GAPVelocity AI, the AI modernisation business arm of US-based Growth Acceleration Partners, has released VELO for PowerBuilder.
VELO for PowerBuilder is a platform designed to convert legacy PowerBuilder applications into Blazor and .NET on Azure using agentic AI. It is now available as a component of the VELO platform.
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PowerBuilder, which has underpinned essential business systems for over three decades, presents significant challenges for organisations due to a decreasing number of professionals with the required expertise.
Traditional options for updating these business applications include costly and time-consuming manual rewrites or relying on generic generative AI translators, both of which carry their own risks.
GAPVelocity AI engineering vice president Ken Rivera said: “PowerBuilder customers have been told for years that their only real choice was to rewrite or to wait.
“We built the original Visual Basic Upgrade Wizard for Microsoft. Thirty years later, the pattern is the same and the tooling is finally equal to it.”
GAPVelocity AI states that VELO for PowerBuilder aims to offer an alternative by leveraging AI agents capable of analysing and re-architecting software, instead of simply translating code line-by-line.
According to GAPVelocity AI, the platform’s approach centres on agents that review the application’s structure, separating business logic from the user interface.
This produces modern code that adheres to current standards and can be verified, addressing the risk of losing undocumented business knowledge often embedded only in older codebases.
GAPVelocity AI also claims that this process offers speed and cost benefits compared to manual rewrites. The tool is claimed to deliver modernised Blazor applications up to 20 times faster and at 60% lower cost than traditional methods.
It operates on Microsoft Foundry, which GAPVelocity AI describes as providing the underlying scale, security, and governance required by enterprise clients, particularly those who already use Microsoft platforms.
The company states that running VELO for PowerBuilder on Foundry enables organisations to conduct modernisation efforts within a familiar and managed technology environment.
In April, GAPVelocity AI announced the launch of VELO, a platform described as the first agentic AI solution designed for updating legacy applications.
The company stated that VELO is intended to assist organisations seeking to transition older software platforms to modern web-based technologies.
