Varasset Migrates from Legacy to Modern Open-source Stack in 8 Months

The Story

Several years ago Microsoft announced the MS Silverlight end of life. Varasset, who developed their utility management system on Silverlight, had to find another platform. The migration could take lots of time and effort.

During the research Varasset found CUBA Platform (currently named Jmix). It provided everything they needed: a modern open-source stack, learning materials and documentation for easy start, out-of-the-box functionality which met their needs.

The migration took much less time and work than the Varasset team expected. They adopted Java stack and completed the process in just 8 months. The migration was performed by 5-6 developers working part-time.

Now Varasset supports their products with CUBA. The in-built features like business process management allows the team to configure the product possibilities according to the specific customers’ needs.

The Product

Varasset is a configurable software solution for the power and communications industries. It specializes in targeted work and asset management processes for power distribution and transmission, adapting to the unique needs of each organization. Along with other features, Varasset manages and maintains capital projects’ processes and assets, tracking the project costs and progress.

Varasset has a long history of success on the US market. The team works on two products: “Varasset XAM” and “Varasset Joint Use”. Initially, their development was based on Microsoft Silverlight. After Microsoft announced the platform sunset, the team had to find another tool, more flexible and open-source. After a long research, they chose Jmix (back then - CUBA Platform).

Solution

The big task for Varasset was the migration from MS Silverlight. It was achieved with less effort than the team expected. The migration took about 8 months and was performed by a team of 5-6 developers, some of them working part-time.

It was surprisingly easy to transition from the Microsoft technologies to the Java stack.

Dave Chaney, Varasset Managing Partner

Currently, all application functionality of Varasset products is developed and supported with the help of CUBA. Varasset manages and maintains capital projects’ processes and assets, tracking the project costs and progress. The latest versions of the system have the following features:

• Organizing the crews - analyzing the types of expertise, equipment, and the correspondent work, assigning crews for the objects and tasks based on this analysis;
• Dynamic assignment of workflow user tasks;
• Displaying work objects on the map;
• Work scheduling;
• Built-in messenger with notifications;
• Managing the internal data - customers info, agreements and other documents.

The out-of-the-box platform components, such as emailing, reports generation, single sign-on helped to save much money and time. The team configures fairly complex workflows for the customers’ needs, and the platform’s in-built features such as the BPM module allow Varasset to adapt to the unique work processes of each customer.