LANSA: Changing the way Business Applications are Developed and Maintained

Computer software has made many business professionals more productive by taking care of tedious and repetitive tasks, that way allowing the professional to focus on the bigger picture. Unfortunately the same does not apply to most application software developers. Their work has become more complex over the years. Not only do their applications need to provide the right business functionality, they also must address a host of other requirements. Recent additions to the requirement list include being mobile responsive, browser agnostic and portable across multiple cloud and on-premise platforms. These are in addition to long-time requirements of robustness, scalability and secure access.

Development platforms that have the capability of meeting the growing list of needs, while shielding developers from increased complexity and tedious coding, are rare. LANSA has aptly been catering to this demand for almost three decades. Headquartered in Sydney, Australia, and with offices around the globe, LANSA’s mission is to make application development and maintenance simple.

Founded in 1987 and initially focussed on providing application development tools for IBM midrange customers, LANSA’s products have evolved to a powerful suite of cross-platform tools to help businesses deal with the complexities involved in developing, maintaining and integrating business applications. Although the IBM i platform is still a LANSA “sweet spot”, a growing number of its customers now use the tool set on Windows, Cloud and Linux platforms.

LANSA has always had a close relationship with IBM and is a long-time IBM Business Partner – making a significant investment in IBM products and technologies.

Other strategic relationships are with Microsoft, Altova, 1WorldSync and with several solution vendors and service providers. Currently, LANSA is used by over 7,000 companies worldwide, owing to its low code development environment, cost effectiveness and its ability to deal with the intricacies of continuously changing technolog ies involved in application development. The company primarily serves medium to large businesses operating across manufacturing, supply chain and financial services sectors. The company also caters to the Independent Software Vendors seeking to modernise their solutions and expand their clientele to multiple platforms. Both through these solution partners and through direct relationships, thousands of companies are using LANSA-based applications, including 23 of the top 50 banks.

Peter Tyrrell, General Manager - Asia Pacific, LANSA, comments “Our customers want to take advantage of new technologies without having to start from scratch. In other words, capitalize on what they already have without being limited by it. Where redevelopment cannot be avoided, they want to do that in a controlled manner and with the lowest possible risk. LANSA makes it possible.”

The most recent release by the company, Visual LANSA version 14, is not just an incremental improvement. It has been holistically re-designed to enable developers to build an entire web application -including the web front-end, the server back-end and all the intermediate communications - with just one language – Visual LANSA. Removing the need for the developer to understand HTML, JavaScript, CSS, Ajax and other technologies, it has completely changed the way developers build business applications.

“LANSA’s main differentiator is that it hides complexity and removes the pain and cost usually associated with application development and maintenance. Therefore our customers’ time-to-market is far less and their total-cost-of-ownership far lower than it is for other organizations. We have a 30-year proven track record of incorporating new technologies into our product set. This ‘technology insurance’ has provided our customers with upward compatibility throughout the last 28 years and 14 version history,” concludes Peter.