Rocket Software

Last Updated: 1st September 2023
Analyst Coverage: David Norfolk, Philip Howard and Fran Howarth

Rocket Software is a privately-held company and a leading global developer of software solutions, particularly in the mainframe space, that maximise the business value obtained from the investments in IT made by large corporations and government agencies. Its LegaSuite solution, for example, reduces the potential for waste from failing to exploit legacy investments effectively; and it owns the U2 multivalue database (acquired from IBM); and Aldon, which is an application lifecycle management tool.

Rocket concentrates on five solution areas currently, covering: Intelligent Infrastructure; Mobile Solutions; Mainframe Solutions; Cloud Solutions; and Big Data Solutions. Its large range of products cover some 39 categories ranging from governance and security; though application lifecycle management and DevOps; to both relational and non-relational database management systems; and business continuity and high availability.

It is very much an engineering company with a focus on R&D: it spends 24% of total revenue on R&D and about 61% of its employees are in R&D. It has a strategic acquisition policy that endeavours to keep the people behind its acquired products, to further develop them. It is also building up considerable in-house expertise (it calls its technical consultants “rocketeers”), particularly in the enterprise-critical mainframe technologies such as IMS and CICS. As well as with IBM, it has similarly strong relationships with Hitachi Data Systems and Fujitsu; plus many smaller partners (such as Embarcadero Technologies and RSA Security).

Rocket started off as an OEM software tool provider, largely for IBM, which means that it has had a comparatively low profile in the past. However, it has grown both by acquisition and organically and is now a large company, with many products.

The company was co-founded in 1990 by Andy Youniss, President and CEO. Before founding Rocket Software, Youness was the development manager for DB View Inc., a DB2 database tool vendor. Johan Magnusson Gedda is Director and Co-Founder, and is actively involved in the company’s financial management and business strategy. In addition to his involvement with Rocket, Gedda was a partner with the Vitol Group of Companies, a privately held Swiss trading partnership. Rocket Software is headquartered in Waltham, Massachusetts, USA; has 14 regional offices in North America (USA and Canada); has a European Headquarters in Dordrecht, The Netherlands; 2 offices in the UK; an APAC Headquarters in Sydney, Australia; 2 offices in China and 3 in Russia.

Customers include The Alaska State Legislature, Nintendo, Fidelity, Gucci, Skoda, Yamaha, and several banks and insurance companies. It claims to have 10,000 customers and partners, and five million end users, worldwide. In areas such as legacy modernisation, it sees its main competition as the ‘do nothing’ or ‘DIY’ options and tends to find some of its customers by taking over and finishing failed DIY products.

As mentioned above, when we first met Rocket Software, it kept a low profile, despite its size, and wasn’t well known outside of its customer-base. Over the last few years this has been changing and it is now a lot more visible.

It has made several interesting acquisitions of late, including:

Uniface, which adds a low-code capability and more large customers of the sort Rocket Software is already used to dealing with, according to P. Gary Gregory [Uniface joins Rocket Software]. Gregory also points out that: “In this instance, we’re welcoming 81 new team members to the Rocket family, each with skills and experiences that will help improve the products and services our customers and partners depend on”.
Rocket Software has also announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire ASG Technologies. According to Andy Youniss, CEO, Rocket Software: “We know ASG well and are pleased to add their competencies and expertise in and around structured and unstructured data, content management, and systems management to our combined company. This is an important milestone in our journey of investing in global enterprise IT solutions and in our ongoing commitment to our customers”.

Both of these are companies that Bloor likes, and has covered in the past.

Rocket Software has an active society involvement program. It says on Twitter: “We celebrated our 31st anniversary this year by spreading kindness and volunteering with charitable organizations we care about during Rocket’s annual CommunityDay. Over the course of just one day, Rocketeers committed time both virtually and in-person, to over 30 organizations across 6 countries. We cleaned up our neighborhoods, mentored students, donated clothing & furniture, and more”. Bloor welcomes recognition of all stakeholders in IT, not just customers, and society as a whole is increasingly being recognised as an important stakeholder in the Future of Work

Rocket Software publishes a blog and also has a LinkedIn presence.

Company Info

Headquarters: 77 4th Avenue, Waltham, MA 02451 USA
Telephone: +1 781 577 4321

LegaSuite

Last Updated: 4th April 2014

What it does

Rocket LegaSuite is a set of application modernisation tools used to re-purpose mainframe and midrange applications as user-friendly front-ends and web services/APIs.

