Monthly our experts present their real world experience solving customer challenges at our Innovation Town Halls hosted by Karsun Solutions, the innovators behind the ReDuX platform. From automation and AI to evolving new cloud and data solutions for our customers, every day Karsun innovators bring their emerging technology insights to bear on these challenges. That includes the ReDuX team.

Addressing Natural/ADBAS Modernization Challenges

Our most recent town hall focused on real world examples of code parsing using ReDuX’s code companion AI agents. ReDuX AI expert Eamon Cusic shared a common pain point for mainframe customers using systems written in legacy Natural code using ADABAS systems. Customers with Natural/ADABAS systems want to move from these systems due to proprietary software costs, workforce shortages, and the fine tuning required to ensure the systems perform properly. However, other tools designed to help modernize these systems only provide automations to refactor or replatform these systems.

The ReDuX Solution: Natural Parser

Using ReDuX Eamon’s team parsed the legacy Natural language, building a tool that could assess both the syntax and semantic structure of the code. Next, the team used ReDuX Blueprinting agents to analyze user behavior from video demonstrations, software module code, and VSAM database schema. Inside ReDuX Blueprint, the team could go beyond the insights available in other AI-for-modernization tools, providing context within the VSAM, including core business logic, data flow, screen flows. Using ReDuX Blueprint citations Eamon’s team could dive in and examine the exact window management subroutine referenced. 

Third Party Components Present Challenges

Raminder Saluja, an AI for modernization leader in our aviation practice, shared a recent challenge conquered faced by a Karsun team. For this legacy application, the need for modernization was driven by the language and third party components which are no longer supported making it difficult to make modifications or bug fixes. The application was anticipated to stop working in the next Windows update. This was a critical application for the customer which needed to be modernized to minimize impact to the aviation team.  

The ReDuX Solution: VB6 Parser

Given the time sensitive nature of this challenge, this team sought a tool that could quickly build a modern application. However, Raminder found a solution in the ReDuX platform as it could not only parse VB6 code but validate the requirements and generate the test cases as part of this modernization. After using the blueprint processes described earlier, Raminder’s team extended ReDuX’s VB6 parsing to its code companion code generation agent. Ultimately, using the code companion agent, the team will migrate VB6 to a VB .Net application. The overall effort is expected to be completed within a 6 month time frame where the traditional modernization approach can take more than a year.

Whether using Natural, VB6, Oracle Forms/Apex or another legacy coding language like COBOL, ReDuX provides a mature framework that can be used to add additional parsers and libraries. Depending on the complexity of the language, working with a ReDuX AI engineering team can typically write parsers in 2-6 weeks. Both of our modernization experts leveraged this process using ReDuX to address previously intractable code parsing problems. Connect with us to learn how ReDuX tackles legacy code while providing AI agents and agile teams essential context about your mainframe system.