The trouble with the textbook business, in one Integrative Systems case study, was partly a software problem. A wholesaler serving college bookstores had a B2B purchasing application more than a decade old. Its customers needed functions the application did not provide. Marketplace exchanges ran largely through FTP. Payment processing lived in several applications, making the same logic difficult to maintain. The business could sell books. Its software made buying them harder than it needed to be.
- Integrative specializes in IBM i and Microsoft business applications.
- Its work ranges from selective upgrades to custom development and ongoing support.
- The central question: which parts of an existing system still earn their keep?
The textbook test
Integrative built a new purchasing application called MyClient. It also created shared web APIs for marketplace transactions and payments. The company reports that orders through MyClient exceeded $1.5 million during its first three months. That is transaction volume through a client’s application, rather than a measure of Integrative’s own sales.
MyClient orders in the first three months
There is a small, pleasing detail in the project: customers could upload an Excel list of books and quantities. They could check availability and pricing, then purchase some or all of the list. Order status was visible too. A procurement system had acquired the manners of a competent shop assistant.
The lesson is an interpretation of the case, rather than a universal law of software: follow the transaction. Look for the point where a willing buyer, a useful employee or an available product encounters unnecessary work. A modernization project becomes easier to judge when that obstruction has a name.
Change the connections, keep the knowledge
Integrative Systems operates in a market where replacement is only one possible answer. Its IBM i modernization services include refactoring RPG applications, updating databases and connecting existing software through APIs. It also changes application interfaces. Those are different jobs with different consequences; a new screen need not mean a new set of business rules.
Imagine an order-entry application that correctly applies years of customer agreements but is awkward to connect to a website. The agreements are valuable. The awkward connection is expensive. This hypothetical is the kind of distinction that makes selective modernization worth considering. Age alone offers remarkably poor instructions for a purchasing decision.
Integrative’s published process begins with examining applications, infrastructure, dependencies, transaction volumes and security. It includes performance and load testing, migration validation, documentation and user training. These activities make a preservation strategy credible: keeping a system requires understanding what it does, then checking that it still does it after the changes.
A specialist for the awkward middle
The company’s BPCS/LX offering makes its positioning unusually explicit. Customers can upgrade, keep their current setup with support, or migrate. For manufacturers and distributors, Integrative supplies customization, implementation, integrations and managed services around those ERP applications. The existing installation is a starting point for a decision, rather than an automatic verdict.
The Microsoft side covers custom .NET applications for desktop, web and mobile use, alongside migrations, integration and cloud work. This gives Integrative a role between older operational systems and newer applications. A business can need both, often within the same transaction. The textbook project is a useful example of its Microsoft development work.
Its other services reach into Power BI strategy and dashboards, IT infrastructure support, accounts payable and receivable, customer support and graphic design. Monarch ERP consulting brings it into print businesses, where estimating, scheduling, production and financial information must work together. Integrative provides implementation and support around that software; the service should not be mistaken for ownership of the ERP product.
Public customer testimonials identify paint retailer JC Licht, sports-equipment company Champro Sports, Calico and Crane Composites. The company describes serving SMBs as well as Fortune 500 businesses. These customers help explain the breadth of the offering: enterprise work concerns the unglamorous machinery behind a sale as much as the application a shopper sees.
Two experts and six months
A separate published IBM i case concerns a boating and fishing retailer with more than 240 stores. It describes limited internal expertise and specialists stretched by coordination work. Integrative assigned two experts over six months, working across US and India teams. They wrote RPGLE and CLLE programs to compare object authorities and validate user profiles, triggers and authority lists.
The whitepaper reports six logical partitions successfully upgraded, zero defects and zero business impact. Its initial description refers to seven partitions needing upgrades; the reported result covers six. Read the outcome at that stated scope. The useful operational detail is the automation of checks before and after the change, rather than a promise that every upgrade will be uneventful.
For a buyer, this is also a reminder that software cost includes specialist attention. TechBehemoths lists indicative rates of $30-$70 an hour and a stated project budget floor of $15,000. Treat those directory figures as a starting point for discussion. Discovery, testing, migration and support all belong in the scope of a real quote.
Integrative sells project work and access to specialist capacity. Its Power BI page describes hourly, weekly and monthly engagements. That flexibility can help an internal team add a particular skill without filling a permanent position. It also gives the buyer a management job: define responsibilities, acceptance criteria and who will retain the knowledge when the engagement ends.
The owner-funded temperament
Rajesh Rajan is identified as founder and CEO. His biography describes experience in business and IT strategy, operating models and technology cost planning. That background fits the company’s emphasis on relating a technical project to the way a business operates.
Integrative describes its US and India operations as entirely owner-funded. Its culture page stresses equality, employee development and long-term commitment. Those are the company’s descriptions of itself, but they reveal the character it wants customers to recognize: a services partner prepared to stay with an operational problem.
“I have always thought of Integrative as an idea more than an organization.”Rajesh Rajan, India operations anniversary message, 2022
There is independent evidence of growth. Inc. lists Integrative in its 5000 rankings for 2020, 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025 and 2026. The 2026 entry places it at No. 4,003 with 60% three-year growth. Those figures describe the company’s growth record; they do not measure the return on any individual client project.
Start with one troublesome transaction
Where does Integrative fit? Among specialist consultancies, software development firms and managed service providers, with a particular concentration in IBM i and Microsoft environments. A buyer can also choose an ERP vendor’s implementation partner or build the capability internally. The relevant comparison is the knowledge and scope each option brings to the actual problem.
The approach is most persuasive when functioning business rules deserve to survive and the obstacles can be isolated. If the underlying rules no longer fit the business, preserving them can preserve the problem. That is an editorial judgment about the method, and a reason to examine the core application before choosing a supplier.
What can a reader copy? Pick one troublesome transaction. Record its delays, manual handoffs and repeated work. Define what improvement would count, then test a bounded change against that baseline. Integrative’s case studies suggest a modest but useful ambition: make it easier for a business to do something it already knows how to do. A computer need not become fashionable to become more helpful.