Services

In January 2007, a landmark shift occurred in the computing industry when Apple announced the first iPhone. Having a powerful, connected, easy-to-use computer in your pocket changed the way we think about computing, and the arrival of the iPad in 2010 continued that trend.

At Lateral, we believe that despite the continuing massive growth of mobile computing in the consumer market, it is yet to realise its full potential in the workplace. In addition to the existing traditional mobile roles (such as sales & service), we think that the new mobile computing platforms will enable a number of currently desk-bound employees to ‘go mobile’ and achieve new levels of productivity and effectiveness.

Furthermore, marketing & customer experience teams are gradually warming to the ability to deliver information and services to customers in a much more usable and immediate fashion — mobile apps are a great mechanism for brand extension and to drive customer loyalty.

Over the next few years, we see mobile apps as a catalyst for business change; an opportunity for perceptive and agile organisations to outmanoeuvre their slower competitors and disrupt their market in much the same way that Apple has disrupted phones. Lateral can help you in achieving this outcome for your business — contact us to discuss your plans for world domination.

The iSeries (AS/400, IBM i, System i, i5/OS etc) is still a great server platform, however for many years the only words we heard in relation to it were ‘legacy’, ‘modernisation’ and ‘retirement’, particularly during the period that many enterprises adopted a Windows-only desktop & server platform policy.

Thankfully, we’ve mostly left behind the days of blanket Windows policies and it’s not unusual, even in former Microsoft strongholds, to see computers & mobile devices running Apple operating systems, and servers running other varieties of UNIX (such as RHEL or ESX). In today’s more tolerant environment, the iSeries can be evaluated on its merits rather than automatically discounted.

At Lateral, we've been using the platform consistently since it was still called AS/400, and we’ve never bought into the whole ‘legacy’ argument. We’ve built and maintained business systems on the iSeries that have consistently and reliably delivered real business value, all the while surviving numerous unsuccessful attempts to rewrite them on the trendy platform du jour.

Our people are leading experts in rapidly developing high-quality iSeries solutions using the LANSA toolkit, and Lateral is trusted by organisations worldwide to deliver profitable, high-value software. Contact us to discuss your software needs.

We believe cloud computing is one of the most significant innovations in business IT services over the last 10 years. The success of cloud applications such as Google Apps for Business, SalesForce.com, Basecamp, DropBox, etc shows that many businesses recognise the benefits of no-deployment, always-on hosted services, and like the predictability of flat monthly subscription pricing models.

In addition, the modern worker is increasingly expecting applications and data to be available at any computer, in the office or at home, and on mobile devices — much the same as email. With traditional (non-cloud) business applications, this is difficult to accomplish, but cloud apps give you this out of the box.

As with any software, off-the-shelf solutions can only take you so far — to deliver the full benefit, you may need to get your cloud solutions talking to each other, or supplement them with custom functionality. Lateral are the cloud experts — we’ve built numerous cloud-hosted custom applications and integration processes, and as enthusiastic users of cloud applications ourselves, we understand how to deliver the value promised by the new paradigm. Contact us and we’ll have a chat about how to transform your business IT.