It features web and mobile user interface and web API tools, and is used by hundreds of companies and government organisations to facilitate access to mission-critical systems and their integration with other critical systems.

Good governance of IT spend implies avoidance of waste and re-use of legacy applications in modernised web-based and mobile systems achieves this—companies can avoid a costly (and risky) 'rip and replace' rewrite or migration of their existing, and working, platforms by taking advantage of innovative emerging web and mobile technologies.

Nevertheless, application modernisation isn't purely a technology issue. Cultural change usually has to be managed and knowledge transfer initiatives will be needed to bring management and technical support up to speed on the modernised platform. Here, Rocket Software's experience, skills-transfer consultancy and educational resources, as an integral part of the LegaSuite solution, will be a key part of achieving effective, rather than just cosmetic, modernisation.

Markets and channels

Rocket Software operates globally (its global HQ is in the USA, and it has a European HQ in the Netherlands and APAC HQ in Australia) and LegaSuite benefits from this. LegaSuite is sold directly to customers and has ISV and partner channels, including a place as one of seven solutions in Fujitsu's legacy modernisation practice.

Users

LegaSuite is sold to large customers with mission-critical legacy applicatons that must be integrated with modern service-oriented (SOA) platforms or extended to web and/or mobile clients.

EVERTEC, for example, is a leading provider of transaction and financial application processing, business process outsourcing, and information technology consulting in the USA, Caribbean Basin and Latin America. It has over 1,750 professionals supporting anything from portable payment devices to sophisticated mainframe systems and its data centre executes over 1.1 billion transactions yearly, and operates a network of over 5,000 automated teller machines and over 133,000 point-of-sale payment terminals. It uses LegaSuite for rapid deployment of SOA interfaces to mainframe systems for, for example, core banking services, thus maximising the value obtained from its investment in existing applications.

Frontline Homeowners Insurance, as another example, operates in the southeast United States. It operates through a large network of agents who use its custom-built web portal as a key part of Frontline’s business operations. It uses LegaSuite Integration technology to support seamless integration of Frontline’s Java web application with its IBM i claims and policy administration system.

Technology

LegaSuite fits best into Rocket's Mobile Solution area; it can provide a user interface on iOS, Android and Windows Phone devices from mainframe and midrange solutions. It uses the latest standards such as HTML5 and REST APIs.

Its most important feature, however, is that it can act as an API hub, handling the back-end integration between presentation-layer mobile user interfaces/applications and back-end legacy systems.

LegaSuite supports modernisation and extension of most existing mainframe (typically IBM System z), midrange (typically IBM i), UNIX, and Windows applications. It supports a wider range of source platforms than many other modernisation tools, including, for example, OpenVMS and several different varieties of UNIX/Linux (HP-UX, AIX, Solaris, z/Linux, Red Hat, SUSE).

Services

Rocket Software has a global presence, with 24x7 phone support available for LegaSuite, as well as email and online support. However, its customer portal for technical support, while effective, is becoming a little old-fashioned. It is beginning to build an online support community, using collaboration software to encourage support and communication amongst its customers, in addition to direct support from Rocket Software, but this is in its early stages. It does currently have a community on LinkedIn and plays an active part in the IBM development community: in 2014 it was a premier sponsor of IBM's Pulse and IBMInsight conferences.

Rocket Software has a global professional services organisation of "rocketeers", with deep domain expertise from Rocket R&D labs. If a company, for example, has lost the mainframe IMS database and CICS transaction processing expertise associated with building a mission-critical legacy system, Rocket Software would be able to replace it.

Rocket Software provides rich educational resources with a breadth of introductory webinars, in-depth training, and career-enhancing certification programs for its solutions, including LegaSuite.

Downloads

Download in .PDF format

Uniface

Last Updated: 1st September 2023
Mutable Award: Gold 2023

What is it?

Fig 1 - The Uniface Community Edition is an excellent way in for those new to Uniface

The DSP (Dynamic Server Page) framework is what Uniface uses to build full-stack, data-centric web applications that scale. It is data-centric, with built-in data synchronisation, binding and validation. It is low code, it does a lot of the work involved in communicating between the client and the server and synchronising data – it protects its developers from race conditions, protects read-only data, protects applications from SQL injection attacks and so on.

