Ab Initio’s simple graphical development tools allow you to build data processing applications quickly, without specialized knowledge.
Ab Initio makes it easy to design, implement, and test large complex applications. Ab Initio enables architects and developers to build applications graphically — with no traditional coding. Because businesspeople can easily understand these applications’ intuitive diagrams, the applications are built far faster with fewer people and require far less maintenance than traditional technologies.
For a retailer running critical software on antique hardware, upgrading turned out to be far easier than they ever imagined possible.
Hardware and software upgrades are a reality of technology. As they are upgraded, older programs will often stop working and need to be replaced. When this involves customer-written software, the hassle can be immense.
One major retailer was running different versions of Ab Initio software on a variety of platforms. Important applications — responsible for critical product data across all stores — were running on an old Unix platform that was no longer being manufactured or supported. An unsupported platform is a very risky platform indeed. Also, the Unix box was so old that it couldn’t run Ab Initio’s latest software. For this retailer, the old computer was the proverbial single point of failure: if the Unix box died, complete chaos in the stores would result.
The retailer decided it was time to upgrade the hardware. They also upgraded to the latest version of Ab Initio software. To their surprise, they found that every Ab Initio application that had been running on the old hardware ran perfectly fine on the new hardware and software. They were so pleased with those results that they upgraded all their versions of Ab Initio to the latest release. Every application continued to run as well as or better than before.
In the open source world, flavors of the month can soar to prominence and just as rapidly plummet to obscurity. With Ab Initio, applications over a decade old continue to run and can be easily modified as conditions change.
Ab Initio software spans generations of hardware and operating system technologies — from mainframes to Unix/Linux to Hadoop to the cloud and containers. Ab Initio enabled the retailer to futureproof their environment, making sure their applications continue to work even as the underlying hardware and software change.
For the retailer, that resulted in a greatly reduced risk to operations and eliminated single points of failure. That’s planning for the future, the Ab Initio way.