ASNA, a BluePhoenix company, is proud to have recently held its Tenth ASNApalooza developer conference in San Antonio. Hosted at the Westin Riverwalk Hotel, ASNApalooza was attended by developers from throughout the U.S., Canada, and Honduras. This Palooza was the second of two for ASNA this year. This spring ASNA held its first Barcelona, Spain, ASNApalooza for its European customers, who, in the past, had attended Palooza in the U.S. 

“Palooza was, once again, a huge success for us.” said Eduardo Ross, ASNA’s vice president of Technology. “It was great to reconnect with the many customers and ISVs who attended.” 

Palooza had several special guests this year. Tim O’Brien, a member of Microsoft’s Enterprise Platform Modernization Team, (www.microsoft.com) spoke to the numerous ISVs in attendance about Microsoft business opportunities. Not only did O’Brien speak at Palooza, he was also responsible for securing Microsoft’s sponsorship of a popular and well-attended mixer. 

Also present was Transoft (www.transoft.com/), a legacy application modernization company and ASNA business partner. Transoft’s Sonny Goodwin and Mark Chambless presented some of Transoft’s modernization offerings to Palooza attendees and also sponsored Friday’s lunch. Thanks to Microsoft, Infragistics (www.infragistics.com), Telerik (www.telerik.com), and ActivePDF (www.activepdf.com), more than $36,000 in door prizes were given away to lucky Palooza attendees. 

 “Partners are an extremely important part of the ASNA eco-system,” says Michael Killian, ASNA vice president of Sales. “Our objective at this Palooza was to really push our developer community to think outside of the box and to take advantage of the thousands of additional development options that are now available to them as a result of their adoption of ASNA technologies.  The partner sponsorships really helped solidify that objective.” 

Palooza featured two days of tracks covering a wide variety of technical topics. Says attendee John Brandt, senior systems analyst with the City of Sioux, Iowa: “Palooza was a great revitalization. It ramped up my desire and enthusiasm. It was worth the time!” Lex Hudson, vice president of technology for software development for Canada’s Pathix said, “The trip was worthwhile just in learning how to move data between the System i and MS SQL Server with ASNA’s DataGate product.” 

Perhaps the biggest news out of ASNApalooza was ASNA’s announcement of Wings, its latest System i application modernization product. ASNA’s Ross made the official worldwide debut of Wings at Palooza (read more about Wings at www.asna.com/wings). 

“It was great fun to debut Wings at Palooza and explain what it does (for) our customers," Ross said. "We were blown away with the enthusiastic reaction we received. Palooza provides us a great opportunity to see customers we’ve had for years and to meet our many new ones. We’re very appreciative to everyone who took time out of their busy schedules to attend. And we also thank our great sponsors for helping us to put on such a superb conference.” 

About ASNA

Amalgamated Software of North America, Inc. (ASNA), a division of BluePhoenix Solutions (NASDAQ: BPHX), provides a proven solution suite of flexible products and services allowing its clients to gradually, or in totality, modernize, integrate, migrate, and extend System i assets to the .NET and/or SQL Server standard at a reasonable cost and much faster than rewriting or replacing using a package. These solutions result in a safe, risk limiting extension to the life and value of the IT assets while achieving an extraordinary ROA (Return on Assets).  ASNA’s experience since 1982 with singular focus on the midrange market, coupled with its automated tools and abundant successful modernizations, puts ASNA in a leadership position within the midrange modernization and migration space. For more information:  http://www.asna.com/