The Story of vLegaci

Steve Kilner, CEO

I formed vLegaci in 2007 after 28 years of software consulting in the IBM midrange market.  For 20 of those years I ran the largest AS/400 consulting company in the San Francisco Bay Area.  In forming vLegaci I felt it was time for a new type of consulting concept in this market, one that recognizes that the nature and needs of IBM midrange customers have changed dramatically over the years.

The days are gone of numerous large scale development efforts in RPG; the work required of us now is to maintain those large systems that were developed over the years, enhance them occasionally as needed, and assist customers with the process of moving on to other applications, and other platforms if desired.

My first effort in this new venture was to develop a software tool that would assist developers in maintaining and modifying those large, hugely complex RPG programs that have come to loom over many of the surviving AS/400 applications.  These programs, often written 10-20 years ago by people no longer working in this segment, have often been repeatedly modified, and have come to be, in some cases that I have personally dealt with, almost completely incomprehensible and defiant of any human approach to their maintenance.  I felt that existing tools like Hawkeye and APlus did not drill down deeply enough into individual programs, but were better at giving views across many programs.  This was the first problem I set out to tackle for legacy RPG systems and resulted in my Codelyzer product.

The second effort I have made is to organize a management concept that is tailored specifically to legacy system support and maintenance.  After spending nearly three years managing two large scale enhancement projects on an RPG system that dated back to the mid-80’s I had to deal with a myriad of problems: the system was minimally documented, the changes were to be extensive but there was no existing means of regression testing, knowledge of the system was piecemeal and scattered among developers, and no one, not even the users, could describe everything the system did on a daily basis.

At the same time I saw very experienced IT professionals trying to use methodologies that were really more suited to new system development than legacy enhancement, and it just didn’t work.  The result of all this is that I have encapsulated the principles learned and developed in those efforts into a management system tailored to RPG legacy systems.  I also wanted this management system to be executable remotely over the internet, and thus developed LAS .

More generally, in the 20 years I spent running my past business I developed some key beliefs that I bring to vLegaci:

• If we always consider the customer’s interest first, it will always pay back in the long run
• Focus on results and solving problems for customers rather than overblown sales and marketing
• Keep overhead to an absolute minimum; use the latest management techniques and technologies to create a virtual corporation with the lowest possible overhead in order to keep customer costs down
• Only employ the most qualified professionals, both in their technical skills and in their teamwork skills, and treat them with the full measure of respect they have earned
  
• Make wise use of both onshore and offshore resources to achieve the right balance of skills, accessibility and cost effectiveness

I aim to help customers improve the maintenance of their legacy systems, outsource their departmental work when desired, and make the move to new systems when they are ready.

Steve Kilner

CEO, vLegaci

February 2008