It also provides a rich Javascript API, for people mainly interested in JavaScript automation and who may not want to build full Uniface applications. Uniface allows developers a free hand with building their own web front ends.

Quotes

“More than anything I care about our customers’ success and the relationships we’ve built with them. Only when our customers are successful are we successful.”
Jim Byrnes, first CEO of the new Uniface in 2014

“Uniface was able to cut 60% of the 1.3 million lines of code estimated for the company’s next generation software, allowing it to install the new systems in under 3 years – compared to the 5 years quoted by Rocket’s competitors. Time savings from automating controls saved inspectors two days of work a month (10%) on average.”
A global French food distribution company

What does it do?

Fig 2 - Uniface has been a trusted platform for about four decades

Traditional Uniface-based desktop applications have been successful with Uniface’s loyal customers for many years but are now facing increased competition, from, for example: modern web UIs, the trend towards increased remote and home working with BYOD (Bring Your Own Device; perhaps this is better thought of as Bring Your Own Interface); and, of course, the move to cloud deployment at scale.

Uniface has been making an effort to ensure that its customers can enhance their applications with these latest approaches, without being disadvantaged with respect to their competitors, for a long while now. Its latest technology modernisations will make its customers’ new technology journeys even easier and once Rocket and Uniface have addressed customer retention, post-merger, these new Uniface features should help to attract new customers.

Local functions are available with component-level scope (callable from anywhere in the component); Entity/Occurrence-level scope (restricted to the Entity/Occurrence triggers as well as their direct fields); and Field-level scope (restricted to the field’s triggers).

Support for new widget functionality including an open API for integrating/creating complex custom widgets); and a Web component widget set which will be implemented using these; thus helping Uniface to deliver a consistent and accessible UX/UI.

Uniface now supports automatic layout generation and comes with a new reference web application, Docker support and an improved Cloud License Manager. Extending Uniface with central logging, auto scale and monitoring enable simple deployment into an Orchestrated environment.

A key issue is that you can’t simply translate a desktop application into a full-function enterprise web application. This is because a multi-user business application needs to be built on a firm foundation that makes it resistant to attacks from malicious parties (or even unintended user error). As Uniface says “Significant business risks would be introduced if an automated process were to convert a desktop application directly into an enterprise-scale web application”. Once the foundations are secure, business logic can be layered on top.

Uniface is particularly proud of its eLearning support, which is inspiring similar capabilities across Rocket. New eLearning modules will, of course, be created enabling the developers to understand and adopt the new functionality.

Why should you care?

To summarise, Uniface has identified several enhancements to the current DSP approach, the Uniface scripting language and the development environment, that it thinks will simplify development, increase application quality, and minimise the knowledge of HTML, CSS and JavaScript needed to create a rich user experience.

These will increase a developer’s focus on the business logic generally, through simplifying application development and increasing productivity. They simplify and automate exception- and error-handling and ensure the Uniface system is left in a good known state, whether application exceptions are handled specifically or not.

The Bottom Line

The Uniface acquisition by Rocket seems very positive, and both companies have a similar customer focus. Uniface itself has been modernised, and this will help its customers modernise their own Uniface installations and then, perhaps, add new functions to other legacy applications.

Mutable Award: Gold 2023

Commentary

The Open Mainframe Project and some implications for ES-3

Uniface rides on a Rocket

Going outside low-code silos for Mutable Action Automation

Hello Earth: we have lift off!

Updating data preparation

Rocket Process Automation

Research

00002770 - MODERNISATION UNIFACE Spotlight (cover thumbnail)

Modernisation with modern tools empowers you to do more with less - And modernisation thrives on modern approaches, such as Low Code and AI

Modernisation is better than rip and replace, taking advantage of Low Code, AI (Augmented Intelligence), DevOps etc.

Rocket Software

Company Info

LegaSuite

What it does

Markets and channels

Users

Technology

Services

Downloads

Uniface

What is it?

What does it do?

Why should you care?

Commentary

Solutions

Research

Modernisation with modern tools empowers you to do more with less - And modernisation thrives on modern approaches, such as Low Code and AI

Uniface - A modernised low-code platform

Modernisation with modern tools empowers you to do more with less

Enterprise Server 3.0

The Future of Business… using Enterprise Server 3.0 Services

Data Assurance