Bruno Labbay,
expert developer @ PHL Soft

After graduating with a Bac+2 and completing training at AFPA on AS/400 – TSIG, Bruno quickly became a senior management IT technician, specializing in AS/400 at UTI Group, an IT services company in Paris, where he worked in all sectors: banking-insurance, finance, production & logistics… He then joined Abylene and CGA, the Société Générale factor.

In each of his missions, he looks for all the alternatives to the solutions in use, and quite naturally finds himself more and more attracted to software publishing, and in particular to the idea of making tools for other programmers.

After graduating with a Bac+2 and completing training at AFPA on AS/400 – TSIG, Bruno quickly became a senior management IT technician, specializing in AS/400 at UTI Group, an IT services company in Paris, where he worked in all sectors: banking-insurance, finance, production & logistics… He then joined Abylene and CGA, the Société Générale factor.

In each of his missions, he looks for all the alternatives to the solutions in use, and quite naturally finds himself more and more attracted to software publishing, and in particular to the idea of making tools for other programmers.

(Trainer)
Joining PHL Soft

AS/400 + software: so it was quite logical that Bruno joined PHL Soft in 2012 after a traditional application route (via email job at the time), initially as a trainer, after having been trained in the software suite himself.

“Being a trainer has enabled me to see how each customer uses the solution, with its own constraints, market and different needs: from a product, strategy and field feedback point of view, it’s very enriching”.

Bruno then moved on to development, first part-time, then full-time.

(PHL Soft joins Armonie)
Darling, pack your bags, we’re off to Montpellier

PHL Soft is integrated into Armonie on June¹, 2022: Bruno also takes the train, especially as the climate and premises in Montpellier become even more attractive after 2 years of Covid in Paris.

But beyond the location, it’s PHL’s new strategy that particularly appeals to Bruno: in fact, Guy Routier’s project for PHL’s suite of hardware and services around the IBM i platform is particularly exciting, as it proposes a global offering to long-standing IBM i customers, some of whom no longer know what to do with their platform.

“I really liked the idea of being able to provide all the services around the platform: it’s a real opportunity to overhaul and improve all the PHL tools that were starting to look a bit dated and so, in a way, modernize the modernization tools!”

Today, on paper, Bruno is officially an RPG expert, but in reality, he’s also an SQL Web App expert (html, css, JS).

(the day-to-day job)
Expert or project manager

In concrete terms, when PHL management issues a request, Bruno draws up the specifications, supervises development and monitors the project like a project manager. As a software publisher, PHL is obliged to correct any bugs reported to it, and to provide a rapid fix (and, if necessary, to contact the customer, logging on to the customer’s site to find out about the problem until it is resolved).

Bruno also participates in version upgrades, which require more collegial decisions, generally based on customer feedback, whether it’s about new needs or obvious shortcomings. In fact, that’s the purpose of the workshops we’re currently organizing with PHL customers: to find out what they’re really expecting, given the sometimes surprising gap between what we imagined and reality…