While the legacy systems have done their jobs well and brought about improvements in productivity, they are now an impediment to progress. As organizations have become more sophisticated, information must be shared between departments. Having invested thousands of hours "feeding" legacy systems, most users say that they cannot extract information when it is needed. This is because the systems were not built as integrated systems and are made-up of "modules" that were added to meet specific user needs. Duplication of data is rampant in most systems and maintenance costs have risen dramatically. Additionally, enhancements have been limited because vendors do not want to make investments in legacy systems.

Another aspect of legacy systems that is not well known is that they are very proprietary. Many systems that purport to be based on "open" technology were developed in proprietary languages and require layers of middleware to operate on different platforms. While the systems are technically "open," the user must bear a tremendous cost to actually port these applications to newer platforms. Most customers simply install the proprietary environments recommended by the vendor and are held captive to the policies of that vendor.

The lack of new systems in the public sector marketplace has prevented customers from reaping the benefits of an entire generation of dramatic progress in improving functionality while enormously reducing the Total Cost of Operations (TCO) of their information systems. Many organizations feel "locked-in" to these proprietary applications because the alternatives are so costly and difficult to install while offering no significant improvements.

Based on our own industry observations, along with input from our customers, we have embarked upon a quest to replace our own legacy software as well as the other legacy solutions that dominate the market today began.  Our new generation of software was built from a clean slate and is free of the limitations and bottlenecks of legacy systems. With direct customer participation, our new enterprise software is designed to deliver features that matter to utilities and municipalities. How do we know? Our customers are on our design team!