So we chose the Visual Basic Upgrade Companion because of the flexibility that it provides, and because we can get pure .NET code, as opposed to someone else’s third-party library. Using the VBUC allowed considerable savings and approaching the project in a much more controlled manner. And it was not just the tool itself but the actual engagement with ArtinSoft; the way we can analyze the code and discuss how we want it to look, and then customize and configure the tool accordingly.”

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“The best $5,000 we ever spent were for the Ready Assessment. The quality of the information provided by ArtinSoft during this analysis was the key to the success of this migration”

Robert Courtney – Chief Software Architect, SSP

LMM Designs Ltd. | Technology, UK

“I downloaded about three different migration products in the demonstration form. One of them actually crashed from the start, so there was no way that it was usable to begin with. But right after trying the VBUC I decided it did much more than the competitors, so I immediately purchased it online and started to work with it that very evening.

In the very beginning I sort of thought about a manual rewrite too, but I’m glad to say now that the thought didn’t last very long. I also tried the Upgrade Wizard that shipped with Microsoft’s Visual Studio, but I looked at what I would have to do manually and estimated it would take several months to complete.

So for me, the benefits of using the VBUC are 100% down to time and efficiency. It allowed me to save a lot of time in terms of research around VB6/.NET equivalencies, taking care of a huge potential learning curve. And for the most complex application I had, it took me just one week to get the converted .NET version running.”

Philip Blackman – Owner, LMM Designs Ltd.

Ineo Relocation Technologies | ISV, USA

“We felt it would be better to upgrade our VB6 application rather than waiting until it became mandatory due to future operating systems incompatibilities. So we chose ArtinSoft and its VBUC because of the level of expertise displayed, plus we loved the speed and simplicity of the product and the idea that we can generate our existing application to 100% .NET native code, including the conversion of the data access layer directly into ADO.NET, all of which constitutes a significant advantage over any other migration tool out there.

A manual rewrite would require touching all 500,000+ lines of code, and there is the almost unavoidable scope creep involved with such a massive task. The VBUC simplifies the conversion and will help keep our time to market in line with our goals by minimizing rework and re-engineering. All in all, we estimate that the VBUC represents a reduction of cost and time of about 80% over what is required to rewrite our application”

Kevin Flynn – Director of Technology, Ineo Relocation Technologies

Bold Technologies, Ltd | ISV, USA

“ArtinSoft seemed the only one that sorted out the details, not only the basic issues of a migration engagement. Its product, the Visual Basic Upgrade Companion, included unique, powerful features, many of which turned out to be very valuable for this specific project, like ADO to ADO.NET conversion and error handling transformation”

Rod Coles – President, Bold Technologies, Ltd

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BEMAS Software, Inc. | ISV, USA

“We just didn’t see how we could accomplish a full rewrite from scratch either on time or on budget, so we decided to use the Visual Basic Upgrade Companion, which was really useful in blocking out code, putting in comments and drawing attention to things like Windows API functions. We also worked with ArtinSoft so that the VBUC would recognize some very specific instances and convert the code correctly”

Steve Pownall – Chief Executive, BEMAS Software, Inc.

Zucchetti S.p.A. | ISV, Italy

“I was skeptic of using automated conversion tools. When I found ArtinSoft Visual Basic Upgrade Companion I thought it was just an extension of the free wizard in Visual Studio. What a surprise to find out that the VBUC is in a class of its own: simply put, the best option to evolve your VB6 application to .NET”

Ivano Raino, Zucchetti S.p.A.

Superior Labels, Inc. | Manufacturing, USA

“I am very pleased with the tool and your responsiveness. I have had at least 3 other aborted efforts to convert and hundreds of man-hours wasted. To get a clean compile after only 2 days is thrilling. I suspect that with about a week of effort, I can have a working .NET equivalent app.”

“ArtinSoft VB6 migration tool and their support team greatly helped in the conversion to .NET. Their tool is so good that we only needed to use their telephone support twice and both times they solved the issue in less than 30 minutes. Our VB6 code heavily uses Win32 API calls and we had failed three other attempts to convert to .NET prior to using ArtinSoft. I would highly recommend their solution to speed up conversion from VB6 to VB.NET. My only regret is that we didn’t use them sooner!”

