New features built on Microsoft Foundry enable fully modernized Blazor applications up to 20x faster and 60% cheaper than manually rewriting them
GAPVelocity AI, the AI modernization business unit of Growth Acceleration Partners, announced VELO for PowerBuilder. This release, currently available as part of the VELO platform, applies agent AI to directly convert decades-old PowerBuilder applications to idiomatic Blazor and .NET on Azure.
PowerBuilder has been running mission-critical business systems for over 30 years. Organizations that rely on it today are faced with a choice between a shrinking talent pool, manual rewrites with significant cost and deadline risks, or doing nothing and hoping for the best. VELO for PowerBuilder eliminates that tradeoff.
Beyond rewrites and translations
Legacy modernization has historically forced us to choose between two imperfect options. Manual rewriting can produce cleaner results, but it is time consuming, costly, and prone to losing undocumented business logic. Knowledge that exists only within the code itself. Although general-purpose GenAI code translation is fast, it suffers from complex dependencies typical of real-world business applications, resulting in code that compiles but is not up to the standards of the teams that inherit the code.
VELO takes a strictly limited approach. Rather than relying on a single mechanical translation, VELO deploys an AI agent that actually infers the application architecture. The agent separates the underlying business logic from the presentation layer and produces modern, verifiable code that adheres to current framework conventions.
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Built on Microsoft Foundry
VELO runs agent models on Microsoft Foundry, giving the platform an enterprise-grade foundation for scale, security, and governance. For many GAPVelocity AI customers and partners who have already invested in Microsoft technology, this collaboration keeps modernization efforts within a familiar and well-managed environment. This is an important consideration when the system being modernized is one of the most sensitive systems in the organization.
“PowerBuilder customers have been told for years that their only real choice is to rewrite or wait,” said Ken Rivera, vice president of engineering at GAPVelocity AI. “We created the original Visual Basic Upgrade Wizard for Microsoft. Thirty years later, the pattern is still the same and the tools are finally on par.”
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