Working with Mainsoft, an independent software vendor/solution provider and IBM business partner, Opal Future Technologies Inc. saved time and money by quickly consolidating eight software pension systems into a single portal or web site while extending and preserving existing software applications built on .NET, a programming language from Microsoft.

Mainsoft is led by company CEO Yaacov Cohen (pictured). With the company's Visual Mainwin for J2EE, specifically designed for use with IBM Websphere Portal, Opal quickly translated .NET-based applications into Java applications that run across a variety of software platforms.

Opal Future Technologies Inc. integrated critical .NET applications and web services at a fraction of the time it would have taken to translate software code and avoided the inherent incompatibility risk involved in rewriting software languages. With WebSphere Portal use of .NET-Java EE interoperability software from Mainsoft, Opal delivered a seamless end-user experience across Java and .NET services with equal access to role-based personalized interfaces, single sign-on, unified navigation, inter-portlet communication, and other portal services.

"Customers who have multiple software platforms and applications, which is what Opal Future Technologies faced after several company acquisitions, are realizing the powerful benefits of an open standards-based and flexible architecture," said Larry Bowden, IBM's vice president of portals and web interaction services. "WebSphere Portal gives companies ultimate flexibility and choice by making it easy to re-use a company's software assets and extend them into new solutions built within SOA and new Internet technologies such as Web 2.0."

Alex Libis, information and data security manager of Opal, evaluated several commercially available portal servers to deliver the user interface. "We selected IBM WebSphere Portal 6 because it offers role-based access and a highly integrated, rich, end-user experience," said Libis. "WebSphere Portal also offers easy integration with the funds' existing IBM DB2 CM (Content Manager) storage system."

Because Opal has portal components written in both .NET and in Java, Opal used Mainsoft's Portal Edition to deploy .NET applications natively on the portal. Opal integrated six .NET applications and more than 30 Java services into the portal and deployed the new system in four months. In the process, the team changed less than one-half of one percent of the .NET code base. The next phase will incorporate additional .NET applications and will open the portal to external users.

Mainsoft is helping more than 150 businesses deploy Windows applications natively on open systems, including WebSphere Portal, WebSphere Application Server and UNIX and Linux operating systems.