Scott Lee – President, Superior Labels, Inc.

Speed-IT | ISV, Ireland

“We evaluated other migration tools and chose the VBUC not only because of its advanced conversion capabilities and the quality of the generated .NET code, but because we definitely wanted to avoid dependencies on extensive proprietary runtimes with no long-term .NET compatibility guarantee, plus any support fees associated with such third-party libraries.”

Tom Hosgood - Managing Director, Speed-IT

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Activus | ISV, UK

Learn how this Bristol-based ISV managed to save 14 man/months while securing compliance for its customers by licensing ArtinSoft’s Visual Basic Upgrade Companion to cost-effectively migrate to VB.NET its flagship medical insurance application (Act-isure).

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IPSOA, Wolters Kluwer Group | ISV, Italy

“ArtinSoft is a qualified company that has made of the intelligent automation one of its prerogatives of core business. By using the Visual Basic Upgrade Companion, IPSOA was able to save 2 years of work, receiving from ArtinSoft’s the support necessary to customize the tool, which allowed the evolution of the product using the features of Microsoft’s .NET Framework and the new development tools”.

Roberto Fusè, IPSOA’s lead resource for the VB6 migration project.

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Banamex - Citigroup | Banking and Financial Services, Mexico

How Banamex, a leading Mexican bank, part of Citigroup, was able to migrate over 5 million lines of code from VB6 and ASP to C# and ASP.NET using the Visual Basic Upgrade Companion, in compliance with all corporate policies set for quality assurance and information security.

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Banco Central de Costa Rica (Central Bank of Costa Rica) | Banking and Financial Services, Costa Rica

"We have seen improvements of 300% to 400% in the validation process. Before we could validate 400 records per second, now we validate 1700 per second. "

Carlos Melegatti - Director of Financial Services, Central Bank of Costa Rica

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Ciber | IT Consulting / System Integrators, USA

“The quality of the conversion tools provided by ArtinSoft exceeded our expectations, and we found ArtinSoft to be a flexible and reliable partner who provided exceptional product training and sales support.”

Joe Mancuso, Senior Vice President, CIBER’s Commercial Practice

EMMSA Consulting | IT Consulting / System Integrators, Argentina

"Our experience with ArtinSoft’s Visual Basic Upgrade Companion was really positive. It’s a robust and powerful tool that provided us with very readable code and useful comments about the executed conversions. In addition to the list of associated Errors, Warnings and Issues, it gave us an extremely valuable framework to estimate the complete required effort."

Sebastián Ramírez - Project Leader, EMMSA Consulting

Freeway | ISV, Costa Rica

"For Freeway, the ability to migrate our eZway application to .NET represented a mission critical project, for which we required a true business partner with the knowledge, technology and experience that guaranteed the success of this process. ArtinSoft without a doubt was this partner, offering World class technology supported by an extraordinary team that saw beyond our technical requirements and into our business necessities."

Oscar Emo - CEO Freeway Corporation

"We had known for quite some time about the services offered by ArtinSoft for system migration from Informix 4GL to Java. When ArtinSoft approached us and offered its modernization services to .NET, we immediately began working on a pilot project. The first converted segment was one which enables the generation of ASP pages, starting from high-level specifications of both the objects and the properties contained in those pages. The time it took to reach Functional Equivalence was amazing and we immediately started to modify the code to generate ASP.NET pages."

Jairo Almanza - Development Director, Freeway

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GYSSA | IT Consulting / System Integrators, Guatemala

"ArtinSoft paved the way for us to take advantage of .NET long before we would have expected. ArtinSoft’s services and technology not only enabled us to economize a huge sum of money; they also helped us concentrate our resources on discovering the full potential of .NET to satisfy our clients’ needs.”

Guillermo Villacorta - Vice-president of Projects & Strategy, GYSSA

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HSI | Energy / Oil, USA

"I was very pleased with the methods ArtinSoft utilized to communicate progress on the project and the professional manner in which their staff conducted themselves. Utilizing the Visual Basic Upgrade Companion saved us about one year of development and $160,000. ArtinSoft completed the project on time and within the turnkey cost. This conversion will allow us to leapfrog well in front of our competition."

Ken Bowdon - President and CEO, HSI

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MDA | ISV, South Africa

"We wanted to use the newest technology instead of just being able to run Visual Basic 6 style code inside the .NET Environment. Using the Visual Basic Upgrade Companion represented an estimated saving for the project of US$300,000."

Rodger Beadle - Technical Director, MDA Property Systems

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Microsoft | ISV, Global

"ArtinSoft's upgrade tools help enterprise developers sensibly and cost-consciously upgrade their applications to Visual Studio .NET and the .NET Framework. With ArtinSoft's services, customers will be able to rapidly extend their existing solutions to produce compelling applications and solutions in the new XML Web services world."

Tom Button - Vice President of the Developer Tools Division, Microsoft

SAFECO | Insurance, USA

SAFECO, Microsoft® and ArtinSoft Corporation partnered to convert a large scale, real world application to Visual Basic .NET. Safeco looked towards a VB to .NET migration to enhance performance and take advantage of .NET's improved development environment.

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Servicengine | ISV, USA

"The migration training ArtinSoft provided was conducted in a very professional and efficient manner. After it concluded, our team felt very confident that they had all they needed and were ready to start working on the code migration. ArtinSoft was very flexible in terms of the schedule and content for the training, which was tailored to our specific project. They provided us with all the tools and information required for our conversion project. Would definitely recommend ArtinSoft to anyone in need of a code migration training."

Harry W. Dayton - President, Servicengine

Vertex | ISV, UK

"ArtinSoft has been an excellent company to work with. They have been responsive to requests from Vertex to change their processes in order to accommodate the way in which we work. They have provided us with daily updates throughout the migration life cycle and have worked in partnership with Vertex to resolve any issues that have arisen in a pragmatic and expedient manner"

Sue Craig - Senior Project Manager, Vertex

• Read the Omiga application case study
• Read the Supervisor application case study

Vision Consulting | IT Consulting / System Integrators, Mexico

"The quality and professionalism shown by the ArtinSoft staff greatly surpassed our expectations. This made us confirm the initial vision towards them: establishing a long term relationship for migration projects."

Rafael Miranda - General Manager, Vision Consulting

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XchangingTechnology | ISV, UK

"ArtinSoft have provided an excellent service whilst converting our VB6 application to C#.NET. Their staff has been both knowledgeable and professional throughout the conversion process with timely and accurate deliveries. Xchanging will be looking to ArtinSoft for future conversion projects."

Anthony Rider - Project Manager for Xchanging

Andrew Fryer | USA

"I was looking for a conversion tool for one specific application and the VBUC fitted the bill perfectly! The interface was nice and clear and it did basically everything for you, and the process was a lot quicker than I expected it to be. And after the first successful compilation the application loaded up and I was surprised how much everything looked the same as I expected. In conclusion I cannot praise this product highly enough. It has saved me an immense amount of time when compared to rewriting it, and just as importantly, it has maintained the look and feel of the application, meaning that the impact to the users will be minimal. I wish you luck with the continued development of this, and if I become aware of anyone needing to do anything similar, then I will be sure to let them know"

Andrew Fryer

Signature South Consulting | ISV, LATAM

“Since 2001, we have been licensing our Signature electronic invoicing application as a Software As A Service (SaaS). As the number of customers has been building up, operating under the traditional data center modality has become increasingly intricate for us, taking into account the time that the tax authorities demand for the storage of invoices, which averages 5 years.

We found about Azure during the Microsoft partners global event in 2009, and from the start we concluded that it was an ideal solution for our needs, for security concerns (backup, contingency, availability), ease of scalability and cost savings.

Due to the addition of new customers, new requirements, changes in legislation in different countries, and other improvements and upgrades, our software is under constant development, and that was a critical aspect to consider within the migration project. Therefore, we approached Microsoft to find the best method to move it to the cloud, and they highly recommended ArtinSoft for this task.

Since then, we have established a strong business relationship with ArtinSoft, who gave us all necessary support to carry out the migration to Azure in the most efficient way, cutting down on costs and time-to-market thanks to their experts’ know-how. They have given us a complete picture of the migration process, and communication between the two companies has been fluid and constant, being a vital element in the decision making process when dealing with different re-architecture options.”

Sergio Chaverri - CMO, Signature South Consulting

Maritz Travel | Diversified Services, USA

"ArtinSoft demonstrated professionalism throughout the project. Its understanding of our goals and technology, and its ability to help our application seamlessly scale to our current and future needs, provides ample proof as to why ArtinSoft is one of Microsoft's preferred providers of migration to the .NET Framework"

Scott Loos - Director of Internet Development, Maritz Travel

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Wily Technology | ISV, USA

"ArtinSoft's easy-to-use JLCA Companion proved to be instrumental when completing our own migration project. Thanks to ArtinSoft's ability to quickly comprehend our goals and to the expertise it brought to the table, we were able to confidently greenlight our project and subsequently carry it through. In the end, both the JLCA Companion and ArtinSoft's help contributed significantly to our success."

Jeff Cobb - Willy Technology - a Division of Computer Associates

HIS | ISV, Germany

"ArtinSoft has given us the opportunity to dramatically improve the services that Universities can provide in support of the student. Using Freedom® to migrate our old system across a paradigm shift to a leading edge language has saved a great deal of money and development time for us. ArtinSoft has a truly impressive service to offer any public or private sector organisation. I did not believe what they could do until I saw it with my own eyes – a remarkable scientific breakthrough."

Dr Bernard Hartung - Deputy Director, Hochschul Informations System

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Mercy Ships | Health Care, UK

"Not only were we able to complete the project with impressive speed; the quality of Java produced by the service was so high that we were able to deploy the new system very easily. A project we would have expected to take us at least 18 months only took several weeks"

Kelvin Burton - CTO, Mercy Ships

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Mundo de Juguetes | Retail, Costa Rica

"Migrating our application with the help of ArtinSoft saved us a lot of time and money, and it allowed us to standardize our database platform. Thanks to ArtinSoft’s automatic migration technology, we have managed to obtain huge savings in license fees, as well as a system on a new platform that provides flexibility to quickly respond to market needs. We are now fully capable of developing our application and hence our business without any technological constraints."

Mr. Leitón - General Manager, Mundo de Juguetes

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Banco Azteca | Banking and Financial Services, Mexico

Banco Azteca is the newest and fastest growing bank in Mexico and serves nearly a million customers through 850 branches across the country.

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BCR - Banco de Costa Rica | Banking and Financial Services, Costa Rica

"After working closely with ArtinSoft’s consulting team, I can assure that because of the robustness of the technology employed and their experience in the automated migration field, ArtinSoft fulfilled our expectations at a 100% level."

Lic. Mario Rodríguez Valverde - Project Coordinator, Banco de Costa Rica

E-volutionSoft | ISV, Costa Rica

"Having carried out manual migration trials toward Java and concomitantly looking for less complex alternatives to manual conversion (rewrite), we tried ArtinSoft’s solution. ArtinSoft possesses the best technology, which, combined with its consulting services, fulfilled our expectations."

Gustavo Astua - Technical Director, e-volutionMain.

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Instituto Nacional de Seguros - INS | Insurance, Costa Rica

"To redesign an application of this kind from scratch was not an option, because it would have been too expensive and would have taken up valuable time and resources. Through the technology and services offered by ArtinSoft, we are able to rescue the information embedded in the current system, and we will have a much more modern, easier-to-maintain application that provides Web services and that will be easier to upgrade in the future.

The support and professionalism offered by ArtinSoft has given us the confidence and security to carry out our migration project. We are very excited with the project and are sure it will be completed quickly and successfully."

Alvaro Padilla - INS